The Drillmaster of Valley Forge Read Online Free PDF Page B

clientèle, who that fall included an old friend from the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich Eugen of Württemberg, one of Frederick’s generals. Accompanying the duke was his consort, Margravine Friederike Dorothea, twenty-seven-year-old niece of the Prussian king. A beautiful, vivacious, and learned woman, she was also quite lonely, so the presence of the courtly Steuben provided her with a pleasant diversion. The two hit it off immediately. Soon she introduced him to another guest at Wildbad: Josef Friedrich Wilhelm, the Catholic prince of a tiny German territory called Hohenzollern-Hechingen, a small portion of the original ancestral lands of Prussia’s ruling dynasty. With Friederike’s help, and bearing a testimonial from Prince Henry of Prussia, Steuben persuaded Prince Josef to hire him as chamberlain for his modest residence at the town of Hechingen. 3
    The post came as a great relief to Steuben. It wasn’t much, but it was infinitely better than nothing at all. Hohenzollern-Hechingen was a genuinely minuscule German state. Its capital, the town of Hechingen, was small, slow-paced, and pretty; the prince’s palace, the Altes Schloss, was a modest whitewashed structure that might have been mistaken for a city hall in a larger German town. Steuben’s position there was not a demanding one. A Hofmarschall was not a politicalfigure but rather a member of the prince’s personal staff, a sort of social secretary and manager of the princely household. He supervised the daily administration of the court and its personnel, advising his master on matters of economy and personal finance, and was responsible for the education and rearing of the prince’s children. For Steuben, who loved parties, being at the center of the social scene at court was no small attraction.
    He fit in well, fast becoming a trusted member of the prince’s family. And he made friends, many friends, foremost among them the prince’s ranking minister, Chancellor Daniel Marianus Frank. Because of his central position in the household, Steuben soon came to know influential men from neighboring courts as well. Yet he was never quite comfortable there. The duties bored him, and being fully aware of his ineptitude in handling his own money, he was reluctant to watch over the prince’s finances. After Chancellor Frank asked him repeatedly to take over the management of the court accounts, Steuben stubbornly refused. “You know full well, my dearest friend,” he wrote Frank, “and I do not conceal it from anybody, that in the management of my own affairs I have always been…careless…. It would be ridiculous to load upon my shoulders the management of another, and by far more considerable, household.” 4
    Not that there was much for him to manage. The prince was so heavily saddled with debt that in late 1771, he decided to dissolve his household temporarily. Chancellor Frank would watch over affairs in Hechingen, while the prince, his family, and his chamberlain would take a brief sojourn in southern France. There they would live, incognito, as private citizens, unencumbered by the burden of hospitality.
    For the next three and a half years, Steuben and the princely family would live in self-imposed fiscal exile, first at Strasbourg and then at Montpellier. It was a disaster, at least from a financial standpoint. The prince was unable to hide his identity for long, and therefore was still compelled to entertain innumerable dinner guests with all due ceremony and munificence. “Our incognito,” Steuben reported to Chancellor Frank in dismay, “is a laughable masquerade.” 5 The chamberlaindidn’t mind Strasbourg all that much, for it was both a university town and a fortress with a large garrison. In between chaperoning the young princess and shopping, he found the time to strike up friendships with prominent French officers in the Strasbourg garrison.
    Montpellier should have