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Two barons Von der Trenck—Friedrich a cornet of the Gardes du Corps—Favoured by the Princess Amelia—Incurs the displeasure of Frederick the Great—Sent to the fortress of Glatz—Escaped to Bohemia and passed into Russia—Re-arrested at Danzig and sent to Magdeburg—Plans for escape—The grenadier Gefhardt a faithful friend—Communication established with friends outside—Funds obtained—Plot discovered—Removed to the Star Fort and loaded with irons—Terrible suffering—Attempt to cut through the doors discovered—His prison is strengthened but his courage is unbroken—Fresh plans made—A new tunnel begun—Plot discovered—The sympathy of the Empress-Queen of Austria aroused—Released on Christmas Eve, 1763—Married and settled in Aix-la-Chapelle—His death on the scaffold during the French Revolution.

There were two barons Von der Trenck, Franz and Friedrich, in the middle of the 18th century, both intimately associated with the prisons of their respective countries, for although cousins, Franz was an Austrian, and the other, Friedrich, a Prussian. Both were military officers. Franz was a wild Pandour, a reckless leader of irregular cavalry, who for his sins was shut up for life in the Spielberg, the famous prison fortress near Brünn, where he committed suicide. Friedrich, after enjoying the favour of Frederick the Great and winning the rank of cadet in the Gardes du Corps, was eventually disgraced and imprisoned in the fortress of Magdeburg, where he was detained for ten years and treated with implacable severity. Friedrich von der Trenck was richly endowed by nature; he was a gallant young soldier with good mental gifts and a handsome person which enabled him to shine in court society and achieve many successes. He was fortunate enough to gain the good graces of the king’s sister, the Princess Amelia of Prussia, who greatly resembled her celebrated brother both physically and mentally. She possessed the same sparkling wit, the same gracious vivacity and, like Friedrich, was a distinguished musician. She was a warm votary of art, science and literature and was always surrounded and courted by the most cultured German princes. All her contemporaries describe her beauty with enthusiasm. So far, she had declined the many proposals of marriage, which, as a matter of course, she had received. Her heart belonged to the cornet of the Gardes du Corps, and a secret understanding existed between them. The lovers were at first cautious, but soon became bolder, and the king’s suspicions were aroused. At first he tried fatherly remonstrances, but in vain. The extraordinary liaison became the talk of the hour. A lieutenant of the Prussian Foot Guards taunted the favoured lover about his relations with the princess, they quarrelled, and a duel followed. The king was furious, and a catastrophe was imminent, but was avoided by the outbreak of war. Then this gay and reckless courtier allowed himself to be drawn into a correspondence with his cousin in Vienna, the notorious colonel of the Pandours, and the measure of the king’s wrath overflowed. Trenck was cashiered and sent to the fortress of Glatz. The king wrote with his own hand to the commandant of the fortress on the 28th June, 1745, “Watch this rogue well; he wished to become a Pandour under his cousin.” Undoubtedly Frederick intended to keep Trenck imprisoned for a short time only, but he was detained for a whole year, during which time he made more than one attempt to escape.

The following account is in his own words: “At last, after I had spent about five months in confinement (at Glatz) peace had been proclaimed, the king had returned to Berlin and my place in the gardes had been filled. A certain lieutenant Piaschky of the Fouquet regiment and the ensign Reitz, who was often on sentinel duty outside my cell, offered to make preparations to enable me to escape and take them with me. Everything was settled and agreed upon. At that time there was in the cell next to mine a certain Captain von Manget, a native of Switzerland. He had been cashiered, was condemned to ten years’ imprisonment and had only four rix dollars to spend. I had shown this man much kindness out of pity, and I wished to save him as well as myself, and this was discussed and proposed to him. We were betrayed by this rascal on the first opportunity, he in consequence earning his pardon and liberty. Piaschky had wind that Reitz was already a prisoner, and saved himself by deserting. I denied everything, was confronted with Manget, and because I could bribe the judge with a hundred ducats, Reitz escaped with castigation and a year’s imprisonment. I, on the contrary, was now considered as a corrupter of the officers and was locked up in a narrow cell and strictly confined. Left to myself, I still meditated flight, as the seclusion in a small cell was too irksome to my fiery temperament. The garrison was always on my side, therefore it was impossible to deprive me of friends and assistance. I was known to have money, so that all was possible to me. The first plan was as follows. My window was above the ramparts, about ninety feet from the ground, and looked towards the town. I could not therefore get out of the citadel and must find a place of safety in the town. This was assured to me through an officer, in the house of an honest soap-boiler. I then cut with a pen knife that had been made jagged at the end, right through three iron bars of enormous thickness, but as this took up too much time, as eight bars must be sawn through before I could get out of the window, an officer provided me with a file, with which I had to work very carefully so as not to be heard by the sentries. As soon as this was accomplished, I cut my leather knapsack into strips, sewed them together with the thread from an unravelled stocking, brought my sheet likewise into requisition, and let myself down from this astounding height in safety. It was raining, the night was dark and everything went off well. I had, however, to wade through the public drain and this I had not foreseen. I only sank into it just above the knees, but was not able to work my way out of it. I did all I could, but stuck so fast that at last I lost all my strength and called to the sentry on the rampart, ‘Tell the commandant that Trenck is sticking in the mire!’

