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Bell's

COURT AND
AND FASHIONABLE

MAGAZINE,

For AUGUST, 1807.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

OF

ILLUSTRIOUS LADIES.

The Twenty-first Number.

HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN OF PRUSSIA.

LOUISA AUGUSTA WILHELMINA AMELIA, Queen of Prussia, was born on the 10th of March 1776; she is the daughter of Duke Charles Louis Frederick, sovereign of the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and niece of her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain. She was betrothed to her royal consort in February, and married on the 24th December 1793. Handsome in her person, accomplished in her manners, with a mind equally elevated and noble, she possesses talents sufficient, if left unbiassed, to alleviate the burden of state to her royal consort. Misled, or prejudiced, she, by a fatality belonging to our wretched times, became an indirect instrument to support usurpation in France, by forsaking her native dignity, and condescending to put herself on a level with a revolutionary Empress, and by not dissuading her husband from forming those scandalous relations, which united him with the most atrocious of usurpers.

Whether impolitic errors of courts may as justly be attributed to depraved and immoral courtiers, as shameful and dangerous transactions of cabinets are to ignorant or corrupted ministers, the sovereigns of the Prussian Monarchy have certainly since 1795 been encompassed by every thing derogatory to greatness, undermining rank, insulting virtue, humiliating loyalty, and destructive to social order. What can contemporaries think, what must posterity judge of cer

tain transactions, and of certain connections of the cabinet of Berlin? Does it not seem as if every confidential attendant of the Prussian Queen was studying to degrade her, and every confidential counsellor of the Prussian King was a traitor conspiring against lawful sovereignty, or at least a well paid pensioner of usurpation, or an artful intriguer in its pay, plotting against all ancient dynasties?

The day on which Prussia forsook the coalition by the treaty of Basle, she inclosed herself in a circle of dangers She broke the obligation of her alliances without being able to form any, took umbrage at being reproached, resumed that national hatred, which the wisdom of the Emperor Leopold, and the patriotisin of Frederick William II. had abjured; and forgot revolutionary France to dread Austria and Russia. Assisted by these fatal dissentions, Bonaparte and his predecessors have pursued their disorganizations, plots and usurpations.

Justice and impartiality require, however, that it should also be remarked, that the lustre of the Prussian Monarchy was clouded before their Majesties began to reign. It was obscured, if not darkened, by its treaties with the regicide French republic. This was however not surprising. The late King, enervated by debauchery, and inAluenced by corrupt or depraved mistresses, became the easy dupe of seduction, and a prey to

tion and vanity, like an upstart sans-culotte; they, like sovereigns, like princes and princesses, who saw that they had advanced too far, but who had not courage or disinterestedness enough to retreat, and instead of entertaining and feasting this ill-bred vagabonl at Berlin, at Potsdam, at Charlottenbourg, or at Sans Souci, to shut him up amongst his equals, at Magdebourg or at Spandau.

delusion. During his last years the reins of state were directed by revolutionary illuminati, by political quacks, or by unprincipled women. The errors and vices of his government, although reprehensible and complained of, were nevertheless justly ascribed to others, not to himself. But when,' shortly after the accession of their present Majesties, the ex-Abbé Sieyes, the most infamously notorious of regicides, was admitted as an ambassador at Berlin, loyalty was dejected, and rebellion reared its head in triumph. Notwithstanding any thing a Haugwitz, a Schoulem-family, not in the palace, but in a private house

bourg, or a Hardenberg, may have asserted to the contrary, the assassin of one King could never be a proper person to figure in the court of another. But many thought that even this humiliating act was merely a temporary though a degrading measure, commanded by imperious cir

cumstances.

In the year 1799, when the most artful as well as the most outrageous of usurpers had seized on the throne of the Bourbons, all truly loyal and religious men began to be alarmed at the conduct of the Prussian cabinet. The manner in which Bonaparte's emissary Duroc was cajoled and caressed at the court of Berlin did not diminish their apprehensions. He was not only treated with the same ceremony as the representative of a legitimate sovereign, but with a distinction unusual as well as unbecoming. Being one day permitted to be present at the parade of the garrison of Berlin, he expressed some approbation of the scarfs of the officers of the King's body guards. No sooner was her Prussian Majesty informed of his condescension, than she, or rather her courtiers, caused her to degrade her rank and elevation, and to forget that this Daroc was nothing but the valet of a mean adventurer, who six years before could not have obtained the commission of a subaltern in the Prussian service. The Queen is said to have knitted with her own hands a scarf;—it is known that she presented one to Duroc with her own hand on the day he took leave.

This impolitic step (which took place during the winter of 1799), to say no worse of it, encouraged Bonaparte to send during the winter of 1800, his brother Louis to fraternize with the King, Queen, and royal family at Berlin. As might be expected, this Prince of Corsican blood was brutal, they were enduring; he was insolent and they were condescending; he behaved, from want of education, from presump

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The King and Queen are fond of retirement.The winter of 1800 was passed by the royal

at Berlin, to save, as was reported, the expence of many fires, wood being rather dear. Every day, about one o'clock in the afternoon, the King took a walk, without any other suite than one of his Majesty's aid-de-camps. The Queen at the same hour took an airing in a plain postchaise, so plain that not its equal is found in any inn of Great Britain: behind the post-chaise stood two servants, and by her side was either her brother or some lady of her court. She was accompanied with no guards, or any attendants in any other carriage. Among a people, whose religious ideas were shaken under Frederick the Great; whose morals were corrupted under the reign of his successor; and who, under the present reign, have listened with avidity to the revolutionary doctrine of French emissaries, and who have seen their Sovereign by treaties descend to a level with the present as well as with former usurpers in France, all base as well as criminal, such an affected simplicity will certainly not augment their loyalty.

Every day during the same winter, when the weather permitted, the young Prince Royal and his cousin, nearly of his own age, son of the late Prince Lewis, took a walk on a place called the Linden, accompanied with no other person but their governor, a brother, and a son of a baker at Magdeburg. The children of tradesmen in good circumstances in England are much better dressed than those two Princes were; and no merchant's clerk in this country is so shabbily accoutred, as was their governor, an honest man, who would make an excellent usher in a charity school.

The Queen of Prussia is the tender mother of six children: four Princes and two Princesses; of whom the eldest was born on the 15th of October 1795, and the youngest on the 15th of January 1805.

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