him, consisting of about three hundred lads. This band was called “The
Crown Prince Cadets.” Fritz was very thoroughly drilled in his military
duties, and a uniform was provided for him. An arsenal was built on the
palace grounds at Potsdam, where he mounted batteries and practised
gunnery with small brass ordnance. Until Fritz was seven years of age,
his education had been under the care of a French governess; but at
that age he was taken from his lady teachers and placed under tutors.
These tutors were military officers of great renown.
The following directions were drawn up by Frederick William, regarding
his son’s education:—
“My son must be impressed with love and fear of God, as the foundation
of our temporal and eternal welfare. No false religions or sects of
Atheist, Arian, Socinian, or whatever name the poisonous things have,
which can easily corrupt a young mind, are to be even named in his
hearing. He is to be taught a proper abhorrence of Papistry, and to
be shown its baselessness and nonsensicality. Impress on him the true
religion, which consists essentially in this: that Christ died for
all men. He is to learn no Latin, but French and German, so as to
speak and write with brevity and propriety. Let him learn arithmetic,
mathematics, artillery, economy, to the very bottom; history in
particular; ancient history only slightly, but the history of the
last one hundred and fifty years to the exactest pitch. He must be
completely master of geography, as also of whatever is remarkable in
each country. With increasing years you will more and more, to an
especial degree, go upon fortification, the formation of a camp, and
other war sciences, that the prince may from youth upward be trained to
act as officer and general, and to seek all his glory in the soldier
profession.”
Frederick William took little Fritz with him from early childhood on
all his military reviews, and in going from garrison to garrison the
king employed a common vehicle called a sausage-car. This consisted of
a mere stuffed pole, some ten or twelve feet long, upon which they sat
astride. It rested upon wheels, and the riders, ten or a dozen, were
rattled along over the rough roads through dust and rain, in winter’s
cold and summer’s heat. This iron king robbed his child even of sleep,
saying, “Too much sleep stupefies a fellow.” Sitting astride of this
log carriage, the tender and delicate Fritz, whose love was for music,
poetry, and books, was forced to endure all kinds of hardship and
fatigue. When Fritz was ten years of age, his exacting father made out
a set of rules which covered all the hours of this poor boy’s life. Not
even Saturday or Sunday was left untrammelled by his stern requirements.
Fritz was a remarkably handsome boy, with a fine figure, small and
delicate hands and feet, and flowing blonde hair. His father, despising
all the etiquette and social manners of life and dress, ordered his
beautiful hair to be cut off, and denied him every luxury of the toilet
and adornment. Frederick William early displayed an aversion for his
handsome son, which soon amounted to actual hatred. As Wilhelmina and
the mother of Fritz both took his part against the angry and brutal
king, the wrath of that almost inhuman monster was also meted out to
them.
When Fritz was fourteen years of age, he was appointed by his father as
captain of the Potsdam Grenadier Guards. This regiment was the glory
of the king, and was composed entirely of giants. The shortest of the
men were nearly seven feet high, and the tallest nearly nine feet in
height. Frederick William did not scruple to take any means of securing
these coveted giants, and his recruiting officers were stationed in
many places for the purpose of seizing any large men, no matter what
their nationality or position. When the rulers of neighboring realms
complained at this unlawful seizure of their subjects, the Prussian
king pretended that it was done without his knowledge. If any young
woman was found in his kingdom of remarkable stature, she was compelled
to marry one of the king’s giants. This guard consisted of 2,400 men.
The queen-mother, Sophie Dorothee, had set her mind upon bringing
about a double marriage, between Wilhelmina and her cousin Fred, son
of the king of England, and Fritz and his cousin, the princess Amelia,
the sister of Fred. But though all her schemes came to naught, they
occasioned much trouble in her family, and brought down upon the heads
of poor Wilhelmina and Fritz much brutal persecution from their inhuman
father.
Frederick William took his son Fritz to visit Augustus, king of Poland.
