Fox-Tosser

In early 18th-century​ Christian Europe, only Peter the Great ruled a larger territory than Augustus the Strong. As Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony in 1694 and King Augustus II of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1697, he reigned from the German heartland on the Elbe and the cities of Dresden and Leipzig deep into what is now Belarus and Ukraine. Augustus’s subjects included not only Germans, Poles and Ukrainians but also Tatars, Jews and people who had fled religious and racial persecution: Unitarians, Mennonites, Armenians and Gypsies.

The gossipy contemporary accounts of Augustus’s reign by the Prussian courtier Karl Ludwig von Pöllnitz and Frederick the Great’s sister Wilhelmine of Bayreuth are highly inaccurate. It would be tempting to repeat the salacious stories told about him, but Tim Blanning has instead produced an authoritative account of his reign and a measured reckoning of what Augustus called his ‘intrigues’ and ‘adventures’. It turns out that he did not father 354 bastards, as historians continue to report, but eight, which puts him well behind Louis XIV and Charles II. A conversation reported by Pöllnitz, which Blanning doesn’t mention, also suggests that towards the end of his reign Augustus’s tally of mistresses was a modest ten. Numbers aside, there was a general atmosphere of moral abandon at the Dresden court. The young Frederick of Prussia experienced it at first hand and counted himself lucky to have escaped with his virtue intact.

For Blanning, much of this libertinism can be attributed to Augustus’s ‘priapic’ and ‘incorrigibly promiscuous’ disposition. But, as he also points out, by the 18th century royal mistresses had in many places become an integral part of court spectacle. In line with the new fashion, Augustus paraded his mistresses in processions; he rewarded them with enormous jewels and other gifts and held lavish celebrations in their honour. The luckier among them received palaces and titles; the less fortunate, a husband ready to turn a blind eye to his wife’s dalliances and embrace a baby named Augustus as his own.

Augustan display was prodigious. The court calendar was crowded with tournaments, balls, ballets and operas, though much of the year was dedicated to hunting and to what Blanning calls ‘baiting animals in the theatre of cruelty’. The two activities overlapped. Although Augustus was an accomplished marksman who delighted in shooting at his subjects’ hats, the hunts organised for his pleasure needed no skill whatsoever. The animals were rounded up before the ruler and his guests, who blasted away at them, unable to miss. On other occasions a stag would be hunted down by a pack of hounds until it collapsed from exhaustion, whereupon it was easily dispatched. Sometimes even the semblance of hunting was abandoned, and hundreds of animals were driven by dogs over a clifftop.

What did require expertise and precision was the game of fox-tossing (Fuchsprellen). This was usually played in a courtyard, where lengths of carpet were held by the players. Each time a fox walked onto one of the carpets, the players flicked it upwards; the prize went to the highest toss. Beavers or badgers might be tossed, for a change, but wild cats were found unsuitable since they often sank their claws into both the carpet and the players. Augustus was a master of the sport, able to flick the carpet while holding it between only his forefinger and thumb. Blanning describes him as ‘an incorrigible show-off, always drawing attention to himself’. Some of the stories told of him, such as his decapitating a bull with a single slash of a knife, are the invention of his first biographers. Even so, he liked to impress visitors by breaking horseshoes with his bare hands and rolling up silver plates into tubes: hence ‘Augustus the Strong’.

When it came to political and military matters, however, Augustus’s appetite for self-advertisement had predictably unhappy consequences. Only three years after succeeding his brother as elector of Saxony in 1694, he bid for and won the crown of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. For the rest of his life, he would struggle to keep hold of it. Contemporaries and historians alike have been bewildered by the decision to surrender the ease of Saxony for the hurly-burly of Polish and Lithuanian politics. Blanning suggests that Augustus may have been swayed by an old prophecy about a Saxon prince who would become king of Poland and recapture Constantinople from the Turks, before welcoming the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. But such prognostications were just part of princely display, to be publicised but not acted on. It seems more likely that Augustus was motivated by simple vanity: he wanted to control both Saxony and the Commonwealth. As he told his principal negotiator for the crown, ‘my greatest ambition is glory and I will strive for it until the end of my days.’

