Frederick William III

• 1. Introduction

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  Frederick William III, King of Prussia, was born in Potsdam on the 3rd of August 1770 into a dynasty celebrated for iron will and military genius. He had neither. A boy so reticent that he habitually omitted personal pronouns from his sentences, he grew into a king too distrustful to delegate and too irresolute to lead. Yet he ruled Prussia for over four decades, through the catastrophe of Jena-Auerstädt, through the humiliation of Tilsit, and out the other side to the Congress of Vienna. How does a man famous for shyness and indecision navigate the most turbulent era in European history? The answer, largely, is that the people around him did the navigating. His wife Queen Louise led the reformers. His generals rebuilt the army Napoleon had shattered. His ministers won Prussia its territorial gains at Vienna. Frederick William III was the king who presided over Prussia's near-destruction and its remarkable recovery, while spending much of his private energy on a far more personal project: reshaping the Protestant Church to serve the Prussian crown.

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• 2. The Shy Prince of Paretz

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  Count Hans von Blumenthal, an old soldier at the estate of Paretz, was among the earliest figures to shape the future king. Frederick William and his brother Prince Henry were partly raised there, under Blumenthal's guardianship, and the two boys grew up alongside the count's own son. That son would later accompany them on their Grand Tour in the 1780s. Frederick William was happy at Paretz in a way he was rarely happy elsewhere. In 1795 he bought the estate from his boyhood friend and kept it as a royal country retreat for the rest of his life.

  His father, Frederick William II, had largely ignored him. The elder king, under the influence of his mistress Wilhelmine Enke, Countess of Lichtenau, handed the boy over to tutors rather than raising him directly. The neglect left a lasting mark. Frederick William III carried an inferiority complex throughout his life, a trait visible even in adulthood in his clipped, pronoun-free manner of speech. That same manner, his contemporaries noted, later came to seem perfectly suited to a Prussian military officer.

  Among his tutors was the dramatist Johann Jakob Engel. Military training followed the standard Prussian path for a prince: a lieutenancy in 1784, lieutenant colonel in 1786, colonel in 1790, and combat experience against France in the campaigns of 1792-1794. On the 24th of December 1793, he married Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. They would have ten children and live what observers called a problem-free domestic life in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. Louise's warmth and popularity among ordinary Prussians lifted the standing of the entire House of Hohenzollern.

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• 3. A Kingdom Restored, Then Shattered

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  Frederick William succeeded to the throne on the 16th of November 1797, and his first instinct was to scrub the rot his father had left behind. He cut the royal household's expenses, dismissed his father's ministers, and began correcting the worst abuses of the previous reign. The disgust with his father's court, steeped in political intrigue and sexual scandal, was sincere. It nearly derailed sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow's Prinzessinnengruppe project, an expensive commission from the previous king that the new one found indulgent. Frederick William's sense of duty was summarized in a statement he gave, notable for its clipped construction: "Every civil servant has a dual obligation: to the sovereign and the country. It can occur that the two are not compatible; then, the duty to the country is higher."

  He also became, through personal union, the sovereign prince of the Principality of Neuchâtel. Yet for all his diligence, he had what one observer noted was the Hohenzollern determination to keep power without the Hohenzollern talent for using it. He refused to delegate, and his reign suffered for it.

  For years he tried to stay neutral in the Napoleonic Wars and succeeded in keeping Prussia out of the Third Coalition in 1805. It was Queen Louise who eventually swayed him, leading Prussia's pro-war faction into the conflict in October 1806. On the 14th of October 1806, at the Battles of Jena-Auerstädt, the French dismantled the Prussian army's effectiveness in a single day. Napoleon occupied Berlin by late October. The royal family fled east to Memel, in East Prussia, throwing themselves on the mercy of Tsar Alexander I of Russia.

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• 4. Tilsit and the Reformers

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  Alexander I himself was soon defeated by the French, and the two emperors made peace with Prussia at Tilsit on the Niemen. Napoleon's terms were severe. Prussia lost its Polish territories and all land west of the Elbe. It was forced to pay a heavy indemnity and to finance French troops garrisoning key points within the kingdom. A personal appeal by the pregnant Queen Louise to Napoleon was believed capable of softening the terms; it did not. The outcome was harsher than almost anyone had expected.

