In 1762, a peasant named Christian Arnold purchased from his father the lease to a water-powered grain mill in Neumark province in the Kingdom of Prussia. The mill was located on the estate of Count von Schmettau. Christian and his wife Rosine were to make annual payments of grain and cash to the landlord, but stopped paying in 1770, saying the water on which the mill depended had been diverted by the neighboring estate, of Count von Gersdorf, for new carp ponds. In 1773, Schmettau sued for back payments, and won, in a “patrimonial” court that was part of his estate. The Arnolds refused to pay, so Schmettau temporarily confiscated their cows and twice put Christian in jail for weeks.
In 1774, the Arnolds sued Schmettau in the Neumark provincial court, arguing payments should be suspended when the mill had no water. The lease said payments would stop in case, “God forbid,” of “conflagration,” “pestilence” and “war,” and landlords had a feudal obligation to protect peasants from external aggressors, but whether any of that applied to this situation was debated. There was also contention about how bad the water situation was and whether Gersdorf had caused it. As the case wound on, Rosine Arnold began sending letters asking for help from Prussia’s King Frederick II, aka Frederick the Great.
The provincial court threw out the Arnolds’ lawsuit early in 1776, saying if they were going to sue anyone, it should be Gersdorf, a ruling upheld later that year by a higher court in Berlin, the Kammergericht. The Arnolds sued Gersdorf, but in 1778 Schmettau evicted them and confiscated the mill. Schmettau, who was on the verge of bankruptcy, sold it to Gersdorf, who sold it a “Widow Poelchen,” who may have been Christian Arnold’s sister. Rosine continued writing to Frederick, who granted Christian an audience in 1779.
Agreeing to the peasant’s request to investigate the matter, the king sent a Colonel von Heucking, accompanied by a Neumark tribunal official named Neumann. However, these two drew different conclusions, resulting in two different reports—the colonel finding for the Arnolds, and the court official agreeing with prior judicial rulings. Frederick regarded the first report as the correct decision; the courts considered the second one valid.
Frederick now started pressing the courts, first insisting the Neumark court hear the Arnolds’ case against Gersdorf, then when that suit was rejected, demanding that the Kammergericht hear an appeal. When the judges there—Frieden, Gaun, and Rensleben—ruled against the Arnolds, Frederick angrily summoned them in late-1779 to the royal palace in Berlin and reversed their decision, saying the judges had cruelly abused (cruel gemisbraucht) his good name by making an unjust ruling. Chancellor Maximilian von Fürst und Kupferberg spoke up for the judges, and Frederick fired him on the spot, telling him to “march,” as his successor had already been chosen. Then he put the chancellor and the judges in jail.
Frederick next ordered arrests of four judges from the provincial court, an official of the patrimonial court, the provincial president of Newmark, and Gersdorf. He ordered other judges of the Kammergericht to form a panel to sentence their colleagues, and issued a decree that if this was not done with severity, the minister of justice and the panel “will have to deal with me.” However, the panel, after investigation, said they found “nothing blameworthy or criminal” about the judges’ actions. Frederick ordered the justice minister, Karl Abraham Zedlitz, to issue sentences, but he refused. So the king issued the sentences himself, a year in prison for most, with a couple of acquittals.
They’d be released after nine months, and in the meantime a stream of visitors came to the prison, bringing food and drink, as local sentiment favored these prisoners. At the same time, foreign potentates, such as Catherine the Great, tended to side with Frederick. The Arnolds got the mill back. Schmettau was never arrested, but faced ongoing royal disfavor, evident in a rejection of his request for help when his estate flooded.
The Miller Arnold case, as it’s known, had a long-term effect on Western jurisprudence. Frederick was regarded as an “enlightened despot,” but as mathematician Adam Kucharski notes in his new book Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty: “Overturning and imprisoning judges on a whim was not a particularly good demonstration of Enlightenment values, and this is perhaps why Frederick decided to follow up by finally launching his most ambitious reform.” This was to create a “Prussian code,” a legal system based on reason and logic. The final version, enacted after his death, fell short of that ideal but led to more reforms, including an 1850 Prussian constitution establishing judicial independence.
If even a brilliant figure such as Frederick the Great couldn’t be trusted to wield both executive and judicial power, legal thinkers increasingly recognized, calamity would result from such a combo falling into the hands of a man who’s ignorant, crooked or deranged.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky