FREDERICK I. (1657-1713), king of Prussia, and (as Frederick III.) elector of Brandenburg, was the second son of the great elector, Frederick William, by his first marriage with Louise Henriette, daughter of Frederick Henry of Orange. Born at Königsberg on the 11th of July 1657, he was educated and greatly influenced by Eberhard Danckelmann, and became heir to the throne of Brandenburg through the death of his elder brother, Charles Emil, in 1674. He appears to have taken some part in public business before the death of his father; and the court at Berlin was soon disturbed by quarrels between the young prince and his stepmother, Dorothea of Holstein-Glücksburg. In 1686 Dorothea persuaded her husband to bequeath outlying portions of his lands to her four sons; and Frederick, fearing he would be poisoned, left Brandenburg determined to prevent any diminution of his inheritance. By promising to restore Schwiebus to Silesia after his accession he won the support of the emperor Leopold I.; but eventually he gained his end in a peaceable fashion. Having become elector of Brandenburg in May 1688, he came to terms with his half-brothers and their mother. In return for a sum of money these princes renounced their rights under their father’s will, and the new elector thus secured the whole of Frederick William’s territories. After much delay and grumbling he fulfilled his bargain with Leopold and gave up Schwiebus in 1695. At home and abroad Frederick continued the policy of the great elector. He helped William of Orange to make his descent on England; added various places, including the principality of Neuchâtel, to his lands; and exercised some influence on the course of European politics by placing his large and efficient army at the disposal of the emperor and his allies (see [Brandenburg]). He was present in person at the siege of Bonn in 1689, but was not often in command of his troops. The elector was very fond of pomp, and, striving to model his court upon that of Louis XIV., he directed his main energies towards obtaining for himself the title of king. In spite of the assistance he had given to the emperor his efforts met with no success for some years; but towards 1700 Leopold, faced with the prospect of a new struggle with France, was inclined to view the idea more favourably. Having insisted upon various conditions, prominent among them being military aid for the approaching war, he gave the imperial sanction to Frederick’s request in November 1700; whereupon the elector, hurrying at once to Königsberg, crowned himself with great ceremony king of Prussia on the 18th of January 1701. According to his promise the king sent help to the emperor; and during the War of the Spanish Succession the troops of Brandenburg-Prussia rendered great assistance to the allies, fighting with distinction at Blenheim and elsewhere. Frederick, who was deformed through an injury to his spine, died on the 25th of February 1713. By his extravagance the king exhausted the treasure amassed by his father, burdened his country with heavy taxes, and reduced its finances to chaos. His constant obligations to the emperor drained Brandenburg of money which might have been employed more profitably at home, and prevented her sovereign from interfering in the politics of northern Europe. Frederick, however, was not an unpopular ruler, and by making Prussia into a kingdom he undoubtedly advanced it several stages towards its future greatness. He founded the university of Halle, and the Academy of Sciences at Berlin; welcomed and protected Protestant refugees from France and elsewhere; and lavished money on the erection of public buildings.
The king was married three times. His second wife, Sophie Charlotte (1668-1705), sister of the English king George I., was the friend of Leibnitz and one of the most cultured princesses of the age; she bore him his only son, his successor, King Frederick William I.
See W. Hahn, Friedrich I., König in Preussen (Berlin, 1876); J. G. Droysen, Geschichte der preussischen Politik, Band iv. (Leipzig, 1872); E. Heyck, Friedrich I. und die Begründung des preussischen Königtums (Bielefeld, 1901): C. Graf von Dohna, Mémoires originaux sur le règne et la cour de Frédéric Ier (Berlin, 1883); Aus dem Briefwechsel König Friedrichs I. von Preussen und seiner Familie (Berlin, 1901); and T. Carlyle, History of Frederick the Great, vol. i. (London, 1872).
FREDERICK II., known as “the Great” (1712-1786), king of Prussia, born on the 24th of January 1712, was the eldest son of Frederick William I. He was brought up with extreme rigour, his father devising a scheme of education which was intended to make him a hardy soldier, and prescribing for him every detail of his conduct. So great was Frederick William’s horror of everything which did not seem to him practical, that he strictly excluded Latin from the list of his son’s studies. Frederick, however, had free and generous impulses which could not be restrained by the sternest system. Encouraged by his mother, and under the influence of his governess Madame de Roucoulle, and of his first tutor Duhan, a French refugee, he acquired an excellent knowledge of French and a taste for literature and music. He even received secret lessons in Latin, which his father invested with all the charms of forbidden fruit. As he grew up he became extremely dissatisfied with the dull and monotonous life he was compelled to lead; and his discontent was heartily shared by his sister, Wilhelmina, a bright and intelligent young princess for whom Frederick had a warm affection.