“Now to augment my misfortune, it happened that General Fouquet was at that time commandant in Glatz. He was a well known misanthrope, had fought a duel with my father and been wounded by him, and the Austrian Trenck had taken his baggage from him in 1744. He was therefore a great enemy to the Trenck name, and consequently made me remain in the filth for some hours as a public spectacle to the garrison, then had me pulled out and confined in my cell, allowing no water to be taken to me for cleaning purposes. No one can imagine how I looked; my long hair had got into the mud, and my condition was really pitiable until some prisoners were permitted to wash and cleanse me.”

When he finally escaped from Glatz, he went to Bohemia, to Nürnberg and to Vienna, whence he passed into Russia and entered the service of the czar for a time. Then he again travelled through northern Europe and returned to Vienna, where he was coldly received, and he started once more for Russia, but was intercepted at Danzig and again arrested in 1753, after which he suffered a more severe imprisonment for nearly ten years, characterised with such inhuman treatment that it must ever tarnish the reputation of the monarch who posed as a poet and a philosopher, the friend of Voltaire. Frederick the Great would hardly have earned his ambitious epithet had it depended upon the measure he meted out to his turbulent subject, Friedrich von der Trenck. He hated him cordially and persecuted him cruelly, behaving with a pitiless severity, and exhibiting such a contemptible spirit of revenge that he has been hopelessly disgraced by the enlightened verdict of history.

Von der Trenck has told his own story in one of the most remarkable books published in the eighteenth century, as the following excerpts will show. He was taken into custody at Danzig, despoiled of all his cash and valuables, and carried in a closed coach under escort to Lauenberg, and thence via Spandau to Magdeburg, where he was lodged in the destined prison. “It was a casemate,” according to his own account of the cell, “the forepart of which was six feet wide and ten feet long, and divided by a separation wall in which were double doors with a third at the entrance of the casemate. The outer wall was seven feet thick, with one window giving upon the top of the magazine, sufficient for light, but I could see neither the heaven nor the earth. It was barred inside and outside, and there was a narrow grating in the middle, through which nothing could be seen. Six feet beyond my wall stood a row of palisades which prevented the sentry or any one from coming near enough to pass anything in. I had a bed with a mattress, the bedstead clamped down to the floor so that I might not drag it to the window and climb upon it to look out. A small stove and night table were fixed in like manner near the door.

“I was not ironed, and my daily ration was one pound and a half of ammunition bread and a jar of water. I had an excellent appetite, but the bread was mouldy and I could barely touch it. Through the avarice of the town major, the supplies were almost uneatable and for many months following I suffered torture from raging hunger.... I begged for an increase, but prayers and entreaties were of no avail. ‘It is the king’s order,’ I was told; ‘we dare not give you more.’ The commandant, General Borck, cruelly reminded me that I had long enough eaten patties out of the king’s silver service, I must learn now to be satisfied with ammunition bread.”

Von der Trenck turned his thoughts at once to the possibilities of escape. He soon found that he was left very much to himself; his food was brought every day and passed in to him through a slit in the door; but his cell was actually opened only once a week for the visit and inspection of the major of the fortress. He might work, therefore, for seven days without fear of interruption, and he proceeded forthwith to execute a plan he had formed of breaking through the wall of his cell into an adjoining casemate, which he learned from a friendly sentry was unoccupied and unlocked. This sentry and another spoke to him through the window, despite strict orders to the contrary. They gave him a good idea of the interior arrangements of the fortress, and told him that the Elbe was within easy reach. He might cross it by swimming or by a boat, and so gain the Saxon frontier.

Thus encouraged, he devoted himself with unremitting energy to his gigantic task of making a practicable hole in the wall. He found bricks in the first outward layers, and then came upon large quarry stones. His first difficulty was to dispose of the debris and material produced by the excavation; after reserving a part to replace and so conceal the aperture formed, the rest he gradually distributed when ground down into dust. The quarry stones gave infinite trouble, but he tackled them with the irons extracted from his bedstead, and he got other tools from his sentries,—an old ramrod and a soldier’s clasp knife. The labour of piercing this wall of seven feet in thickness was incredible. It was an ancient building, the mortar was very hard, and it was necessary to grind the stones into dust. It lasted over six months, and at length the outer layer of bricks on the side of the adjoining casemate was reached.

