December 1856: K. Marx. The Right Divine of the Hohenzollerns
At the present moment there is only one great question afloat in Europe — the Neuchatel question.[183] This, at least, is the tenet of the Prussian newspapers. The principality of Neuchatel, it is true, together with the county of Valengin, may be mathematically circumscribed by the somewhat diminutive figure of fourteen square miles.(1) But then, say the royalist philosophers "of Berlin, it is not quantity but quality, that generally invests things with grandeur or pettiness, and stamps them as sublime or ridiculous. To them the Neuchatel question is the eternal question between revolution and right divine, an antagonism as little affected by geographical dimensions as the law of gravitation by the difference between the sun and a tennis-ball.
Let us try to get at an understanding of what the Hohenzollern dynasty call their divine right. In the case now before us, they appeal to a protocol dated London, May 24th, 1852, by which the plenipotentiaries of France, Great Britain and Russia,
"recognised the rights which belong to the King of Prussia over the principality of Neuchatel and the county of Valengin, according to the tenor of articles twenty-three and seventy-five of the treaty of Vienna, and which have coexisted from 1815 to 1848 with those which article seventy-three of the same treaty conferred on Switzerland."(2)"
By this "diplomatic intervention" the right divine of the King of Prussia over Neuchatel is only acknowledged as far as established by the treaty of Vienna. The treaty of Vienna, in its turn, refers us to a title which Prussia acquired in the year 1707. Now how did thje case stand in 1707?
The principality of Neuchatel and the county of Valengin, appertaining in mediaeval times to the kingdom of Burgundy, became, after the defeat of Charles le Téméraire,(3) an ally of the Swiss Confederation,[184] and such it remained under the immediate protection of Berne, during all the subsequent displacements of its feudal "suzerains," till the treaty of Vienna transformed the ally into a member of the Swiss Confederation. The suzerainty over Neuchatel was first transferred to the house of Châlons-Orange— next, by the intervention of Switzerland, to the house of Longueville, and finally, after the extinction of the magnates of that house, to the sister of the prince,(4) the dowager Duchess of Nemours. When the latter acceded to these dominions, William III., King of England and Duke of Nassau-Orange, issued a protest and made over his claims on Neuchatel and Valengin to his cousin Frederick I. of Prussia, a settlement which, however, produced no effect whatever during the lifetime of William III. On the death of Mary, Duchess of Nemours, Frederick I. stepped forward with his pretensions, but fourteen other candidates appearing in the field, he wisely abandoned the decision over the rival claims to the supreme judgement of the States of Neuchatel and Valengin, having made sure before of their sentence by bribing the judges. By dint of bribery, then, the King of Prussia became Prince of Neuchatel and Count of Valengin. As such he was unmade by the French revolution, remade by the treaty of Vienna, and unmade again by the revolution of 1848. Against the revolutionary right of the people he appeals to the right divine of the Hohenzollerns, which would seem to resolve itself into the divine right of bribery.(5)
Littleness is a characteristic feature of all feudal conflicts. Yet there is a large line of distinction to be drawn. The numberless small fights, intrigues, treasons, by which the Kings of France succeeded in supplanting their feudal vassals, are sure to remain a favourite subject with the historian, because they trace the origin of a great nation. On the other hand, the story how a vassal contrived to carve out the German Empire, a more or less extensive slice of sovereignty for his private use, is a theme altogether barren and dull, unless enlivened by a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances, such as distinguish the history of Austria. There we observe one and the same prince as the elective head of an empire and as the hereditary vassal of a province of that empire; conspiring in the interest of his province against the empire; proving successful in that conspiracy, because his encroachments on the south appear to revive the traditionary conflicts between the German empire and Italy, and his encroachments on the east to continue the deadly struggle between the German and Sclavonic races, and the resistance of Christian Europe against the Mahometan Orient; lastly, exalting, by artful family connections,(6) his domestic power to such a pitch that at one moment it threatened not only to absorb the empire while shedding a factitious lustre upon it, but to bury the world in the tomb of a universal monarchy. Than such colossal outlines, nothing can be stranger to the annàls of the margravate of Brandenburg. Where the history of its rival reads like a diabolical epic, it only reads like an immoral family tale. There exists a striking difference, even where one expects to find likeness, if not identity of interest. The two Marches of Brandenburg and of Austria,(7) both derived their original importance from forming advanced posts for the defence as well as the attack of Germany against the neighbouring Sclavonian race. But even from this point of view the history of Brandenburg lacks colour, life, and dramatic movement, lost as it is in petty strifes with obscure Sclavonic tribes scattered over a relatively small tract of land between the Elbe and the Oder, none of which tribes ever ripened into anything like an historical existence. No Sclavonic tribe of historical mark was ever conquered or Germanised by the margravate of Brandenburg, nor did it even succeed to stretch out its arms to the bordering Wendish sea.(8) Pomerania, coveted by the margraves of Brandenburg since the 12th century, was not entirely incorporated with the kingdom of Prussia in the year 1815 [185]; and when the Brandenburg electors began to appropriate it piecemeal, it had long ago ceased to be a Sclavonic state. The transformation of the southern and south-eastern shores of the Baltic, partly by the commercial enterprise of German burghers, partly by the sword of the German knights, belongs to the history of Germany and Poland, not to that of Brandenburg, which only came to gather the harvest it had not sown.