Frederick William, seeing his son apparently absorbed in frivolous and effeminate amusements, gradually conceived for him an intense dislike, which had its share in causing him to break off the negotiations for a double marriage between the prince of Wales and Wilhelmina, and the princess Amelia, daughter of George II., and Frederick; for Frederick had been so indiscreet as to carry on a separate correspondence with the English court and to vow that he would marry Amelia or no one. Frederick William’s hatred of his son, openly avowed, displayed itself in violent outbursts and public insults, and so harsh was his treatment that Frederick frequently thought of running away and taking refuge at the English court. He at last resolved to do so during a journey which he made with the king to south Germany in 1730, when he was eighteen years of age. He was helped by his two friends, Lieutenant Katte and Lieutenant Keith; but by the imprudence of the former the secret was found out. Frederick was placed under arrest, deprived of his rank as crown prince, tried by court-martial, and imprisoned in the fortress of Cüstrin. Warned by Frederick, Keith escaped; but Katte delayed his flight too long, and a court-martial decided that he should be punished with two years’ fortress arrest. But the king was determined by a terrible example to wake Frederick once for all to a consciousness of the heavy responsibility of his position. He changed the sentence on Katte to one of death and ordered the execution to take place in Frederick’s presence, himself arranging its every detail; Frederick’s own fate would depend upon the effect of this terrible object-lesson and the response he should make to the exhortations of the chaplain sent to reason with him. On the morning of the 7th of November Katte was beheaded before Frederick’s window, after the crown prince had asked his pardon and received the answer that there was nothing to forgive. On Frederick himself lay the terror of death, and the chaplain was able to send to the king a favourable report of his orthodoxy and his changed disposition. Frederick William, whose temper was by no means so ruthlessly Spartan as tradition has painted it,was overjoyed, and commissioned the clergyman to receive from the prince an oath of filial obedience, and in exchange for this proof of “his intention to improve in real earnest” his arrest was to be lightened, pending the earning of a full pardon. “The whole town shall be his prison,” wrote the king; “I will give him employment, from morning to night, in the departments of war, and agriculture, and of the government. He shall work at financial matters, receive accounts, read minutes and make extracts.... But if he kicks or rears again, he shall forfeit the succession to the crown, and even, according to circumstances, life itself.”
For about fifteen months Frederick lived in Custrin, busy according to the royal programme with the details of the Prussian administrative system. He was very careful not to “kick or rear,” and his good conduct earned him a further stage in the restoration to favour. During this period of probation he had been deprived of his status as a soldier and refused the right to wear uniform, while officers and soldiers were forbidden to give him the military salute; in 1732 he was made colonel in command of the regiment at Neuruppin. In the following year he married, in obedience to the king’s orders, the princess Elizabeth Christina, daughter of the duke of Brunswick-Bevern. He was given the estate of Rheinsberg in the neighbourhood of Neuruppin, and there he lived until he succeeded to the throne. These years were perhaps the happiest of his life. He discharged his duties with so much spirit and so conscientiously that he ultimately gained the esteem of Frederick William, who no longer feared that he would leave the crown to one unworthy of wearing it. At the same time the crown prince was able to indulge to the full his personal tastes. He carried on a lively correspondence with Voltaire and other French men of letters, and was a diligent student of philosophy, history and poetry. Two of his best-known works were written at this time—Considérations sur l’état present du corps politique de l’Europe and his Anti-Macchiavel. In the former he calls attention to the growing strength of Austria and France, and insists on the necessity of some third power, by which he clearly means Prussia, counterbalancing their excessive influence. The second treatise, which was issued by Voltaire in Hague in 1740, contains a generous exposition of some of the favourite ideas of the 18th-century philosophers respecting the duties of sovereigns, which may be summed up in the famous sentence: “the prince is not the absolute master, but only the first servant of his people.”
On the 31st of May 1740 he became king. He maintained all the forms of government established by his father, but ruled in a far more enlightened spirit; he tolerated every form of religious opinion, abolished the use of torture, was most careful to secure an exact and impartial administration of justice, and, while keeping the reins of government strictly in his own hands, allowed every one with a genuine grievance free access to his presence. The Potsdam regiment of giants was disbanded, but the real interests of the army were carefully studied, for Frederick realized that the two pillars of the Prussian state were sound finances and a strong army. On the 20th of October 1740 the emperor Charles VI. died. Frederick at once began to make extensive military preparations, and it was soon clear to all the world that he intended to enter upon some serious enterprise. He had made up his mind to assert the ancient claim of the house of Brandenburg to the three Silesian duchies, which the Austrian rulers of Bohemia had ever denied, but the Hohenzollerns had never abandoned. Projects for the assertion of this claim by force of arms had been formed by more than one of Frederick’s predecessors, and the extinction of the male line of the house of Habsburg may well have seemed to him a unique opportunity for realizing an ambition traditional in his family. For this resolution he is often abused still by historians, and at the time he had the approval of hardly any one out of Prussia. He himself, writing of the scheme in his Mémoires, laid no claim to lofty motives, but candidly confessed that “it was a means of acquiring reputation and of increasing the power of the state.” He firmly believed, however, in the lawfulness of his claims; and although his father had recognized the Pragmatic Sanction, whereby the hereditary dominions of Charles VI. were to descend to his daughter, Maria Theresa, Frederick insisted that this sanction could refer only to lands which rightfully belonged to the house of Austria. He could also urge that, as Charles VI. had not fulfilled the engagements by which Frederick William’s recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction had been secured, Prussia was freed from her obligation.
