department for Lutheran and Catholic affairs. War was at once declared on what—to use a later term—we may call the “modernists.” The king, so long as Wöllner was content to condone his immorality (which Bischoffswerder, to do him justice, condemned), was eager to help the orthodox crusade. On the 9th of July was issued the famous religious edict, which forbade Evangelical ministers to teach anything not contained in the letter of their official books, proclaimed the necessity of protecting the Christian religion against the “enlighteners” (Aufklärer), and placed educational establishments under the supervision of the orthodox clergy. On the 18th of December a new censorship law was issued, to secure the orthodoxy of all published books; and finally, in 1791, a sort of Protestant Inquisition was established at Berlin (Immediat-Examinations-commission) to watch over all ecclesiastical and scholastic appointments. In his zeal for orthodoxy, indeed, Frederick William outstripped his minister; he even blamed Wöllner’s “idleness and vanity” for the inevitable failure of the attempt to regulate opinion from above, and in 1794 deprived him of one of his secular offices in order that he might have more time “to devote himself to the things of God”; in edict after edict the king continued to the end of his reign to make regulations “in order to maintain in his states a true and active Christianity, as the path to genuine fear of God.”
The effects of this policy of blind obscurantism far outweighed any good that resulted from the king’s well-meant efforts at economic and financial reform; and even this reform was but spasmodic and partial, and awoke ultimately more discontent than it allayed. But far more fateful for Prussia was the king’s attitude towards the army and foreign policy. The army was the very foundation of the Prussian state, a truth which both Frederick William I. and the great Frederick had fully realized; the army had been their first care, and its efficiency had been maintained by their constant personal supervision. Frederick William, who had no taste for military matters, put his authority as “War-Lord” into commission under a supreme college of war (Oberkriegs-Collegium) under the duke of Brunswick and General von Möllendorf. It was the beginning of the process that ended in 1806 at Jena.
In the circumstances Frederick William’s intervention in European affairs was not likely to prove of benefit to Prussia. The Dutch campaign of 1787, entered on for purely family reasons, was indeed successful; but Prussia received not even the cost of her intervention. An attempt to intervene in the war of Russia and Austria against Turkey failed of its object; Prussia did not succeed in obtaining any concessions of territory from the alarms of the Allies, and the dismissal of Hertzberg in 1791 marked the final abandonment of the anti-Austrian tradition of Frederick the Great. For, meanwhile, the French Revolution had entered upon alarming phases, and in August 1791 Frederick William, at the meeting at Pillnitz, arranged with the emperor Leopold to join in supporting the cause of Louis XVI. But neither the king’s character, nor the confusion of the Prussian finances due to his extravagance, gave promise of any effective action. A formal alliance was indeed signed on the 7th of February 1792, and Frederick William took part personally in the campaigns of 1792 and 1793. He was hampered, however, by want of funds, and his counsels were distracted by the affairs of Poland, which promised a richer booty than was likely to be gained by the anti-revolutionary crusade into France. A subsidy treaty with the sea powers (April 19, 1794) filled his coffers; but the insurrection in Poland that followed the partition of 1793, and the threat of the isolated intervention of Russia, hurried him into the separate treaty of Basel with the French Republic (April 5, 1795), which was regarded by the great monarchies as a betrayal, and left Prussia morally isolated in Europe on the eve of the titanic struggle between the monarchical principle and the new political creed of the Revolution. Prussia had paid a heavy price for the territories acquired at the expense of Poland in 1793 and 1795, and when, on the 16th of November 1797, Frederick William died, he left the state in bankruptcy and confusion, the army decayed and the monarchy discredited.
Frederick William II. was twice married: (1) in 1765 to Elizabeth of Brunswick (d. 1841), by whom he had a daughter, Frederika, afterwards duchess of York, and from whom he was divorced in 1769; (2) in 1769 to Frederika Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, by whom he had four sons, Frederick William III., Louis (d. 1796), Henry and William, and two daughters, Wilhelmina, wife of William of Orange, afterwards William I., king of the Netherlands, and Augusta, wife of William II., elector of Hesse. Besides his relations with his maîtresse en titre, the countess Lichtenau, the king—who was a frank polygamist—contracted two “marriages of the left hand” with Fräulein von Voss and the countess Dönhoff.
See article by von Hartmann in Allgem. deutsche Biog. (Leipzig, 1878); Stadelmann, Preussens Könige in ihrer Tätigkeit für die Landeskultur, vol. iii. “Friedrich Wilhelm II.” (Leipzig, 1885); Paulig, Friedrich Wilhelm II., sein Privatleben u. seine Regierung (Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, 1896).
FREDERICK WILLIAM III. (1770–1840), king of Prussia,
eldest son of King Frederick William II., was born at Potsdam
on the 3rd of August 1770. His father, then prince of Prussia,
was out of favour with Frederick the Great and entirely under the
influence of his mistress; and the boy, handed over to tutors
appointed by the king, lived a solitary and repressed life which
tended to increase the innate weakness of his character. But
though his natural defects of intellect and will-power were not
improved by the pedantic tutoring to which he was submitted,
he grew up pious, honest and well-meaning; and had fate cast
him in any but the most stormy times of his country’s history
he might well have left the reputation of a model king. As a
soldier he received the usual training of a Prussian prince,
obtained his lieutenancy in 1784, became a colonel commanding
in 1790, and took part in the campaigns of 1792–94. In 1793
he married Louise, daughter of Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,
whom he had met and fallen in love with at Frankfort
(see Louise, queen of Prussia). He succeeded to the throne on
the 16th of November 1797 and at once gave earnest of his good
intentions by cutting down the expenses of the royal establishment,
dismissing his father’s ministers, and reforming the most
oppressive abuses of the late reign. Unfortunately, however,
he had all the Hohenzollern tenacity of personal power without
the Hohenzollern genius for using it. Too distrustful to delegate
his responsibility to his ministers, he was too infirm of will to
strike out and follow a consistent course for himself.
The results of this infirmity of purpose are written large on the history of Prussia from the treaty of Lunéville in 1801 to the downfall that followed the campaign of Jena in 1806. By the treaty of Tilsit (July 9th, 1807) Frederick William had to surrender half his dominions, and what remained to him was exhausted by French exactions and liable at any moment to be crushed out of existence by some new whim of Napoleon. In the dark years that followed it was the indomitable courage of Queen Louise that helped the weak king not to despair of the state. She seconded the reforming efforts of Stein and the work of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in reorganizing the army, by which the resurrection of Prussia became a possibility. When Stein was dismissed at the instance of Napoleon, Hardenberg succeeded him as chancellor (June 1810). In the following month Queen Louise died, and the king was left alone to deal with circumstances of ever-increasing difficulty. He was forced to join Napoleon in the war against Russia; and even when the disastrous campaign of 1812 had for the time broken the French power, it was not his own resolution, but the loyal disloyalty of General York in concluding with Russia the convention of Tauroggen that forced him into line with the patriotic fervour of his people.
Once committed to the Russian alliance, however, he became the faithful henchman of the emperor Alexander, whose fascinating personality exercised over him to the last a singular power, and began that influence of Russia at the court of Berlin which was to last till Frederick William IV.’s supposed Liberalism was to shatter the cordiality of the entente. That during and after the settlement of 1815 Frederick William played a very secondary part in European affairs is explicable as well by his character as