  With Frederick William apparently resigned to the situation, the rebuilding of Prussia fell to a group of ministers and generals who operated with the queen's encouragement. Baron Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and Count August Neidhardt von Gneisenau set about restructuring Prussia's administration, finances, and military. Louise died in 1810, greatly mourned, and her death left a political vacuum that was filled in a different direction.

  After her death, Frederick William fell under the influence of a circle of courtiers that included Friedrich Ancillon, a Huguenot preacher who reinforced the king's resistance to any reforms that might limit royal authority. Also in the circle were Sophie Marie von Voß, described as an older woman with conservative views, and Prince Wilhelm zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein. The reformers continued their work, but the king's instinct increasingly ran against constitutional change.

  In 1813, after Napoleon's catastrophic defeat in Russia, Frederick William was pushed further by the Convention of Tauroggen and signed an alliance with Russia at Kalisz, formally turning against France. He had to flee Berlin, which was still under French occupation at the time.

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• 5. Vienna and Its Aftermath

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  Prussian troops were central to the allied victories of 1813 and 1814. Frederick William himself traveled with the main army, commanded by Karl Philipp Fürst zu Schwarzenberg, alongside Tsar Alexander of Russia and Emperor Francis of Austria. At the Congress of Vienna, his ministers negotiated substantial territorial gains for Prussia. The one prize they failed to secure was all of Saxony, which they had sought but could not obtain.

  The promises Frederick William had made in 1813 to give Prussia a constitution did not survive the victory. He abandoned them once the war was over, turning toward political reaction and consolidating rather than sharing royal authority. The composer Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated his Ninth Symphony to Frederick William III in 1824, a mark of the king's standing in European cultural life even as his political record remained mixed.

  In the same year, 1824, Frederick William married for the second time. His second wife was Countess Auguste von Harrach zu Rohrau und Thannhausen. Because her family was not recognized as equal to the major European royal houses for dynastic purposes, the marriage was morganatic. She was created Princess of Liegnitz. They had no children.

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• 6. The Church Project

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  Merging Prussia's Lutheran and Calvinist congregations into a single body was, by any measure, Frederick William III's most sustained personal project. His goal was a fully centralized Prussian Union of Churches, with the king himself recognized as the leading bishop. The resistance was organized and fierce. The "Old Lutherans" of Silesia were especially determined not to surrender their liturgical traditions.

  The crown's response to that resistance escalated steadily. Military force was applied. Churches were confiscated. Pastors who refused to comply were imprisoned or exiled. By 1834, outward union was formally achieved on the basis of shared worship while allowing separate doctrinal symbols. Opponents were prohibited from forming their own congregations. Many simply left Prussia, resettling in South Australia, Canada, and the United States.

  The effort was without precedent in Prussian history. In its final form, the Church of the Prussian Union brought together the majority Lutheran body and the minority Reformed Protestants under a government structure that gave the state full authority over church affairs. The controversy it generated reached into the highest levels of government and never fully subsided.

  In 1838, two years before his death, Frederick William distributed large portions of his farmland at Erdmannsdorf Estate to 422 Protestant refugees who had fled the Austrian Zillertal. They settled in a Silesian village and built farmhouses in the Tyrolean style, a concrete trace of the religious disruptions his reign had both caused and, in this case, tried to shelter.

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• 7. A Dynasty Carried Forward

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  Frederick William III died on the 7th of June 1840 in Berlin, from a fever, survived by his second wife. He was buried at the Mausoleum in Schlosspark Charlottenburg. His eldest son succeeded him as Frederick William IV.

  The children of his first marriage to Queen Louise extended the Hohenzollern line across Europe. His second son, Wilhelm, would eventually become Wilhelm I, German Emperor. His daughter Charlotte married Nicholas I of Russia; among their descendants was the future Alexander II of Russia. Another daughter, Alexandrine, married Paul Friedrich, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. A son, Prince Charles, married into the Saxon-Weimar-Eisenach line. The reach of that single marriage to Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz shaped the royal houses of Europe for generations to come.

  A German military march was dedicated to Frederick William III by a local resident of Torgau, written for his royal visit on the 24th of June 1817. He was, in the end, a king better remembered through the people who surrounded him than through his own decisions, a monarch whose reign was partly rescued by his wife, partly rebuilt by his generals, and partly defined by a church policy that drove thousands of his own subjects across the ocean.

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