This king was an exceedingly profligate man, and the young Fritz
learned vicious habits at this court, which lured him into evil ways
which ever after left their blot upon his character and morals. This
fatal visit to Dresden occurred when Fritz was sixteen years of age,
and the dissipation of those four weeks introduced the crown prince
to habits which have left an indelible stain upon his reputation, and
which poisoned his life. The king’s previous dislike to his son was
now converted into contempt and hatred, as he became aware of his
vicious habits; for though the iron king was a maniac in temper, and
cruel as a savage, he had no weakness towards an immoral life. King
Frederick William was now confined to his chair with gout, and poor
Wilhelmina and Fritz were the victims upon whom his severest tyrannies
fell. The princess Wilhelmina was very beautiful, and had it not
been for his love for this sister, upon whom the whole weight of his
father’s resentment would then fall, Fritz would have escaped from his
home and the terrible ill-treatment he there received.
We have not space to give the pictures of the family broils in this
unhappy household. Now the crabbed old man would snatch the plates
from the table at dinner and fling them at the heads of his children,
usually at hapless Wilhelmina or Fritz; then, angered at Wilhelmina
because she refused to take whatever husband her cruel father might
select, irrespective of her inclination or wishes, he shut the poor
princess up in her apartment, and tried to starve her into submission;
for, as she writes, “I was really dying of hunger, having nothing to
eat but soup made with salt and water and a ragout of old bones, full
of hairs and other dirt.” At last she yielded to her father’s demands;
but then she incurred the anger of her mother, who had set her heart
upon the match with the prince of Wales.
So the poor princess’ days were full of bitterness. But, fortunately,
the prince of Baireuth, whom she married, turned out to be a kind
husband; but as he was absent most of the time on regimental duty,
and had but his small salary, and the old marquis of Baireuth, her
husband’s father, was penurious, irascible, and an inebriate,
she often suffered for the necessaries of life. The home of her
step-parents was unendurable, and the home of her childhood was still
more so. Unhappy princess! and yet, in the midst of all this misery,
her bright and graphic letters form one of the greatest delights to
students of history, and give true pictures of the home of Frederick
the Great, which can be found nowhere else.
Fritz had now so seriously offended his father, that the king openly
exposed him to contempt. He even flogged the prince with his rattan in
the presence of others; and the young heir-apparent to the throne of
Prussia, beautiful in person, high-spirited, and of superior genius,
was treated by his father with studied insult, even in the presence of
monarchs, of lords and ladies, of the highest dignitaries of Europe;
and after raining blows upon his head, he exclaimed in diabolical
wrath, as if desirous of goading his son to suicide: “Had I been so
treated by my father, I would have blown my brains out. But this fellow
has no honor. He takes all that comes.”
But at last Fritz decided not to take longer all that came, and so he
prepared for flight. On the 15th of July, 1730, the king of Prussia
set out with a small train, accompanied by Fritz, to take a journey to
the Rhine. When near Augsburg, Fritz wrote to Lieutenant Katte, one
of his profligate friends, stating that he should embrace the first
opportunity to escape to the Hague; that there he should assume the
name of the Count of Alberville. He wished Katte to join him there,
and to bring with him the overcoat and the one thousand ducats which
he had left in his hands. Just after midnight the prince stole out to
meet his valet, who had been commanded to bring some horses to the
village green. But as Keith, the valet, appeared with the horses, he
was accosted by one of the king’s guard; and the prince, although
disguised with a red overcoat, was recognized and forced to withdraw to
his own quarters and give up the attempt for that time. The king was
informed of these things, and now the poor prince was put in the care
of three of the guard, and they were informed if the prince was allowed
to escape, death would be their doom. Upon the king’s arrival at Wesel,
he ordered his culprit son to be brought before him. A terrible scene
ensued. As the king would give no assurance that his friends who had
aided him should be pardoned, the crown prince evaded all attempts to
extort from him confessions which would implicate them. “Why,” asked
the king, furiously, “did you attempt to desert?”
“I wished to escape,” the prince boldly replied, “because you did not
treat me like a son, but like an abject slave.”
“You are a cowardly deserter,” the father exclaimed, “devoid of all
feelings of honor.”
