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Updated: May 23, 2025
The king, far from being satisfied with this general answer, sent fresh orders to Klingraafe, to represent, that after the king had dissembled, as long as he thought consistent with his safety and honour, the bad designs imputed to the empress would not suffer him longer to disguise his sentiments: that he was acquainted with the offensive projects which the two courts had formed at Petersburgh; that he knew they had engaged to attack him suddenly with an army of two hundred thousand men; a design which would have been executed in the spring of the year, had not the Russian forces wanted recruits, their fleet mariners, and Livonia a sufficient quantity of corn for their support; that he constituted the empress arbiter of peace or war: if she desired the former, he required a clear and formal declaration, or positive assurance, that she had no intention to attack him either this year or the next; but he should look upon an ambiguous answer as a declaration of war; and he called heaven to witness, that the empress alone would be guilty of the innocent blood that should be spilt, and all the dismal consequences that would attend the commission of hostilities.
His Prussian majesty, perceiving the military preparations of the court of Vienna, and having obtained intelligence of their secret negotiations with different powers of Europe, ordered M. de Klingraafe, his minister at the imperial court, to demand whether all those preparations of war, on the frontiers of Silesia, were designed against him, and what were the intentions of her imperial majesty?
A declaration of this nature might have provoked a less haughty court than that of Vienna, and, indeed, seems to have been calculated on purpose to exasperate the pride of her imperial majesty, whose answer he soon received to this effect: that his majesty the king of Prussia had already been employed, for some time, in all kinds of the most considerable preparations of war, and the most disquieting with regard to the public tranquillity, when he thought fit to demand explanations of her majesty, touching the military dispositions that were making in her dominions; dispositions on which she had not resolved till after the preparations of his Prussian majesty had been made; that though her majesty might have declined explaining herself on those subjects, which required no explanation, she had been pleased to declare, with her own mouth, to M. de Klingraafe, that the critical state of public affairs rendered the measures she was taking absolutely necessary for her own safety, and that of her allies; but that, in other respects, they tended to the prejudice of no person whatsoever; that her imperial majesty had undoubtedly a right to form what judgment she pleased on the circumstances of the times; and likewise that it belonged to none but herself to estimate her own danger; that her declaration was so clear, she never imagined it could be thought otherwise; that being accustomed to receive, as well as to practise, the decorums which sovereigns owe to each other, she could not hear without astonishment and sensibility the contents of the memorial now presented by M. de Klingraafe; so extraordinary, both in the matter and expressions, that she would find herself under a necessity of transgressing the bounds of that moderation which she had prescribed to herself, were she to answer the whole of its contents; nevertheless, she thought proper to declare, that the information communicated to his Prussian majesty, of an offensive alliance against him, subsisting between herself and the empress of Russia, together with the circumstances and pretended stipulations of that alliance, were absolutely false and forged, for no such treaty did exist, or ever had existed.
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