Without much risk one may go so far as to say that of the innumerable readers who have contrived to get some clue to the classical names of Achilles, Cicero, Nestor, and Hector, there exists only a very indifferent per centage who ever suspected the sandy soil of Brandenburg of not only producing potatoes and sheep at our own time, but of having once(9) exuberated in no less than four electors, going respectively under the names of Albrecht Achilles, Johann Cicero, Joachim I. Nestor, and Joachim II. Hector. The same golden mediocrity that favoured the slow growth of the electorate of Brandenburg into what is by courtesy called an European power, has screened(10) its home-spun history from too indiscreet an intimacy with the public eye. Relying on this fact Prussian statesmen and writers have exerted themselves to the utmost to impregnate the world with the notion that Prussia is the military monarchy par excellence, whence it might be induced that the right divine of the Hohenzollerns must mean the right of the sword — the right of conquest. Nothing could be more off the mark. It may be affirmed, on the contrary, that, properly speaking, of all the provinces the Hohenzollerns now possess, they have conquered only one — Silesia, a fact, so unique in the annals of their house that it earned for Frederick II. the title of the Unique. Now, the Prussian monarchy stretches over 5,062 geographical square miles,(11) of which the province of Brandenburg, even in its present extent, does not occupy more than 730, and Silesia no more than 741. How, then, did they get at Prussia with 1,178, at Posen with 536, at Pomerania with 567, at Saxony with s 460, at Westphalia with 366, and at Rhenish Prussia with 479 square miles? By the divine right of bribery, open purchase, petty larceny, legacy-hunting, and treacherous partition treaties.
In the beginning of the fifteenth century the margravate of Brandenburg belonged to the house of Luxemburg, whose chief, Sigismund, simultaneously swayed the Imperial sceptre of Germany. Being very short of cash, and hard pressed by his creditors, he found a facile and accommodating friend in Frederick, burgrave of Nürnberg, a prince tracing his origin to the house of Hohenzollern. In 1411, Frederick was installed as General Administrator of Brandenburg, made over to him as a sort of mortgage for the divers sums of money he had advanced to the Emperor. Like a prudent money-lender who finds himself once put in preliminary possession of the premises of a spendthrift, Frederick continued to involve Sigismund in fresh debts by new advances, till 1415, when the debtor and creditor accounts were settled by the investiture of Frederick with the hereditary electorate of Brandenburg. To leave no doubt as to the nature of this act, it was encumbered with two clauses, the one reserving to the house of Luxemburg the right of redeeming the electorate on payment of 400,000 gold florins, and the other binding Frederick and his heirs to give on every new election for the empire their vote to the house of Luxemburg — the former clause stamping the contract as a barter, and the latter as a bribery. To become full proprietor of the electorate, there remained for the grasping friend of Sigismund but one further operation, the dropping of the redemption clause. Accordingly, he watched the opportune moment when Sigismund, at the council of Constance,[186] had again got at loggerheads with the costs of Imperial representation(12); and hurrying from the -March to the confines of Switzerland, he emptied his purse, and the fatal clause was struck off. Such were the ways and means of the right divine on which the still reigning dynasty of Hohenzollern founds its possession of the electorate of Brandenburg. Such was the origin of the Prussian monarchy.
Frederick's next successor,(13) a very weak man, called the "Iron," because of his fancy for always appearing in public in an iron harness, bought for 100,000 gold florins the New March from the order of the Teutonic knights,[187] as his father had bought the Old March and his dignity from the Emperor. Thence the method of buying encumbered parcels of sovereignty grew into as settled a thing with the Hohenzollern electors as intervention had once been with the Roman senate. Leaving alone the tedious details of this sordid traffic, we pass on to the times of the Reformation.