“I have as much honor as you have,” the son replied; “and I have only
done that which I have heard you say a hundred times you would have
done yourself, had you been treated as I have been.”
The infuriated king was now beside himself with rage. He drew his sword
and seemed upon the point of thrusting it through the heart of his son,
when General Mosel threw himself before the king, exclaiming, “Sire,
you may kill me, but spare your son.” The prince was then placed in a
room where two sentries watched over him with fixed bayonets. As the
prince had held the rank of colonel in the army, his unjust father
declared he was a deserter, and merited death. Frederick William, whose
brutal cruelty exceeds our powers of belief, then sent a courier with
the following despatch to his wife:—
“I have arrested the rascal Fritz. I shall treat him as his crime and
his cowardice merit. He has dishonored me and all my family. So great a
wretch is no longer worthy to live.”
His Majesty is in a flaming rage. He arrests, punishes, and banishes
where there is trace of co-operation with deserter Fritz and his
schemes. It is dangerous to have spoken kindly to the crown prince,
or even to have been spoken to by him. Doris Ritter, a young girl who
was a good musician, and whom the unfortunate Fritz had presented
with music and sometimes joined in her singing in the presence of the
girl’s mother, is condemned to be publicly whipped through the streets
by the beadle, and to be imprisoned for three years, forced to the
hard labor of beating hemp. The excellent tutor of the crown prince
is banished, the accusation against him being that he had introduced
French literature to the prince, which had caused him to imbibe infidel
notions. The wicked old king never seemed to think that his own brutal
conduct might have influenced the prince to be indifferent to the
religion which he hypocritically professed to believe, but so poorly
practised.
Meanwhile the crown prince was conveyed from Wesel to the castle of
Mittenwalde, where he was imprisoned in a room without furniture or
bed. Here Grumkow, one of the king’s ministers, was sent to interrogate
him. Though the cruel old minister threatened the rack of torture to
force him to confess, Fritz had the nerve to reply:—
“A hangman, such as you, naturally takes pleasure in talking of his
tools and of his trade, but on me they will produce no effect. I have
owned everything, and almost regret to have done so. I ought not to
degrade myself by answering the questions of a scoundrel such as you
are.”
The next day the crown prince was sent to the fortress of Cüstrin,
about seventy miles from Berlin.
“The strong, dungeon-like room in which he was incarcerated consisted
of bare walls, without any furniture, the light being admitted by a
single aperture so high that the prince could not look out of it. He
was divested of his uniform, of his sword, of every mark of dignity.
Coarse brown clothes of plainest cut were furnished him. His flute
was taken from him, and he was deprived of all books but the Bible
and a few devotional treatises. He was allowed a daily sum amounting
to twelve cents for his food,—eight cents for his dinner and four for
his supper. His food was purchased at a cook-shop near by and cut for
him. He was not permitted the use of a knife. The door was opened three
times a day for ventilation,—morning, noon, and night,—but not for more
than four minutes each time. A single tallow candle was allowed him;
but that was to be extinguished at seven o’clock in the evening.”
For long months this prince of nineteen was imprisoned in absolute
solitude, awaiting the doom of his merciless father. But the savage
king had reserved still greater torture for the unfortunate Fritz. By
the order of the king, Fritz, who also had been condemned to die, was
brought down into a lower room of the fortress, and there compelled
to witness the execution of Lieutenant Katte, his friend, whom the
king had condemned as guilty of high treason. As Fritz was led into
the lower apartment of the fortress, the curtains which concealed the
window were drawn back, and Fritz, to his horror, beheld the scaffold
draped in black placed directly before the window. The frantic young
prince was in an agony of despair, and exclaimed, with eyes full of
tears, “In the name of God, I beg you to stop the execution till I
write to the king! I am ready to renounce all my rights to the crown
if he will pardon Katte.” But the attendants knew the iron will of
the merciless monarch, and his cries and tears were unheeded. As the
condemned was led by the window to ascend the scaffold, Fritz cried out
to him, in tones of deepest anguish, “Pardon me, my dear Katte, pardon
me! Oh, that this should be what I have done for you!”
