Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (46 page)

Weeping and watching for the morrow

He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers!
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But the greatest humiliation lay ahead. Its prelude was another crushing defeat: that of the Russian army under General Bennigsen at Friedland, twenty-seven miles south of Königsberg, on 15 June 1807. A week later it was the Tsar Alexander’s turn to negotiate a truce. This was the prayer of Louise to Alexander before the battle: ‘You are our only hope: do not abandon us, not for my sake, but for my husband’s sake, for the sake of my children, their future and their destiny.’ Her prayer would go for nothing compared to the crudeness of
Realpolitik
. Louise’s ‘only hope’ was indeed about to abandon them, as she would shortly discover.

At Tilsit, while the Emperor Napoleon of France and the Tsar Alexander of Russia met on an island in the middle of the river, King Frederick William of Prussia was condemned to await their summons standing in the pouring rain, on the shore. His unhappy stance perfectly illustrated the comment of the Austrian Prince Metternich: at Tilsit Prussia descended from the first rank ‘to be ranged among powers of the Third Order’.
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What was Prussia’s fate likely to be – what territorial sacrifices, what financial reparations would be demanded at a treaty negotiated under such unpromising circumstances?

It was at this point that someone at the Prussian court, convinced that the Queen’s ‘fascinating affability’ would win over ‘this Monster vomited from hell’ (the King’s phrase on this occasion), had the idea of sending for Louise. One German biographer suggests that it was Hardenberg and General Kalkreuth who decided to use the Queen. Another name proposed is that of Murat, working on Frederick William. But on the French side Talleyrand was certainly very much against it and, accepting Louise’s putative powers as an enchantress, enquired of Napoleon angrily: ‘Sire, will you jeopardize your greatest conquest for a pair of beautiful eyes?’
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We know from the testimony of those young British diplomats stationed at Memel – all of them half in love with the Queen – how reluctant she was to go. Her health alone might have precluded such an ordeal. To the King, however, Louise wrote that her arrival would be a proof of her love for him: for as she confided to her diary, ‘this burden is demanded’, whatever it might cost her to be pleasant and courteous towards Napoleon.
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Louise was condemned to the ‘burden’ by the romantic Prussian belief, which she herself obviously shared, that she could succeed where male diplomacy failed. Furthermore, hopeful signs elicited, as it seemed, from the ‘Monster’ only underlined the general atmosphere of expectation: he drank the Queen’s health and asked with some tenderness after her family’s welfare.

Perhaps it was as well that the Prussian courtiers could not read Napoleon’s reassuring letter to Josephine on the subject of the Prussian Queen’s ‘coquetting’: ‘I am like cere-cloth, along which everything of this sort slides without penetrating. It would cost me too dear to play the gallant on this subject.’ The Queen herself might have been more affronted by the merry gossip of the time in London where bets were being taken on whether she would get Napoleon to fall in love with her. The playwright Sheridan took, on the other hand, the cynical line that Louise would fall in love with Napoleon: from an empress to a housemaid, ‘all women are dazzled by glory, and sure to be in
love with a Man whom they begin by hating and who has treated them ill …’
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In the event what happened satisfied neither the optimists, the romantics nor the cynics. The Queen arrived in Tilsit on 6 July.
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Napoleon behaved extremely courteously all along, ending dinner especially early out of regard for her delicate health. When the Queen gently taxed him, ‘Sire, I know you accuse me of meddling in politics’, Napoleon responded gallantly, ‘Ah, Madame, you must not believe that I listen only to malicious gossip’ (thus splendidly ignoring the subject of his own Bulletins of the Army). Nor did Louise herself find the ‘Monster’ as odious as she had expected (although she certainly did not fall in love with him).

But while Louise saw it as her role to plead with him, as the traditional Queen-in-distress – ‘I am a wife and mother and it is by these titles that I appeal for your mercy on behalf of Prussia’ – Napoleon responded blandly with compliments on her white embroidered crêpe de Chine dress made in Breslau, and the superb collar she wore of her favourite pearls. After Louise’s death, Countess Voss would comment sadly on the Queen’s love of pearls, with their connotation of tears, as opposed to diamonds, which stood for prosperity; certainly there were tears enough to be shed on this occasion. Again and again the Queen tried to steer the conversation away from clothes back to the fate of Prussia itself. Privately, Napoleon rather admired her for her polite tenacity, how she always got back to her subject: ‘perhaps even too much so, and yet with perfect propriety and in a manner that aroused no antagonism’. He even went as far to admit that ‘In truth, the matter was an important one to her …’ Publicly, he would have none of it.

There is a celebrated story concerning the occasion following the dinner when Napoleon went to call on Louise in her Tilsit lodgings; like many celebrated stories which sum up the popular image of a particular character (or characters) – the story of Queen Jinga and her royal ‘chair’ is another noted example – it has several variants. It seems that the Queen pleaded with Napoleon to exclude certain Prussian possessions from the
confiscation which was planned as part of the peace treaty. Those to be reallocated included all the Prussian territories west of the Elbe, not omitting Magdeburg itself, on the river, most of Prussian Poland (to be reconstituted as the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw) and the Silesian fortresses. It is not known for certain exactly which provinces the Queen named to Napoleon, but attention has generally focused on Magdeburg.

