298 FREDERICK AND WAR
never chooses to write on disagreeable subjects. (25 November
1761, PRO, SP 90/78)If Frederick was willing to join in the contest for opinions with
enthusiasm and wit, he was much concerned to limit the spread of his
wars into international dimensions which he could not fully control
or understand.
Frederick's vanity, his contempt for mankind, and his confidence
in his own army made him the worst of allies. He abandoned the
French in 1742 and again in 1745. He began the wars of 1740 and 1756
without active partners, and his capacity to carry on the fight was not
seriously disturbed when the British terminated their subsidy in 1761.
Only the huge military potential of Russia had the power to make him
look nervously about for friends.
Frederick's self-sufficiency, according to the Due de Nivernais,
was in part the product of ignorance:He has a very full understanding of the interests, resources and
means of his own power and state, but I believe that he has only
a feeble comprehension of how these things relate to other
powers. He is totally unaware of the influence which commerce
and maritime trade now exert on the political system of Europe.
(1756, in Volz, 1926-7, I, 286)It was not Frederick but the Duke of Bevern who was responsible for
the attempt to do battle with the Swedish flotillas on the Baltic
estuaries and lagoons in the Seven Years War. Frederick himself
renounced the ambition of building a navy, on account of the
expense of construction and manning, the unsuitability of the
geography, the indecisive nature of sea battles, and the unfamiliarity
of the element - 'land animals like us are not accustomed to live
among whales, dolphins, turbot and codfish' (to Maria Antonia of
Saxony, 23 September 1779, Oeuvres, XXIV, 327; also Political Testa-
ments of 1752 and 1768, Frederick, 1920, 101, 244).
In a famous passage the historian Macaulay condemned the
conquest of Silesia: 'The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in
lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he
might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men
fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other
by the Great Lakes of North America' (Macaulay, 1864, II, 253). In
fact the reverse was the case. The colonial wars had an impetus of
their own, and Frederick lived in perpetual fear that the red men
would involve him in the Anglo-French quarrels over a wilderness
like Canada, whose importance he 'rated at six hundred crowns'
(Catt, 1884, 391). It was Galisonniere's fort-building and other causes