“Death is sweet for a prince I love so well,” replied the heroic Katte
with calm fortitude, and ascending the scaffold, the bloody execution
was performed, while four grenadiers held Fritz with his face to the
window so that he must perforce look upon the ghastly scene. But as
Katte’s gory head rolled upon the scaffold, the prince fainted.
When the poor tortured prince regained his consciousness, his misery
plunged him into a fever, and in his wild delirium he sought to take
his life. When the fever abated, he sank into hopeless despair, looking
forward to nothing but a like horrible death.
With strange inconsistency, the ferocious king, who could thus torture
the body and mind of the prince, expressed the greatest anxiety for
the salvation of his soul. It is not strange that the example of such
a father staggered the faith of his son, and failing to see that the
religion professed by his father was bigoted fanaticism instead of the
religion of the pure and saving truths inculcated by a sinless Christ,
the crown prince became in after-life an infidel.
In accordance with a promise made by the king that his life should be
spared if he would acknowledge his guilt, which word was brought to
the lonely captive by Chaplain Müller, the crown prince took an oath of
submission to the king, and soon after wrote this letter to his father:—
“All-serenest and All-graciousest Father,—To your royal majesty, my
all-graciousest father, I have, by my disobedience as their subject and
soldier, not less than by my undutifulness as their son, given occasion
to a just wrath and aversion against me. With the all-obedientest
respect I submit myself wholly to the grace of my most all-gracious
father, and beg him most all-graciously to pardon me, as it is not so
much the withdrawal of my liberty in a sad arrest as my own thoughts
of the fault I have committed that have brought me to reason, who,
with all-obedientest respect and submission, continue till my end my
all-graciousest king’s and father’s faithfully-obedient servant and
son, Frederick.”
Though the prince had been brought by his terrors and sorrows to make
such an humble appeal, his father’s anger was not entirely removed. The
prince was still forced to dwell in the town of Cüstrin, in a house
poorly furnished; and though allowed to wear his sword, his uniform was
forbidden him. He was debarred all amusements, and was forbidden to
read, write, or speak French, and was denied his flute, of which he was
exceedingly fond. Three persons were appointed constantly to watch him.
His only recreation was the order to attend the sittings of the Chamber
of Counsellors in that district. At last, through the intercession of
his sister Wilhelmina, the king consented to allow Fritz to come home.
In March, 1732, the crown prince was betrothed to Princess Elizabeth,
the daughter of the duke of Bevern. The sufferings of this unhappy
princess cannot now be related. The queen of Prussia received her
with bitter hatred because this match would crush her cherished plans
of marrying her son to Princess Amelia of England; and Fritz himself,
forced to be betrothed against his will, treated her with utter neglect.
In June, 1733, the crown prince was married to Elizabeth, she being
eighteen, and he twenty-one years of age.
Frederick I. of Prussia had reared a very magnificent palace in Berlin;
and in spite of all his stinginess in his household, Frederick William
added masses of silver to the ornamentation of this palace, for he
prided himself on his army and his money, as giving him power and
influence in Europe. He had stored away many barrels of money in the
vaults of his palace, and as there do not seem to have been banking
institutions in his realms in those days, he ordered vast quantities of
silver to be wrought into chandeliers, mirror-frames, and balconies,
which gave him a great reputation for wealth, and could at any time be
converted into money. This hoarded wealth saved his son from ruin, when
involved in after wars which exhausted his treasury.
The crown prince having married a niece of the emperor of Germany,
and being also of age, his father lost much of his control over him.
Frederick was now the rising sun, and his father the setting luminary.
All the courts of Europe were anxious to gain the favor of the coming
king of Prussia. The king allowed his son a petty income, but the crown
prince borrowed large sums of money from the empress of Germany, from
Russia, and from England, who were quite ready to supply his wants,
being assured of payment when he should receive the throne. Fritz did
not forget his sister Wilhelmina, but gave her money to relieve her
wants. War now broke out between France and Germany, and Frederick
William became an ally of the emperor.