The most colourful version of the story has Napoleon asking for a single rose from the Queen’s arrangement of flowers. In reply, the Queen asked for an exchange: ‘A rose for Magdeburg, Sire.’ Some biographers have found this behaviour on the part of the Queen to be uncharacteristically arch. In another version (which accords better with Napoleon’s own description of Louise as relentless – but dignified – in pursuit of her aims) the Queen struck a tragic note more or less on Napoleon’s arrival: ‘Sire, Justice! Justice! Magdeburg! Magdeburg!’ There is no dispute however about the Queen’s lack of success in securing from Napoleon even the slightest diminution of the harsh terms imposed upon Prussia, including an enormous bill of financial reparation. (Ironically enough, her reproaches to the Tsar for abandoning them did move him guiltily to plead for an alleviation of the Prussian punishment;
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Louise, however, had been brought to Tilsit to woo Napoleon, not to reproach the Tsar.)

Everyone had been wrong: Frederick William, Hardenberg, General Kalkreuth, all those who had pinned their hopes on the ‘fascinating affability’ of their Queen. Three years before, seeing Louise dressed as Statira, wife of Alexander the Great (on that same occasion when she had struck Madame de Staël dumb with her beauty), Sir George Jackson had reflected that ‘our queen of beauty’ too would have conquered Alexander, ‘had the hero the happiness of seeing her’. But the Queen of beauty had not conquered the Alexander of the hour: Napoleon. Much later, on St Helena, Napoleon referred to her ‘winning ways’ as well as her attempts to win him over. The Queen on the other hand wept bitterly and continuously afterwards, according to Countess Voss, referring over and over again to her ‘deception’ and reading
her favourite Schiller (
The Thirty Years’ War
) for comfort. ‘In that house’, she told one of the young Englishmen at Memel, referring to Tilsit, ‘I was cruelly deceived.’
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Napoleon had become once more the ‘Monster’, ‘this inhuman being’ who must be beaten down for the sake of the future of Prussia, of her husband and of her children.

Queen Louise did not survive to see the ‘Monster’ beaten down, although Frederick William did. She died of a pulmonary embolism in July 1810, having given birth to two more children, on 1 February 1808 – she must have been once again in the early stages of pregnancy at Tilsit – and 4 October 1809. But it was widely thought that she had died of a broken heart, to which her humiliation at Tilsit, symbolizing the humiliation of Prussia, had contributed. Her last years were marked by the inevitable sorrow of Prussia’s grievous political situation, as well as by her persistent attempts to bolster up Frederick William. Heinrich von Kleist gives a moving picture of her at this time: ‘She has developed a truly royal character … She, who a short time ago had nothing better to do than amuse herself with dancing or riding horseback, has gathered about her all our great men whom the King neglects and who alone can bring us salvation. Yes, it is she who sustains what has not collapsed.’
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The Queen also made earnest attempts to study history – Hume, Robertson and Gibbon – as though to try to make sense of the great if tragic events she had lived through. As with the whole of Louise’s brief life – she was thirty-four when she died – there is a touching quality about the enterprise. ‘I am so stupid and I hate the stupidity,’ she exclaimed. ‘What was the Punic War? Was it against Carthage? Who were the Gracchi and what were their troubles? What does hierarchy mean?’ Even here, patriotism was never forgotten: Louise admired Theodoric for instance as ‘a genuine
German
’, with his love of justice, his upright character and his magnanimity.
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Like Queen Jinga of Angola, however – albeit a very different kind of Warrior Queen – Queen Louise of Prussia was to have
another whole life as a national heroine, far more enduring than her actual life on earth. To the grieving King, she quickly became his ‘sainted Louise’, while he was always firm against charges of political interference: she had ‘never quitted her own sphere of feminine usefulness’. Her popularity with the army was deliberately invoked when he instituted the order of the Iron Cross for military valour on the anniversary of her birth in 1813. (The
Luisenorde
for ladies, on the other hand, instituted on his own birthday – ‘we are determined to do honour to the female sex’ – concentrated on women who relieved suffering, not warriors; and the medal showed the late Queen in silver on a pale blue background, with a crown of stars – not in military uniform). When the ‘Monster’ was despatched to Elba, a hymn was composed in the Queen’s honour beginning: ‘Oh Saint in bliss … Thy tears are dried at last’ and ending with the refrain:

Louise, the protectress of our right,

Louise, still the watchword of our fight.
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Classically, the ordinary soldiers in the Prussian army refused to believe in their beloved Queen’s death for years afterwards; as for the rest of the nation, Princess Anton Radziwill wrote that twenty-five years later ‘still the same regrets are given to the memory of that angel of goodness!’ And an English author, Mrs Charles Richardson, who toured Prussia in the 1840s, subsequently dedicating her biography of Louise to Queen Victoria as another one distinguished ‘for pre-eminence in female excellence’, found many local traditions of the Queen as a guardian angel in time of war, ‘a lovely vision’ who appeared and then disappeared back to heaven.
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Nor did the cult of the holy and patriotic Warrior Queen stop there. Queen Louise may claim to have possessed a genuine sense of Prussia’s importance as part of the German whole: she
was not after all born a Prussian, and throughout Prussia’s troubles retained a conviction that its triumph or defeat should be seen as affecting Germany itself (her remark concerning Theodoric was not uncharacteristic). It was therefore not inappropriate that in the late nineteenth century, continuing into the twentieth, she should come to be regarded as the Holy (departed) Figurehead of the resurgent and mighty Prussian-led Germany. On the sixtieth anniversary of her death, 19 July 1870, her son, then still King William of Prussia, went to pray at her grave; this was the day on which war was declared against France, that war from which he would return as German Emperor. Louise’s son was convinced that he had thus fulfilled her dearest dreams and hopes, she who could be viewed ‘as a martyr to her love for the Fatherland’.
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The Queen’s verdict on herself was both more modest and more poignant.
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‘If posterity will not place my name amongst those of celebrated women [she might have instanced Maria Theresa or Catherine the Great] yet those who were acquainted with the troubles of these times, will know what I have gone through and will say “She suffered much and endured with patience”.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Valiant Rani