Politically, Poland and Saxony were worlds apart. Saxony was a typical ‘mixed polity’, where a powerful ruler faced an equally powerful Landtag, or parliament. Their disagreements were generally peaceable and mostly concerned protocol and who should sit where on public occasions. Early in his reign, Augustus tilted power relations in his favour by excluding all but his own appointees from the central organs of government. But he continued to summon parliaments, roughly every six years, and to attend to the petitions and complaints of his subjects. Unlike in most of Central Europe, noblemen and not state officials still controlled the Saxon countryside. In the Commonwealth, by contrast, the parliament (or Sejm) had hobbled the monarch. The Sejm was the instrument of the ordinary noblemen, who were known collectively as the szlachta (from the German Geschlechter, meaning ‘families’ or ‘lineages’). Fearing that the monarch might use his residual powers against them, the nobles had deprived him of the power to raise taxes, control the army and even to appoint ambassadors, which effectively made it impossible to have a foreign policy.

Having restricted the monarch, however, the Sejm proved incapable of wielding power. Its procedures were never less than shambolic. Notoriously, a single nobleman could veto all the legislation approved in a session, usually by shouting out ‘I don’t allow it!’ From 1652 until the end of the Commonwealth in 1795, two-thirds of the Sejm’s meetings were broken up either by a deputy’s veto or by filibustering, when a group of deputies took it in turn to give day-long speeches to block the passage of legislation.

On top of this, the szlachta were responsible for picking the monarch. As Elector of Saxony, Augustus was one of the nine electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. But in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, every nobleman was an elector, and an ‘election Sejm’ might be attended by tens of thousands of them. Inevitably, much negotiation preceded the grand event. Augustus’s own machinations included converting to Catholicism, although, as the British ambassador in Dresden noted at the time, his dedication to religion ‘was never very great’. Ahead of the vote he also made a welter of minor concessions: he promised to hold lavish banquets, and not to appoint foreign advisers or mint money without the Sejm’s consent. And he bribed anyone he could, even pawning the Saxon crown to the Jesuits of Vienna in order to raise funds. Despite all his efforts, the vote was split between Augustus and the Prince de Conti, the candidate supported by Louis XIV. Augustus, however, could call on a three-thousand-strong Saxon cavalry, vastly outnumbering Conti’s three hundred soldiers.

Despite his taste for extracurricular activities, Augustus took ruling seriously. He composed in 1697 an aide-mémoire that listed various reforms, ranging from building a fleet and establishing a diplomatic service to imposing a consumption tax. But before he could act on these plans, he received a visit in August 1698 from Peter the Great, who was returning home from his ‘Grand Embassy’ to the Netherlands and Great Britain. Over three days the two men consumed twelve kegs of Hungarian wine and unspecified quantities of champagne and other alcohol. It was then, it seems, that they agreed to join forces against Sweden in the Great Northern War of 1700-21.

Almost half of Blanning’s biography is dedicated to the war. In places, Augustus disappears almost entirely from the narrative as the focus shifts to Peter and his Swedish adversary, Charles XII. This is perhaps as it should be. Peter and Charles were the primary actors in the war. Both could deploy more than a hundred thousand troops, whereas Augustus could barely field twenty thousand. Both also had navies, while Augustus could only call on a small fleet of privateers, recruited to plunder Swedish ships. Next to these monarchs, Augustus became, in Blanning’s words, ‘the grist between two millstones’.

Augustus’s aim was to seize Livonia (modern-day Latvia and southern Estonia), which had become a Swedish dominion in 1629. But his attempt to smuggle troops into the Livonian capital of Riga in 1700 went awry when Swedish customs officers discovered them hidden in wagons, packed ‘like herrings in a barrel’. Over the next few years the fighting spread to Poland and Lithuania, where Charles XII captured Vilnius, Warsaw and Cracow, and in 1704 placed his own candidate on the Commonwealth’s throne. Two years later, his troops moved into Saxony and, meeting little resistance, occupied it. It was only Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedish forces at Poltava in 1709 that restored Augustus to power.

