Just five foot three, the king terrorized his soldiers and courtiers, his furies aggravated by the agonies of porphyria – mania, gout, pus-filled sores, fevers and cramps. ‘I wish to suffer everything patiently,’ he said, taking up painting to ease his ‘torments’. The queen encouraged Frederick, now sixteen, to follow his artistic inclinations, practising the flute in between military drills, secretly amassing a French library. His monstrous father now suspected him of lacking ‘truly manly inclinations’.
In 1728, father and son set off to visit the ruler of Prussia’s traditional rival, Saxony. A strapping athlete, Augustus the Strong, who supposedly fathered 365 children, was also king of Poland and he was everything Frederick William loathed: depraved, extravagant, godless – he had become Catholic to clinch the Polish throne – and powerless. His ally Peter the Great had reduced Poland to a Russian client state. Augustus, a champion fox-tosser (once presiding over a gruesome festival at which 647 foxes, 533 hares and 34 badgers were tossed), promoted himself with pageants, operas and Meissen china (kidnapping its creator to develop the technology) to make Dresden the ‘most dazzling court in Europe’.
Augustus’ legion of mistresses was led by the talented, spirited Aurora von Königsmarck* and his Turkish slave Fatima, but it was also said to include his own beautiful, hard-smoking, cross-dressing daughter Anna, Countess Orzelska, aged twenty, who immediately dazzled the visiting Frederick, still only sixteen. Frederick remembered her as ‘this little miracle of nature who possessed every possible charm, together with good taste and delicacy’, and according to his elder sister Wilhelmine he ‘promised everything to gain possession of this beauty, his first lover’.
Hoping to divert him from his daughter-mistress, Augustus shocked the Prussians by opening a curtain to reveal a naked opera singer in a niche. Frederick William hurried his son out of the room, but by then Frederick was in love with Orzelska and suffered depression when he got back to grim Berlin. Shocked by what he had seen on the visit, his father boasted, ‘I am pure as when I left home.’ But on their return king and prince were on collision course thanks to what the father called Frederick’s ‘effeminate, lascivious occupations’.
The king beat Frederick with his cane, punched him in the face and threw him to the ground, forcing him to kiss his feet. When his daughter Wilhelmine supported her brother, he smashed her in the face, knocking her unconscious. But now Frederick fell in love with a boy.
THE PHILOSOPHER PRINCE, THE
After an intimate relationship with a Scottish officer,* Frederick was sent away to repent. Instead the eighteen-year-old prince of Prussia established an affinity with Hans von Katte, an aesthetic officer who was eight years older; together they planned the prince’s escape to England, an act of treason.
In August 1730, when Frederick was caught, his father interrogated him, asking, ‘Did you seduce Katte or Katte seduce you?’ He then ordered that Katte be beheaded – ‘better that Katte came to death than the justice out of the world’ – in front of the boy, who was brought out and forced to watch, clearly to purge him of unnatural desires.
‘Please forgive me, my dear Katte, in God’s name, forgive me,’ cried Frederick.
‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ replied Katte. ‘I die for you with joy in my heart!’ Frederick fainted. Frederick William decided to execute Frederick, telling his queen he was already dead. ‘What!’ she screamed. ‘Have you murdered your son?’
‘He wasn’t my son. Just a miserable deserter!’
‘
Frederick never forgave his father – ‘what a terrible man’ – but over the next ten years he grew to appreciate that Frederick William ‘knew the best interests of his country better than any minister or general. It was through his efforts, through his tireless labour, that I have been able to accomplish everything that I’ve done since.’
Frederick planned a delicious revenge on his father, hungrily consuming the literature of a new movement that was sweeping Europe – the Enlightenment – represented by his hero Voltaire, with whom the prince now started to correspond.
