First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [38]
Ruling with stern authority, the Governess Anna left as her legacy the choice as adviser for her son of yet another strong character, who was to dominate the Prince and take hold as the real governor of affairs during the period of this narrative. He was the Duke of Brunswick, Louis Ernest Wilhelm of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, to distinguish him from many other Brunswicks of his family. He was a brother of the more famous Karl Wilhelm, reigning Duke of the German principality adjoining Prussia, an admired warrior, considered to be the very pattern of “an enlightened despot.” This ruler fell rather short of the attributes that might be expected of such a figure in the episode for which history remembers him—his proclamation of the notorious Brunswick Manifesto, which exemplifies in a single case the nature of the ruling princes of the old regime—and their fall. In time to come, in 1792, the Duke was to command the Austrian and Prussian armies in the allied campaign to crush the French Revolution. Marching on Paris, he announced as his forces approached the French frontier that the allies proposed to restore Louis XVI to the throne and that the French people who dared to oppose his armies “shall be punished” according to the most stringent laws of war, and that “their houses shall be burned. If any harm was done to the King and Queen, the allies would inflict an ever-to-be-remembered vengeance by delivering the city of Paris to military execution and complete destruction.” This fire-eating pronouncement naturally convinced the French public that the King in whose behalf it was issued was a traitor to France, in league with the Prussians and Austrians. The Brunswick Manifesto, rather than accomplishing Louis XVI’s rescue, paved his way to the guillotine, which could have been foreseen if Karl Wilhelm had given the matter any forethought, but thinking ahead is given to chess players, not to autocrats.
We must not allow Louis Ernest of Brunswick to suffer from folly by association with his brother, for he seems to have been a reasonable man. He was a nephew and favorite of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who called him “fat Louis” with reason—for the Duke was indeed obese—if not with politeness. Are Kings polite? Perhaps not at the Prussian court.
Formerly Field Marshal of the Austrian Army, Louis of Brunswick had been brought to the Netherlands by William IV of Orange, who made his acquaintance in the course of one of the European wars, and was impressed by the abilities of the large Duke. Not an Orange by blood, William IV had no great military talents but enough to recognize the ill condition of the Dutch Army. He invited the Duke home to manage the reform of the army with the promise of a salary of 60,000 guilders and retention of his title of Field Marshal and a territorial estate of his own. After declining three times, the Duke accepted and was named Commander-in-Chief. The Regent Anna also formed a high opinion of him and gave him charge of the six-year-old Prince, the future William V, whom the Duke persuaded to sign a Secret Act of Advisership conferring governing powers on a personal Cabinet consisting of Duke Louis, the Grand Pensionary, the veteran greffier Fagel and the aged secretary of the Cabinet, De Larrey.
“I have rarely seen,” wrote the visiting English diarist, Sir William Wraxall, speaking of Brunswick, “a man of more enormous bodily dimensions … but this prodigious mass of flesh, which it was natural to suppose, would enervate or enfeeble the powers of his mind, seemed neither to have rendered him indolent or inactive.” Attached