It must not be imagined that because the Reformation turned out to be the main prop of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the Hohenzollern dynasty proved themselves the main prop of the Reformation. Quite the reverse. The founder of that dynasty, Frederick I., inaugurated his reign by leading the armies of Sigismund against the Hussites,[188] who thrashed him soundly for his pains. Joachim I. Nestor, 1499-1535, treated the Reformation as though it were a Taborite.[189] He persecuted it to his death.
Joachim IL Hector, although a convert to Lutheranism, refused to draw the sword in defence of the new faith, at the very moment when it appeared to succumb under the overwhelming forces of Charles-Quint. Not only declining to share in the armed resistance of the Schmalkalden Bund,[190] he tendered his secret support to the Emperor. On the part of the Hohenzollerns, the German Reformation then met with open hostility at its rise, at the time of its earlier struggles with a false neutrality, and during its terrible concluding scene of the thirty years' war[191] with fainthearted vacillation, cowardly inaction, and base faithlessness. It is known that the elector, George Wilhelm, tried to bar the passage of the liberating armies of Gustavus Adolphus, who was forced to drive him by kicks and blows into the Protestant camp, from which he afterwards attempted to skulk out by concluding a separate peace with Austria.[192] But if the Hohenzollerns were not the knights, they certainly were the cashiers of the German Reformation. Their reluctance to fight in its cause was equalled only by their eagerness to plunder in its name. Reformation, with them, was but the religious title for secularisation, so that the best part of their acquisitions during the 16th and 17th centuries, may be traced to one large source — church robbery — a rather queer way this for the divine right to manifest itself in.
Three events stand foremost in the history of the formation of the Hohenzollern monarchy — the acquisition of the Brandenburg electorate, the adjunction to the electorate of the duchy of Prussia, and lastly the elevation of the duchy into a kingdom. We Tiave seen how the electorate was acquired. The duchy of Prussia was got by three steps. First: secularisation; next, marriage transactions of rather an equivocal character — the elector Joachim Frederick espousing the younger,(14) and his son, Johann Sigismund, the elder daughter (15) of the mad and sonless Duke Albrecht of Prussia — and, lastly: by bribing with the right hand the Court of the Polish King,(16) and with the left hand the Diet of the Polish Republic. So complicated were these bribery transactions as to extend over a whole series of years.[193] A similar method was adopted for the transformation of the duchy of Prussia into a kingdom. To get the royal tide, the elector, Frederick III., afterwards King Frederick I., Wanted the consent of the German Emperor. To get this consent, against which the Catholic conscience of the Emperor I
revolted, he bribed the Jesuit Wolf, the confessor of Leopold I., and threw into the bargain 30,000 Brandenburghers, to be slaughtered in the Austro-Spanish succession-war.[194] The Hohenzollern elector returned to the Old German Institution of life-money, only that the ancient Germans paid with cattle and that he paid with men. Such was the foundation of the Hohenzollern royalty, by the grace of God.
With- their improving fortunes, since the commencement of the eighteenth century, the Hohenzollerns improved their method of aggrandisement by adding to bribery and barter partition treaties with Russia against states which they had not felled, but surprised when fallen. Thus we find them concurring with Peter the Great in the partition of the Swedish possessions, with Catherine II. in the partition of Poland, and with Alexander I. in the partition of. Germany.[195]
Those, then, who object to the Prussian claims on Neuchatel that the Hohenzollerns got it by bribery, commit a woeful mistake in forgetting that it was by bribery that they acquired Brandenburg, that they acquired Prussia, that they acquired the royal dignity. There can exist no doubt they possess Neuchatel by the same right divine as their other states, and they cannot resign the one without exposing the others.
Endnotes
[183] In the eighteenth century the Principality of Neuchâtel and Valangin (in German, Neuenburg and Vallendis) was under Prussian rule. In 1815 by decision of the Vienna Congress it was incorporated into Swiss Confederation as the 21st canton, while remaining a vassal of Prussia. In 1848 a republic was proclaimed in Neuchâtel. However, Prussia laid constant claim to Neuchâtel up to 1857, which led to a sharp conflict with Switzerland.
[184] This refers to the so-called Burgundian wars (1474-77) waged by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, against France. The Principality of Neuchâtel, committed to Berne by an obligation (1406), sided with the Swiss Confederation, which was France's ally and which declared war on Charles the Bold. The troops of Charles the Bold were defeated by the Allied forces at Nancy on January 5, 1477 and he himself was killed in the battle. This led to the disintegration of the Duchy of Burgundy and the Neuchâtel and Valangin with the Swiss strengthening of the ties of Confederation.
[185] Under the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna (1815) Prussia received what was known as Swedish Pomerania from Denmark.
