Frederick William I of Prussia

• 1. Introduction

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  Frederick William I of Prussia woke his young son each morning with the firing of a cannon. The boy, Fritz, was six when he received his own regiment of children to drill as cadets. A year later, his father handed him a miniature arsenal. This was the household of the man history would call the Soldier King, the Soldatenkonig, born in Berlin on the 14th of August 1688. He ruled as King in Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg from 1713 until his death in 1740. How did a king obsessed with discipline transform a state ruined by his own father's spending into a regional power? Why did he order another man beheaded before the eyes of his own heir? And what kind of monarch sells off his colonies to pour the money into soldiers? The answers run through tax codes, salt mines, and a relationship between father and son that turned from love to violence and back to civility.

• 2. The Plague And The Counts

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  The Great Northern War brought a plague outbreak to Prussia, and with it a reckoning. The inefficiency and corruption of the king's favorite ministers stood exposed. Frederick William, with a party that formed at court, brought down the leading minister Johann Kasimir Kolbe von Wartenberg. An official investigation revealed Wartenberg's misappropriation and embezzlement on a huge scale. August David zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, a close associate, was imprisoned at Spandau Citadel. He was fined 70,000 thalers and then banished. The episode shaped Frederick William deeply. It made him resent crime, corruption, waste, and inefficiency, and it convinced him that institutions needed reform. It was also the first time he actively took part in politics. From that point, his father Frederick I began letting his son hold more power. The lesson would harden into the central method of his reign.

• 3. Bankruptcy And The Ledger

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  Two million ducats was the price his father had paid Emperor Leopold I to win the royal title for the Duchy of Prussia. There was also 600,000 ducats to the German clergy and 20,000 thalers to the Jesuit order. Frederick I further agreed to supply Leopold with 8,000 soldiers for the War of the Spanish Succession. To display his new crown, the father doubled the size of the Berlin Palace, Charlottenburg Palace, and Konigsberg Castle, furnishing them at great expense. In doing so he largely ruined the state's finances. On taking the throne in 1713, Frederick William dismissed his father's corrupt Cabinet of Three Counts. He set to work rebuilding the shattered treasury. He raised excise taxes on domestic and foreign goods alike, and he subjected the Prussian nobility to a land tax. He encouraged commerce and farming, reclaimed marshes, and stored grain in good times to sell it in bad. The state he inherited near collapse would become the engine for an army.

• 4. Rule By Regulation

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  Thirty-five chapters and 297 paragraphs made up the manual of Regulations for State Officials that Frederick William dictated. In it, every public servant in Prussia could find his duties set out precisely. A minister or councillor who missed a committee meeting would lose six months' pay. If he stayed away a second time, he would be discharged from royal service. A believer in absolute monarchy, he concerned himself with every aspect of his country. He governed with great energy and skill across a reign of 27 years. He replaced mandatory military service among the middle class with an annual tax, while expanding military obligations for the peasant class. He established schools and hospitals. This was administration as a personal instrument, the same exacting eye that watched a household watching an entire state.

• 5. Soldiers Over Colonies

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  In 1717, Frederick William revoked the charter of the Brandenburg Africa Company, which his father had granted to establish a colony in West Africa known as the Brandenburg Gold Coast. He was unwilling to spend money maintaining either the colony or the Prussian Navy. He preferred to direct state revenues toward enlarging the Royal Prussian Army. That same year, he sold the Brandenburg Gold Coast to the Dutch West India Company. The army was where his money went, and where it grew. He expanded the Prussian Army from 38,000 men in 1713 to 80,000 by 1740, until roughly one in every 25 Prussian men served in the military. Aided by his close friend Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, he reformed the army's training, tactics, and conscription, introducing the canton system. He greatly increased the infantry's rate of fire by introducing the iron ramrod. A brief intervention in the Great Northern War, allied with Peter the Great of Russia, won him a portion of Swedish Pomerania and new ports on the Baltic Sea, including the conquest of the port of Stettin. He left his son the most formidable army in Europe.

• 6. An Open Door For Refugees

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  In 1732, Frederick William invited the Salzburg Protestants to settle in East Prussia, a region depopulated by plague in 1709. Under the Peace of Augsburg, the prince-archbishop of Salzburg could require his subjects to practice the Catholic faith, but Protestants held the right to emigrate to a Protestant state. Prussian commissioners escorted 20,000 Protestants across Germany to their new homes. Frederick William personally welcomed the first group of migrants and sang Protestant hymns with them. In 1733, he began building the Dutch Quarter in Potsdam, inviting talented Dutch craftsmen to settle there. His contempt for France was notable, and the mere mention of the country could send him into a rage. Yet that hostility never stopped him from encouraging French Huguenot refugees to come to Prussia. He had himself been raised by a Huguenot governess, Marthe de Roucoulle.

• 7. The Cane And The Crown Prince

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  Fritz, born in 1712, was meant to become a fine soldier in his father's image. Frederick William ordered him to take a minimal education, live a simple Protestant lifestyle, and focus on the Army and statesmanship. The intellectual boy preferred music, books, and French culture, all of which his father condemned as decadent and unmanly. The king beat or humiliated his son often. Fritz was beaten for being thrown from a bolting horse and for wearing gloves in cold weather. At 16, Frederick seems to have begun a youthful affair with Peter Karl Christoph von Keith, a 17-year-old page. His sister Wilhelmine wrote that she had noticed he was on more familiar terms with the page than was proper, but did not know how intimate the friendship was. The king, who cultivated an ideal of ultramasculinity at court, had Keith dismissed and sent to a regiment near the Dutch border. After Frederick tried to flee to England with his tutor, Hans Hermann von Katte, the enraged king had Katte beheaded before the prince's eyes. Soldiers forced him to watch on the king's orders. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI intervened, arguing a prince could only be tried by the Imperial Diet. Frederick was imprisoned in the Fortress of Kustrin from the 2nd of September to the 19th of November 1731, then schooled rigorously in matters of state. His own short temper, which drove him to strike servants and children with a cane, was worsened by inherited porphyritic disease that brought gout, obesity, and crippling stomach pains.

• 8. Reconciliation And Reburials

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  A measure of reconciliation came after the prison and exile. Frederick William had his son married to Princess Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel-Bevern, a woman Frederick held in contempt, then grudgingly allowed him to return to music and books. He gifted his son a stud farm in East Prussia and Rheinsberg Palace. By the time the Soldier King died in 1740 at age 51, the two were on at least civil terms. Yet Frederick did not mourn his father or make any public statement about his death. He wrote later that his father penetrated and understood great objectives, and knew the best interests of his country better than any minister or general. Frederick William was first interred at the Garrison Church in Potsdam. During World War II, Hitler ordered his coffin hidden, along with those of Frederick the Great and Paul von Hindenburg, moving them first to Berlin and then to a salt mine outside Bernterode. American forces discovered the coffins and reburied the bodies at St. Elizabeth's Church, Marburg in 1946. The coffin moved to Hohenzollern Castle in 1953, where it stayed until 1991. It was finally laid to rest on the altar steps of the Kaiser Friedrich Mausoleum in the Church of Peace, on the palace grounds of Sanssouci. His favorite retreat in life was Konigs Wusterhausen Castle, his hunting lodge, where today hang portraits of officers that the Soldier King painted himself.