"When my Father, Herr von Katte's execution being ended, hastened to the Crown-Prince; he finds him miserably ill (SEHR ALTERIRT);advises him to take a cooling-powder in water, both which materials were ready on the table. This he presses on him: but the Prince always shakes his head." Suspects poison, you think?
"Hereupon my Father takes from his pocket a paper, in which he carried cooling-powder for his own use; shakes out a portion of it into his hand, and so into his mouth; and now the Crown-Prince grips at my Father's powder, and takes that." Privately to be made away with; death resolved upon in some way! thinks the desperate young man? [Nicolai, <italic> Anekdoten, <end italic>
vi. 183-189.]
That scene of Katte's execution, and of the Prince's and other people's position in regard to it, has never yet been humanly set forth, otherwise the response had been different. Not humanly set forth,--and so was only barked at, as by the infinitude of little dogs, in all countries; and could never yet be responded to in austere VOX HUMANA, deep as a DE PROFUNDIS, terrible as a Chorus of AEschylus,--for in effect that is rather the character of it, had the barking once pleased to cease. "King of Prussia cannot sleep," writes Dickens: "the officers sit up with him every night, and in his slumbers he raves and talks of spirits and apparitions." [Despatch, 3d October, 1730.] We saw him, ghost-like, in the night-time, gliding about, seeking shelter with Feekin against ghosts; Ginkel by daylight saw him, now clad in thunderous tornado, and anon in sorrowful fog. Here, farther on, is a new item,--and joined to it and the others, a remarkable old one:--"In regard to Wilhelmina's marriage, and whether a Father cannot give his daughter in wedlock to whom he pleases, there have been eight Divines consulted, four Lutheran, four Reformed (Calvinist);who, all but one [he of the Garrison Church, a rhadamanthine fellow in serge], have answered, 'No, your Majesty!' It is remarkable that his Majesty has not gone to bed sober for this month past." [Dickens, 9th and 19th December, 1730.]
What Seckendorf and Grumkow thought of all these phenomena?
They have done their job too well. They are all for mercy;lean with their whole weight that way,--in black qualms, one of them withal, thinking tremulously to himself, "What if his now Majesty were to die upon us, in the interim!"Chapter II.
CROWN-PRINCE TO REPENT AND NOT PERISH.
In regard to Friedrich, the Court-Martial needs no amendment from the King; the sentence on Friedrich, a Lieutenant-Colonel guilty of desertion, is, from President and all members except two, Death as by law. The two who dissented, invoking royal clemency and pardon, were Major-Generals by rank,--Schwerin, as some write, one of them, or if not Schwerin, then Linger; and for certain, Donhof,--two worthy gentlemen not known to any of my readers, nor to me, except as names, The rest are all coldly of opinion that the military code says Death. Other codes and considerations may say this and that, which it is not in their province to touch upon; this is what the military code says: and they leave it there.
The Junius Brutus of a Royal Majesty had answered in his own heart grimly, Well then! But his Councillors, Old Dessauer, Grumkow, Seckendorf, one and all interpose vehemently. "Prince of the Empire, your Majesty, not a Lieutenant-Colonel only! Must not, cannot;"--nay good old Buddenbrock, in the fire of still unsuccessful pleading, tore open his waistcoat: "If your Majesty requires blood, take mine; that other you shall never get, so long as I can speak!" Foreign Courts interpose; Sweden, the Dutch;the English in a circuitous way, round by Vienna to wit;finally the Kaiser himself sends an Autograph; [Date, 11th October, 1730 (Forster, i. 380).] for poor Queen Sophie has applied even to Seckendorf, will be friends with Grumkow himself, and in her despair is knocking at every door. Junius Brutus is said to have had paternal affections withal. Friedrich Wilhelm, alone against the whispers of his own heart and the voices of all men, yields at last in this cause. To Seckendorf, who has chalked out a milder didactic plan of treatment, still rigorous enough, [His Letter to the King, 1st November, 1730 (in Forster, i. 375, 376).] he at last admits that such plan is perhaps good; that the Kaiser's Letter has turned the scale with him; and the didactic method, not the beheading one, shall be tried. That Donhof and Schwerin, with their talk of mercy, with "their eyes upon the Rising Sun," as is evident, have done themselves no good, and shall perhaps find it so one day. But that, at any rate, Friedrich's life is spared; Katte's execution shall suffice in that kind. Repentance, prostrate submission and amendment,--these may do yet more for the prodigal, if he will in heart return. These points, some time before the 8th of November, we find to be as good as settled.
The unhappy prodigal is in no condition to resist farther.
Chaplain Muller had introduced himself with Katte's dying admonition to the Crown-Prince to repent and submit.
Chaplain Muller, with his wholesome cooling-powders, with his ghostly counsels, and considerations of temporal and eternal nature,--we saw how he prospered almost beyond hope. Even on Predestination, and the real nature of Election by Free Grace, all is coming right, or come, reports Muller. The Chaplain's Reports, Friedrich Wilhelm's grimly mollified Responses on the same:
they are written, and in confused form have been printed;but shall be spared the English reader. And Grumkow has been out at Custrin, preaching to the same purport from other texts: