nMB»a " THE STORY = OF THE HOHENZOLLERN C . SHERIDAM JONES // CLIVEDEN LIBRARY Shelf .&?._-^«^./l4^ NuTobeP— x:- Date -/.Q..'2..2^- THE STORY OF THE HOHENZOLLERN »! FREDERICK THE GREAT. The Story of the HOHENZOLLERN By C. SHERIDAN JONES " '' Author of The Unspeakable Prussian, ''Sun Yat Sen and the Awakening of China'' LONDON JARROLD 6? SONS 1915 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. FREDERICK THE GREAT Frontispiece FREDERICK WILLIAM I. facing 'page 33 - COUNTESS OF LICHTENAU 39 160 FREDERICK WILLIAM II. >» 175 MARIA LOUISA » 185 SILHOUETTE GROUP OF FREDERICK WILLIAM II. AND FAMILY >>, 206 FREDERICK WILLIAM IV. »> 225 THE EMPEROR WILLIAM I. J> 235 The Story oiF the Hohenzollern. CHAPTER I. One of the most wearisome and pointless of the many pedantries that the heaviness of German Culture imposed on the free literature was the habit spirit of European of beginning the account of some interesting not at person or phenomenon before and the beginning. A biographer was supposed to open the Hfe-story of his hero by noticing the leading traits, not of that worthy himself, but of his great-aunt; these, it was confi- dently assumed, would go far to explain away any paradoxes of character that the subse- quent pages might reveal. One had, in fact, to assume that men would cease to be puzzling and contradictory if £ only we remembered that their ancestors were equally to so, and that we were to be reconciled 10 THE STORY OF almost any abnormality in the subject provided that it had been detected in one of the grandparents. Similarly, we were never to read of an invention, unless there were recounted to us all the trials of the men who failed to encompass it; and the history of any race or family that attained to eminence was not complete unless the " " failure of previous generations to arrive was narrated in all its depressing detail. We trust, I hope, that the discredit of may " German Kultur," which is pretty certain to follow the defeat of German arms, will free our writers from the tedious task of raking the dustbins of history in order to discover some trace of the radium that the slime and shimmer of their subject holds. But be that so or not, I, for one, am going to turn over a new leaf. My account of the HohenzoUern will com- mence with the time when they became of importance to Europe. I shall not seek to trace to its somewhat obscure f and muddied source the origin of this strange, this sinister, family. Whether they came from the Colonnas of Rome, or the Colatos of Lombardy, or (as one is tempted to think seems more probable) they are in truth descended from a bear : that is a problem THE HOHENZOLLERN 11 I shall not vex my readers with. I shall not even trouble them with any account of Hohenzollern rule over that sterile and sandy waste that constituted the Marquisate of Brandenburg (ceded them in the fifteenth century by the Emperor Sigismund), to become in 1700 the Kingdom of Prussia. To do so would be valueless and tedious. We should have to relate the squalid details of petty territorial grabs and of grinding exactions from the impoverished peasantry of the district, set off with the same specious and grandiose justifications, the same pre- posterous pretensions that now, as then, marked the most arrogant, the meanest, and the most unscrupulous dynasty of Europe. And if that is not enough reason for my declining to dwell on the prehistoric side of the Hohenzollern, then we have it pro- vided in the delightfully candid words of the greatest of the Hohenzollern, Frederick *' " the Second, who, in the agreeable Memoirs that he bequeathed to his nephew, dealt thus with his forbears. He has been explaining that in the matter of taking kingdoms by stealth, and blushing to find it fame, it is as well not to be too " particular. As for us, we are, most undoubtedly in that case. I see you blush at this. I 12 THE STORY OF forgive you for once ; but let me advise you never to play the child so again. Re- member, once for all, that, in matter of he kingdoms, catches them that can ; and that there is no wrong but in the case of being forced to return them. " The first of our ancestors, who acquired some rights of sovereignty over the country of which he was governor, was Tassillon, of Hohenzollern. The thirteenth of his descendants was of Burgrave Nuremberg ; the twenty-fifth of them was Elector of Brandenburg, and the thirty-seventh, King of Prussia. Our family, as well as all the