Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (15 page)

The ceremony that resulted was a unique and highly self-conscious
amalgam of borrowings from historical European coronations, some recent, others of older vintage. Frederick designed his coronation not only with a view to its aesthetic impact, but also in order to broadcast what he regarded as the defining features of his kingly status. The form of the crown, which was not an open band, but a domed metal structure closed at the top, symbolized the all-embracing power of a monarch who encompassed in his own person both secular and spiritual sovereignty. The fact, moreover, that the king, in contrast to the prevailing European practice, crowned himself in a separate ceremony before being anointed at the hands of his clergy, pointed up the autonomous character of his office, its independence from any worldly or spiritual authority (save that of God himself). A description of the coronation by Johann Christian Lünig, a renowned contemporary expert on the courtly ‘science of ceremony’, explained the significance of this step.

Kings who accept their kingdom and sovereignty from the Estates usually only take up the purple mantle, the crown and sceptre and mount the throne
after
they have been anointed: [… ] but His Majesty [Friedrich I], who has not received His Kingdom through the assistance of the Estates or of any other [party], had no need whatever of such a handing-over, but rather received his crown after the manner of the ancient kings from his own foundation.
²

Given the recent history of Brandenburg and Ducal Prussia, the importance of these symbolic gestures is obvious enough. The Great Elector’s struggle with the Prussian Estates and particularly the city of Königsberg was still a memory with the power to disturb – it is a telling detail that the Prussian Estates were never consulted over the coronation and were informed of the forthcoming festivity only in December 1700. Equally important was the independence of the new kingdom from any kind of Polish or imperial claim. Everyone knows, the British envoy George Stepney had reported to James Vernon, Secretary of State for the Northern Department, in 1698,

the value this Elector sets upon [… ] the absolute soveraignety wherewith he possesses the Ducal Prussia, for in that respect he exceeds in Power all other Electors and Princes of the Empire, who are not so independent but derive their grandeur by investiture from the Emperor, for which reasons, the Elector affects to be distinguished by some more extraordinary title than what is common to the rest of his colleagues.
³

6
. Frederick I, King in Prussia (
Elector 1688–1701; king 1701–13), painted after his coronation, attributed to Samuel Theodor Gericke

One of the reasons for adopting the title ‘King in Prussia’ – an unusual title that occasioned some amusement at the European courts – was that it freed the new crown from any Polish claims pertaining to ‘royal’ Prussia, which was still within the Polish Commonwealth. In negotiations with Vienna, particular care was expended to ensure that the wording of any agreement would make it clear that the Emperor was not ‘creating’ (
creieren
) the new royal title, but merely ‘acknowledging’ (
agnoszieren
) it. A much disputed passage of the final agreement between Berlin and Vienna paid lip service to the special primacy of the Emperor
as the senior monarch of Christendom, but also made it clear that the Prussian Crown was an entirely independent foundation, for which the Emperor’s approval was a courtesy rather than an obligation.

In 1701, as so often before, Berlin owed its good fortune to international developments. The Emperor would probably not have cooperated in the Elector’s elevation had it not been for the fact that he stood in urgent need of Brandenburg’s support. The epochal struggle between Habsburg and Bourbon was about to enter a new and bloody phase, as a coalition of European powers gathered to oppose French designs to place a grandson of Louis XIV on the vacant Spanish throne. Anticipating a major conflagration, the Emperor saw that he would have to make concessions in order to win Frederick’s support. Wooed with attractive offers from both sides, the Elector hesitated, swinging from one option to the other, but eventually decided to align himself with the Emperor in return for the Crown Treaty (
Krontraktat
) of 16 November 1700. Under this agreement, Frederick undertook to supply a contingent of 8,000 men to the Emperor and made various more general assurances of support for the House of Habsburg. The Viennese court agreed, for its part, not only to recognize the foundation of the new title, but also to work towards its general acceptance, both within the Holy Roman Empire and among the European powers.

The establishment of the royal title brought a massive expansion of the courtly establishment and a great unfurling of elaborate ceremonies. Many of these had an overtly historical dimension. There were splendid festivities to mark the anniversary of the coronation, the birthday of the queen, the birthday of the king, the conferral of the Order of the Black Eagle, the unveiling of a statue of the Great Elector. In this respect Frederick’s reign institutionalized the heightened historical consciousness that had been a feature of his predecessor’s understanding of his office and that had been percolating through the courts of western Europe since the late sixteenth century.
⁴
It was Frederick who appointed Samuel Pufendorf Court Historiographer in 1688. Pufendorf’s remarkable history of the Great Elector’s reign was the first to make systematic use of archived government papers.