The crown prince accompanied the king of Prussia to the siege of
Philipsburg. The campaign continued for some time, but the prince saw
little of active service. The king of Prussia being broken down in
health by gout and intemperance, now became very ill, and was obliged
to return home.
Though Frederick returned from this campaign neither socially nor
morally improved, he had become very ambitious of high intellectual
culture and of literary renown. He was now living at the village of
Reinsburg, in a castle which the king had purchased and assigned to
his son. He here gathered around him a number of scholarly men, and
commenced and persevered in a severe course of study, devoting his
mornings to his books, and the remainder of the day to recreation and
music. The old king grumbled at his son’s studies and his recreations,
but Frederick was now a full-grown man, whose heirship to the crown
made him a power in Europe; and the snarling old king was confined
to his room with dropsy and gout, growling away his last hours. The
companions of Frederick’s hours of recreation were gay and profligate
young men, who scoffed at religion and every virtue. No wonder that
with such godless companions, and with such an inconsistent and
irreligious example in his father, even while professing the most
fanatical devotion to the church and religion, the mind of the talented
young prince should have been turned into the wandering wilds of
unbelief. Voltaire was at this time about forty years of age. His
renown as a man of genius already filled Europe. Frederick became an
ardent admirer of Voltaire, and a correspondence was commenced between
them.
[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT.]
But now the grim old king of Prussia is forced to meet a still grimmer
antagonist, who will not take “no” for an answer. He has fought the
world, fought all human affections, fought all feelings of humanity,
fought every good spirit within his heart except a brutal fanaticism,
which he ignorantly and superstitiously called religion; fought
gout, dropsy, and manifold complaints of the flesh; fought his wife,
fought his children, tried to fight the devil, but ended in being his
slave; but he cannot fight grim Death, which now clutches him in his
ghastly grasp. But not to be outdone, even by _this enemy_, while the
death-gurgle was even rattling in his throat, he solemnly _abdicated_
in favor of his son Frederick, and with his fingers trembling with the
chill of the grave, he signed the deed, and falling back, expired. So
the obstinate old king was determined that _his will_, not _death_,
should hand over the crown of Prussia, which he could no longer clutch
with his own cruel hands.
Voltaire said of his reign, “It must be owned Turkey is a republic in
comparison to the despotism exercised by Frederick William.”
Frederick the Great was twenty-eight years of age when he became king
of Prussia. He was very handsome and of graceful presence. In rapid
succession the young king announced certain sentiments which were so
amazing in the eyes of the rulers of that age as to be considered
phenomena. The day after his accession to the throne he summoned
his ministers and declared, “Our grand care will be to further the
country’s well-being, and to make every one of our subjects contented
and happy.”
Strange ideas! when all sovereigns had hitherto thought only of their
own contentment. Next, he abolished the use of _torture_ in criminal
trials. More wonderful still, the world said. Soon he issued this
marvellous edict, which struck consternation in the midst of the
upholders of bigotry and fanatical superstition:—
“All religions must be tolerated, and the king’s solicitor must have an
eye that none of them make unjust encroachments on the other; for in
this country every man must get to heaven his own way.”
Europe was electrified, priests trembled, bigotry and religious
persecution hung their heads and slunk away. But more surprises!
“The press is free!” thundered forth this powerful young Frederick
the Great; and all these phenomena accomplished in the first year of
his reign. No wonder Europe turned their eyes to the rising monarch.
Sad pity that he did not continue in this line of action, bringing
blessings instead of woes upon mankind. But the angel of wise reform
was soon driven from his heart and mind by the subtle and poisonous
demon of selfish ambition.
The young king soon abolished the Giant Guards. He no longer coveted
fine clothes, no longer indulged in the luxury of slippers and French
dressing-gown, which had raised the ire of his ease-hating father.
His hours were rigidly counted, and various duties assigned them, in
regular routine.
Though he treated his nominal wife, Queen Elizabeth, politely in
company, he utterly neglected her in his domestic life, and in later
years rarely ever addressed a word to her.