[186] T h e Council of Constance (1414-18) was convened to strengthen the weakened position of the Catholic Church. It condemned the teachings of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus and ended the schism in the Catholic Church by electing a new Pope.
[187] Thg Teutonic Order—a German religious Order of Knights founded in 1190 during the Crusades. The Order seized vast possessions in Germany and other countries. These were administered by dignitaries known as commandores (or comthurs). In the thirteenth century, East Prussia fell under the rule of the Order after it was overrun and the local population exterminated. In 1237 the Order amalgamated with the Livonian Order, which also had its seat in the Baltic area. The Eastern possessions of the Order became a seat of aggression against Poland, Lithuania and the adjoining Russian principalities. After the defeat at Chudskoye Lake in 1242 and in the battle at Grünwald in 1410, the Order rapidly declined and was only able to maintain a small part of its former possessions.
[188] The Hussites—the followers of Jan Hus, a preacher, thinker and the exponent of the Bohemian Reformation. They participated in the popular movement of 1419-37 against the Catholic Church, feudal exploitation and German domination in Bohemia. There were two trends in the Hussite movement: a moderate (the Calixtines, or Utraquists) and a radical (the Taborites — see Note 189) trend. The Hussites built up a strong army which rebuffed five crusades organised against Bohemia by the Pope and the German Emperor Sigismund I. The movement was suppressed as a result of the burghers' and knights' compromise with Sigismund I.
[189] T h e Taborites (so called from their camp in the town of Tabor, Bohemia) — a radical trend in the Hussite movement. They were the revolutionary, democratic wing of the Hussites, and their demands reflected the desire of the peasantry and the urban lower classes for an end to all feudal oppression and all manifestations of social and political arbitrariness. T h e Taborites were the core of the Hussite army.
[190] A reference to the League of Schmalkalden (February 27, 1531), named after the town in Thuringia where it was formed, was a union of Protestant princes and a number of Imperial towns for the protection of the Reformation against the Catholic princes headed by Emperor Charles V. From 1546 to 1548 the League and the Emperor were engaged in a war which ended in the latter's victory and the disintegration of the League.
[191] The Thirty Years' War (1618-48)—a European war in which the Pope, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and the Catholic German princes, rallied under the banner of Catholicism, fought the Protestant countries: Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden, the Republic of the Netherlands and a number of Protestant German states. The rulers of Catholic France — rivals of the Habsburgs — supported the Protestant camp. Germany was the principal battle area and the main object of plunder and territorial claims. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) sealed the political dismemberment of Germany.
[192] This refers to what is known as the Peace of Prague, a separate agreement concluded by the Elector of Saxony Johann Georg and the Emperor Ferdinand II of Habsburg on May 30, 1635. They were joined by the Elector of Brandenburg Georg Wilhelm and certain Protestant princes. Under this agreement the Elector of Saxony received Upper and Lower Luzica and part of Magdeburg's possessions. The Protestant princes consolidated their hold on the lands which they had seized from the Church in the sixteenth century.
[193] In 1611, the Polish Diet adopted a decision on the unification of the Duchy of Prussia with Brandenburg under Hohenzollern rule. This was done despite the opposition of a group of deputies who advocated Poland's rights to East Prussia. However, the Duchy of Prussia remained a territory held in fee by Poland. This decision was implemented in 1618 when the Elector of Brandenburg, Johann Sigismund, received the Duchy of Prussia in fee from the Polish King in exchange for his promise to take part in the war against Sweden. Under the Wielawa-Bydgoszcz Treaty of 1657 Poland finally renounced her supreme rights to the Duchy of Prussia in favour of Brandenburg.
[194] On the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) see Note 51. The Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich III, having secured the support of the Polish nobility by bribery, and that of Emperor Leopold I by sending him Brandenburg troops for his war in Spain, announced, on January 18, 1701, the establishment of the Kingdom of Prussia and proclaimed himself King Frederick I.
[195] On February l, 1720, Prussia, a participant in the Northern War on Russia's side, concluded a peace treaty with Sweden under which it received Eastern Pomerania with the town of Stettin. The three partitions of Poland (by Austria, Prussia and Russia) took place in 1772, 1793 and 1795. Polish lands, including Pomorze, Great Poland, and part of Mazovia with Warsaw, went over to Prussia; Russia gained Lithuanian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian territories; Austria received the Western Ukraine and part of Smaller Poland. As a result of the third partition, Poland ceased to exist as a state. Under the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna signed on June 9, 1815 Prussia gained Northern Saxony (almost half of Saxony's territory), Torn and Poznan, the Rhine Province and the greater part of Westphalia.