While other courts were preoccupied with the battles and sieges of the war currently waging over the Spanish succession, one contemporary English observer remarked with a note of exasperation, life in Berlin was an unceasing round of ‘shows, dancing and other such like
devertions’.
⁵
For the foreign envoys posted in Berlin, this quantum leap in courtly splendour meant that life became more expensive. In a report filed in the summer of 1703, the British envoy extraordinary (later ambassador) Lord Raby, noted that his ‘equipage, which in London was thought very fine, is nothing to those that are here’. The British despatches of this period are filled with complaints at the inordinate expense involved in maintaining appearances at what had suddenly become one of Europe’s most splendid courts. Apartments had to be refurnished, servants, carriages and horses kitted out to a more exacting and costly standard. ‘I find I shall be no gainer by my embassy,’ Raby dolefully commented in one of many veiled pleas for a more generous allowance.
⁶

Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the new taste for elaborate ceremonial was the regime of mourning that followed the death of the king’s second wife, Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, in February 1705. The queen had been visiting her relatives in Hanover at the time of her death. A senior court official was ordered to take two battalions of Brandenburg troops to Hanover and bear the corpse back to Berlin, where it was to lie exposed on a bed of state for six months. Strictest orders were given that the ‘deepest mourning that is possible’ should be observed throughout the king’s dominions. All who came to court were ordered to cover themselves in long black cloaks and all apartments, coaches and equipages, including those of the foreign envoys, were to be ‘put into deep mourning’.

The court was in deeper mourning than ever I saw in my life, for the women all had black head clothes and Black veils that cover’d them all over, so no face was to be seen. The men all in long black cloakes and the rooms all hung with cloath the top as well as the bottom, and but four candles in each room, so that one could hardly distinguish the king from the rest but by the height of his cloake, which was held up by a gentleman of the bedchamber.
⁷

Hand in hand with the ratcheting up of courtly splendour and ceremonial went a boom in cultural investment that was unprecedented in the history of the dynasty. The last decades of the Great Elector’s reign had seen a growth in representative building in the capital city, but this paled into insignificance beside the projects launched during the reign of his successor. A huge palace complex with an extensive pleasure garden was constructed in Charlottenburg under the direction of the
Swedish master builder Johann Friedrich Eosander, and there was a proliferation of representative sculpture across the city, the most notable example being the striking equestrian statue of the Great Elector designed by Andreas Schlüter. The old war-scarred town of Berlin began to disappear beneath the broad paved streets and stately buildings of a graceful residential city.

In July 1700, as his quest for the royal title approached a successful conclusion, Frederick founded a Royal Scientific Society, later renamed the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, and thus acquired one of the most prized contemporary attributes of dynastic distinction.
⁸
A medallion designed by the philosopher Leibniz to commemorate the inauguration of the society (which was officially established on 11 July, the sovereign’s birthday) displayed on one side a portrait of the Elector, on the other an image of the Brandenburg eagle flying upwards towards the constellation known as the Eagle and bearing the motto: ‘he strives for the stars he knows’.
⁹

Was the Prussian royal title, with all the pomp and circumstance that attended it, worth the money and effort spent acquiring and living up to it? The most famous answer to this question was a scathing negative. For Frederick’s grandson Frederick II the entire exercise amounted to little more than an indulgence of the Elector’s vanity, as he explained in a remarkably spiteful portrait of the first Prussian king:

He was small and misshapen, his expression was proud, his physiognomy vulgar. His soul was like a mirror that throws back every object. [… ] He mistook vanities for true greatness. He was more concerned with appearances than with useful things that are soundly made. [… ] He only desired the crown so hotly because he needed a superficial pretext to justify his weakness for ceremony and his wasteful extravagance. [… ] All in all: he was great in small things and small in great things. And it was his misfortune to find a place in history between a father and a son whose superior talents cast him in shadow.
¹⁰

It is certainly the case that Frederick’s court establishment incurred costs that were unsustainable in the longer term, and it is true that the first king took great pleasure in magnificent festivities and elaborately choreographed ceremonies. But the emphasis on personal foibles is in some respects misplaced. Frederick I was not the only European ruler to seek elevation to kingly status at this time – the Grand Duke of Tuscany had acquired the right to be addressed as ‘Royal Highness’ in 1691; the
same right was acquired during the following years by the dukes of Savoy and Lorraine. More importantly from Berlin’s perspective, a number of rival German dynasties were angling for a royal title during the 1690s. The Elector of Saxony converted to Catholicism in order to get himself elected King of Poland in 1697, and negotiations began at around the same time over the possible succession of the Electoral House of Hanover to the British royal throne. The Bavarians and the Palatine Wittelsbachs were likewise engaged with (ultimately futile) plans to capture a royal title, either by elevation or, in the latter case, by securing a claim to the ‘royal throne of Armenia’. In other words, the coronation of 1701 was no isolated personal caprice, but part of a wave of regalization that was sweeping across the still largely non-regal territories of the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian states at the end of the seventeenth century. Royal title mattered because it still entailed privileged status within the international community. Since the precedence accorded to crowned heads was also observed at the great peace treaties of the era, it was a matter of potentially grave practical importance.

The recent growth of interest in the early modern European courts as political and cultural institutions has heightened our awareness of the functionality of courtly ritual. Courtly festivities had a crucial communicative and legitimating function. As the philosopher Christian Wolff observed in 1721, the ‘common man’, who depended upon his senses rather than his reason, was quite incapable of grasping ‘what the majesty of a king is’. Yet it was possible to convey to him a sense of the power of the monarch by confronting him with ‘things that catch his eye and stir his other senses’. A considerable court and court ceremonies, he concluded, were thus ‘by no means superfluous or reprehensible’.
¹¹
Courts were also densely interlinked with each other through family diplomatic and cultural ties; they were not only focal points for elite social and political life within each respective territory, but also nodes in an international courtly network. The magnificent celebrations of the coronation anniversary, for example, were observed by numerous foreign visitors, not to speak of the various dynastic relatives and envoys who could always be found at court during the season.