Frederick sent an ambassador to Vienna, offering, in the event of his rights in Silesia being conceded, to aid Maria Theresa against her enemies. The queen of Hungary, who regarded the proposal as that of a mere robber, haughtily declined; whereupon Frederick immediately invaded Silesia with an army of 30,000 men. His first victory was gained at Mollwitz on the 10th of April 1741. Under the impression, in consequence of a furious charge of Austrian cavalry, that the battle was lost, he rode rapidly away at an early stage of the struggle—a mistake which gave rise for a time to the groundless idea that he lacked personal courage. A second Prussian victory was gained at Chotusitz, near Caslau, on the 17th May 1742; by this time Frederick was master of all the fortified places of Silesia. Maria Theresa, in the heat of her struggle with France and the elector of Bavaria, now Charles VII., and pressed by England to rid herself of Frederick, concluded with him, on the 11th of June 1742, the peace of Breslau, conceding to Prussia, Upper and Lower Silesia as far as the Oppa, together with the county of Glatz. Frederick made good use of the next two years, fortifying his new territory, and repairing the evils inflicted upon it by the war. By the death of the prince of East Friesland without heirs, he also gained possession of that country (1744). He knew well that Maria Theresa would not, if she could help it, allow him to remain in Silesia; accordingly, in 1744, alarmed by her victories, he arrived at a secret understanding with France, and pledged himself, with Hesse-Cassel and the palatinate, to maintain the imperial rights of Charles VII., and to defend his hereditary Bavarian lands. Frederick began the second Silesian War by entering Bohemia in August 1744 and taking Prague. By this brilliant but rash venture he put himself in great danger, and soon had to retreat; but in 1745 he gained the battles of Hohenfriedberg, Soor and Hennersdorf; and Leopold of Dessau (“Der alte Dessauer”) won for him the victory of Kesselsdorf in Saxony. The latter victory was decisive, and the peace of Dresden (December 25, 1745) assured to Frederick a second time the possession of Silesia. (See [Austrian Succession, War of the].)
Frederick had thus, at the age of thirty-three, raised himself to a great position in Europe, and henceforth he was the most conspicuous sovereign of his time. He was a thoroughly absolute ruler, his so-called ministers being mere clerks whose business was to give effect to his will. To use his own famous phrase, however, he regarded himself as but “the first servant of the state”; and during the next eleven years he proved that the words expressed his inmost conviction and feeling. All kinds of questions were submitted to him, important and unimportant; and he is frequently censured for having troubled himself so much with mere details. But in so far as these details related to expenditure he was fully justified, for it was absolutely essential for him to have a large army, and with a small state this was impossible unless he carefully prevented unnecessary outlay. Being a keen judge of character, he filled the public offices with faithful, capable, energetic men, who were kept up to a high standard of duty by the consciousness that their work might at any time come under his strict supervision. The Academy of Sciences, which had fallen into contempt during his father’s reign, he restored, infusing into it vigorous life; and he did more to promote elementary education than any of his predecessors. He did much too for the economic development of Prussia, especially for agriculture; he established colonies, peopling them with immigrants, extended the canal system, drained and diked the great marshes of the Oderbruch, turning them into rich pasturage, encouraged the planting of fruit trees and of root crops; and, though in accordance with his ideas of discipline he maintained serfdom, he did much to lighten the burdens of the peasants. All kinds of manufacture, too, particularly that of silk, owed much to his encouragement. To the army he gave unremitting attention, reviewing it at regular intervals, and sternly punishing negligence on the part of the officers. Its numbers were raised to 160,000 men, while fortresses and magazines were always kept in a state of readiness for war. The influence of the king’s example was felt far beyond the limits of his immediate circle. The nation was proud of his genius, and displayed something of his energy in all departments of life. Lessing, who as a youth of twenty came to Berlin in 1749, composed enthusiastic odes in his honour, and Gleim, the Halberstadt poet, wrote of him as of a kind of demi-god. These may be taken as fair illustrations of the popular feeling long before the Seven Years’ War.