Fortune now favoured Von der Trenck in the discovery of a veteran grenadier among his guards, named Gefhardt, who proved to be of inestimable service then and afterwards, and a devoted ally. Through the sentries’ good offices, Trenck was enabled to communicate with his friends outside, and through Gefhardt he made the acquaintance across the palisades of a Jewish girl of Dessau, Esther Heymannin, whose father was serving a sentence of ten years’ imprisonment in Magdeburg. With splinters cut from his bed board, the prisoner manufactured a long staff which reached from his window beyond the palisades, and by means of it obtained writing materials, a knife and a file. This was effected by Esther with the assistance of two friendly sentries. Trenck wrote to his sister, who resided at Hammer, a village fourteen miles from Berlin, begging her to hand over a sum in cash to the girl when she called; he wrote another letter to the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, enclosing a bill on his agent in Vienna, for Trenck, although in the Prussian service, was of Austrian extraction and owned estates in that country. The girl succeeded in her mission to Hammer and took the money to Berlin, where the Austrian minister’s secretary, Weingarten, assured her that a larger sum was on its way from Vienna, and that if she would return to Berlin after carrying her first good news to Magdeburg, it would be handed over to her. But on approaching the prison, the wife of one of the sentries met her with the sad news that both men had been arrested and lay in irons awaiting sentence, and Esther, rightly judging that all was discovered, hurriedly fled to Dessau. It may be added that the thousand florins to come from Vienna were retained by the Austrian secretary, and although Trenck years later, after his release, made constant applications to both Count Puebla and Weingarten, he never recovered the money. Weingarten had acted the traitor throughout and it was on his information, extracted from the Jewish girl, that the plot to escape became known. The consequences were far reaching, and entailed cruel reprisals upon Von der Trenck’s friends. The two sentries, as has been said, were arrested, tried and condemned, one to be hanged and the other to be flogged up and down the streets of Magdeburg on three successive days. Trenck’s sister was cruelly persecuted; she was fined heavily and plundered of her fortune, a portion of which was ingloriously applied to the construction of an entirely new prison in the Star Fort of the Magdeburg fortress, for the special confinement of her brother.

Von der Trenck, as his measures for evasion had become ripe, was on the point of breaking prison when a more terrible blow fell upon him. The new prison in the Star Fort had been finished most expeditiously, and orders were suddenly issued for his removal after nightfall. The major and a party of officers, carrying lanterns, entered his cell. He was roused and directed to put on his clothes, and manacles were slipped on his hands and feet, but not before he had managed to conceal the knife on his person; he was blindfolded, lifted under the arms and conveyed to a coach, which drove through the citadel and down toward the Star Fort, where it had been rumoured he was to be beheaded. He was thrown into his new place of durance, and forthwith subjected to the pain and ignominy of being loaded with fetters; his feet were attached to a ring in the wall about three feet high by a ponderous chain, allowing movement of about two feet to the right and left; an iron belt as broad as the palm of a hand was riveted around his naked body, a thick iron bar was fixed to the belt, and his hands were fastened to the bar two feet apart. “Here,” says Trenck, “was I left to my own melancholy reflections, without comfort or aid, and sitting in gloomy darkness upon the wet floor. My fetters seemed to me insupportable, until I became accustomed to them; and I thanked God that my knife had not been discovered, with which I was about to end my sufferings forthwith. This is a true consolation for the unfortunate man, who is elevated above the prejudices of the vulgar, and with this a man may bid defiance to fate and monarchs.... In these thoughts I passed the night; the day appeared, but not its brightness to me; however, I could, by its glimmerings, observe my prison. The breadth was eight feet, the length ten; four bricks were raised from the ground and built in the corner, upon which I could sit and lean my head against the wall. Opposite to the ring to which I was chained was a window, in the form of a semicircle, one foot high and two feet in diameter. This aperture was built upwards as far as the centre of the wall which was six feet thick, and at this point there was a narrow grating, secured both without and within with strong close iron bars from which, outward, the aperture sloped downward and its extremity was again secured with strong iron bars. My prison was built in the great ditch, close to the rampart, which was about eight feet broad on the inside; but the window reached almost to the second wall, so that I could receive no direct light from above and had only its reflection through a narrow hole. However, in the course of time my organs became so accustomed to this dimness that I could perceive a mouse run, but in winter, when the sun seldom or never shone in the ditch, it was eternal night with me. On the inside, before the grating, was a glass window, the middle pane of which might be opened to let in the air. In the wall my name, ‘Trenck,’ might be read, built with red bricks; and at my feet was a gravestone, with a death’s head and my name inscribed upon it, beneath which I was to have been interred. My gaol had double doors made of oak; in front of them was a sort of antechamber, with a window, and this was likewise fastened with two doors. As the king had given positive orders that all connection and opportunities of speaking with sentries should be debarred me, that I might not have it in my power to seduce them, my den was built so as not to be penetrated; and the ditch in which the prison stood was crossed on each side by palisades twelve feet high, the key being kept by the officer of the guards. I had no other exercise than leaping up and down on the spot where I was chained, or shaking the upper part of my body till I grew warm. In time I could move about four feet from side to side, but my shin bones suffered by this increase of territory.