others, has had its Achilles, its Ciceros, its Nestors, its drivellers and its drones, its mothers-in-law, and, without doubt, its women of gallantry. It has also often aggrandized itself by those kinds of right which are only known to princes at once in luck and in force to exert enough them ; for in the order of our successions we see those of con- or and of veniency," expectancy, protection. From the time of Tassillon to that of the Great Elector we did little more than vegetate. We could, in the empire, reckon in fifty princes no point inferior to us ; and, properly speaking, we were but one of the branches of the great sconce or chandelier THE HOHENZOLLERN 13 of the empire. William the Great, by the splendour of his actions, raised our family into in pre-eminence ; and at length, 1701 (the date, you see, is not a very ancient one), vanity placed a crown on the head of it is to this my grandfather ; and epoch that we ought to refer our true existence, since it put us into a condition of acting on the footing of kings, and of treating, upon terms of equality, with all the powers of the earth." It will be agreed, I think, that the author of this delightful passage lacks nothing in those qualities of candour and frankness that always prove so delightful when a man is writing of his relatives. And here let it be set down that, hideous as the defects and horrible as are the crimes that can be laid against the soul of Frederick the Second—justly called the Great—of Prussia, hypocrisy in its worst form was not one of them. He may have lied, he did lie to other he did to nations ; he may have lied, lie, other men, whom he had to deceive because he could not coerce. But with himself, as these "Memoirs" clearly show, he was frank to the verge of cynicism. And as the views that he laid down and the policy he adum- brated became first that of Prussia and then 14 THE STORY OF that of Germany, it is well worth our while to ' ' dip a little further into these Memoirs," which are, truth to tell, exceedingly diverting. More than any other book will they help us to understand why Germany, once a great nation, has by slow degrees developed into the savage and deformed monstrosity that has outraged the conscience of mankind. First, then, let us listen to the austere Frederick on Justice. He is under no illu- sions about that quality. In fact, very plainly he thinks it is a chimera : — " Do not then, my dear nephew, suffer yourself to be dazzled with the word justice ; it is a word that has different relations, and is susceptible of different constructions. These are the ideas that I annex to it : " Justice is the image of God. Now, who can attain to such high perfection ? Is it not more reasonable to give up so vain a project as that of an entire of " possession her ? Again, let us listen to his advice to that same nephew as to the true view of the whole duty of man : — " I will now give up to you the knowledge of man, though at his expense. Believe me, he is delivered his always up to passions ; vanity is at the bottom of all his thirst after THE HOHENZOLLERN 15 glory, and his virtues are all founded on his self-interest and ambition. Have you a mind to pass for a hero ? Make boldly your approaches to crimes. Would you like to be thought virtuous ? Learn to appear artfully what you are not." And yet again : — " If there is anything to be gained by being honest, let us be honest; if it is necessary to deceive, let us deceive." could franker in Nothing be ; saying, be as consummate a liar as possible he deserves at least attention, if only because of his obvious sincerity. It is not very difficult to hear in the gospel thus shouted from the housetops the rustle " " of that scrap of paper which recently put Europe on the qui vive. And if we incline our ears to hear Frederick a little longer, we shall recognise other phrases and phases of thought that appear startlingly fresh to us after the events of the past six months. Take, for instance. His Majesty's observations on Politics : — Since it has been agreed among men that to cheat or deceive one's fellow-creatures is a mean and criminal action, there has been sought for, and invented, a term that might soften the appellation of the thing, and the 16 THE STORY OF word which undoubtedly has been chosen for the purpose is Politics. Now, the word has only been found out in favour of sove- reigns, because we cannot quite so decently be called rogues and rascals.