From then on,​ Augustus remained dependent on Russian support. When, instead of paying his Saxon troops, he allowed them to forage freely in the Polish countryside, prompting a wave of popular protest that led to civil war in 1715, it was Peter the Great who rescued him. Pretending only to act as a ‘mediator’, Peter banged heads together, and a settlement, the Treaty of Warsaw, was agreed in November 1716. On 1 February 1717, while Russian troops patrolled outside, the Sejm approved the treaty in just a few hours. The ‘silent Sejm’, so called because only a handful of deputies were allowed to speak, was a monument to Peter the Great’s cynicism. Posturing as the defender of the szlachta’s liberty, he had endorsed an agreement that left the Commonwealth’s constitution intact and cut its army to fewer than twenty thousand troops. Peter wanted a weak Poland that would neither challenge Russia’s growing power in Northern Europe nor resist the movement of Russian troops across its lands. The fate of the Commonwealth was to be, in the verdict of the Polish historian Piotr Wandycz, ‘a wayside inn open for unwanted and non-paying guests’.

Augustus gained nothing from the treaties that concluded the Great Northern War in 1721 and Livonia was swept up into Russia’s burgeoning empire. Over the next five years Russia, Sweden, Prussia and Austria committed themselves to preserving the constitution of Poland and Lithuania, since it was in their interests to use the szlachta to block any changes that might serve to strengthen the Commonwealth. Half a century later, Russia, Prussia and Austria would carve up Poland and Lithuania between them. From the Commonwealth’s enfeeblement to its partition was only a short step.

It’s an open question whether Augustus seriously intended to reform the Commonwealth’s institutions, strengthening the power of the monarch and executive at the expense of the Sejm and the quarrelsome szlachta, and even transforming the personal union between Poland and Saxony into a real one. Blanning thinks not, and ventures that he was more interested in building a hereditary monarchy. In this he just about succeeded, since in the war that followed Augustus’s death in 1733 it was his son Augustus III of Poland and Lithuania who eventually prevailed, with help from a Russian army. When Augustus III died in 1763, having spent just three years in Poland, Catherine the Great installed King Stanisław II, her former lover, on the throne. He would be the Commonwealth’s last king.

The final part of Blanning’s biography consists of two chapters on Augustus’s building projects and collections. His ‘greatest single creation’, the Zwinger palace, was constructed between 1710 and 1728 next to Dresden’s city wall. Originally the glacis or free-fire zone beyond the wall (hence the name), the Zwinger became the site of one of Central Europe’s grandest baroque monuments. Arcaded galleries, pavilions and 450 statues overlooked a performance area where tournaments, firework displays and festive processions celebrated Augustus’s triumphs and munificence. Beside the Zwinger, he built a new opera house, one of the largest of its time, and refashioned the old palace with the latest Baroque trappings.

The Zwinger and its complex of buildings next to the Elbe were intended to showcase Augustus’s collections of clocks and scientific instruments, jewellery, exotic animals, paintings and chinoiserie – standard fare for 18th-century rulers. But his porcelain collection was unique. The first hard-paste porcelain in Europe was produced in Saxon Meissen from 1710, and by 1727 Augustus owned no fewer than 20,000 Meissen pieces and 21,000 items of East Asian provenance. By the end of his life, porcelain seems to have taken the place once occupied by mistresses. ‘Don’t you know,’ he told one of his ministers, ‘that those who have caught the craze for oranges or porcelain can never have enough of one or the other and always want to have more?’ His last words, after a prolonged drinking session in 1733, were reputedly: ‘My whole life has been an unceasing sin. God have mercy on me.’ Yet his political failure was not entirely of his own making. Like many before and since, he had hoped to make his mark in Poland, but it proved too ambitious an enterprise. In the end, his political survival depended on Russian muskets, setting the stage for the rise of Russian, and then Soviet, power in Central Europe.

I noticed only one mistake in Blanning’s otherwise thrilling and thorough account. In seeking to locate the treasures loaded by Augustus’s father onto his mistress, Magdalena Sibylla von Neitschütz, the Dresden magistrates tortured her mother. Blanning refers to the use of thumb-screws as torture of the ‘first degree’, but depending on which manual of instruction one consults, it is actually the third or fourth. The first degree was to be threatened by the torturer; the second to be shown the instruments. Confession usually came at that point.