FREDERICK WILLIAM III. 



FREDERICK WILLIAM IIL 



1030 



Saxony. The king of Saxony, Frederick Augustus, was then Frederick 

 William's prisoner of war. Frederick William was supported in his 

 views by the Emperor Alexander. Both of them took so menacing an 

 attitude in this affair, and met with so firm a resistance from the king 

 of Saxony, as well as other potentates, that serious fears were enter- 

 tained of a rupture between Prussia and Russia on one side, and 

 Austria, Great Britain, and France, on the other, but the return of 

 Napoleon from the island of Elba produced a salutary effect among 

 the members of the congress, and Frederick William was obliged to 

 be satisfied with the larger and northern half of the kingdom of 

 Saxony. Besides this acquisition he received back the most western 

 part of Poland, under the name of the grand-duchy of Posen, nearly 

 all his former possessions in Germany, and several other parts of that 

 country, namely, a large tract on both sides of the Rhine and the 

 greater part of Westphalia. He also acquired Swedish Pomerania by 

 exchange for Lauenburg, but left several small districts in the hands 

 of some of the minor German princes. Comparatively speaking, how- 

 ever, Prussia acquired less than the other great northern powers, 

 since the area of the kingdom as fixed by the treaty of Vienna was leas 

 than previous to the peace of Tilsit, and besides this the Prussian 

 dominions were now divided into two large portions separated from 

 each other by a small narrow tract belonging to Hanover and Hesse- 

 CasseL 



Bltieher at the head of a powerful Prussian army was ready to resist 

 Napoleon, after his return to Paris in 1815, in the Netherlands. 

 Against him Napoleon aimed his first blow at Ligny, on the 16th of 

 June, and Blucher lost the day, but the spirit of the Prussian army 

 was so excellent, that Blucher retreated in good order upon Wavre, 

 kept hia word to aid the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, 

 and had his glorious share in that great victory, by which the power 

 of Napoleon was broken. Frederick William followed his army to 

 Paris, and there signed with the other powers the second peace of 

 Paris. To the proposition of the Emperor Alexander of forming that 

 union called the Holy Alliance, Frederick William adhered with 

 eagerness. 



After his return, Frederick William undertook the difficult task of 

 organising a kingdom composed of incongruous parts, and exhausted 

 by oppression, rapine, war, and its great exertions. His intellectual 

 capacities were very limited, but he had plain sense, loved and knew 

 how to create order, and, guided by long and bitter experience, dis- 

 played considerable ability in selecting his measures, and in choonng 

 his servants among men whose principles promised a quiet and peace- 

 able development of that state of things which he had in view. In a 

 fow years 4he finances were brought to a flourishing condition; 

 trade, mechanical arts, agriculture, were promoted by liberal laws, 

 and where laws were not sufficient the king would help with money 

 from his own purse, lending or giving large suras to the great land- 

 owner! in Eastern Prussia, when the high rate of the corn duties 

 in England produced a stagnation of the corn trade in that pro- 

 vince, and momentarily deprived the owners of immense estates of 

 the means of paying taxes or their creditors, or even living decently. 

 Nor was he less active in reforming the administration of law and 

 the post-office, in constructing roads, and in founding universities, 

 colleges, and schools. The people however looked to him for civil 

 and political freedom as well as for material improvements. Their 

 claims were the more just ai they were not only founded upon 

 their social wants, but upon rights also ; their rights being derived 

 not merely from the eighteenth article of the Confederative Act, but 

 still more directly from Frederick William's edict of tho 2^ud of 

 May, issued after the return of Napoleon from Elba, and before 

 the battle of Waterloo had removed all fear of France, wherein he 

 promised to establish a general representative constitution for the 

 whole kingdom. But whatever were his intentions when he issued 

 that edict, he never fulfilled the smallest portion of it. The 

 reason* why Frederick William III. broke his solemn promise must 

 be found in his character. A real representative constitution which 

 should give the nation a participation in the legislation, wan a thing 

 utterly detested by Frederick William. He was a king brought up 

 in the old German doctrines of absolutism. He would be the father 

 of hia nation, the master in hU house, and he expected from his 

 subjects that sort of obedience which boys owe to their father and 

 servants to their master. Like a good father he gave his children 

 a good education, allowing them all sorts of amusements and liberty, 

 and paying even their little debts occasionally; but he wanted all 

 their actions to be confined within the limits prescribed by himself, 

 and any claim to go beyond he would punish with angry words or 

 the paternal cane, according to the case. When Frederick William 

 promised a constitution he did not perhaps precisely know what it 

 was; at least this is the excuse which has been offered for him : 

 yet it would seem to be the most obvious duty of a sovereign to 

 ascertain what he really meant before pledging his royal word to 

 give his people a representative constitution. 



The firnt to remind Frederick William of his promise were the 

 inhabitants of tho Klienish provinces. Karly in 1818 the inhabitants 

 of Coblenz presented an address to the king in which they humbly 

 established the justice of their demand on the ground ol' the 18th 

 Article of the Confederative Act, and the edict of the 22nd of May 

 1815. The king professed to be "justly indignant " at their temerity. 



He told them that " Ho who reminds the king, who has voluntarily 

 promised a constitution, of his word, manifests criminal doubts of 

 the inviolability of his word, and anticipates his decision on the 

 right time of its introduction; a decision which ought to be as 

 free as was his first promise; " and with this wretched quibbling the 

 pious monarch contrived to satisfy his conscience. Of course " the 

 right time" never came, and though the king lived for five-aud- twenty 

 years, and the country was peaceful and flourishing, he never made 

 an effort to fulfil the promise made with every character of solemnity 

 to the people, who had done so much for him and had suffered so 

 much from his vacillating, feeble, and time-serving policy. 



While Frederick William thus evaded his promise to grant con- 

 stitutional liberties to hia subjects, he did what he could to check the 

 spirit of liberalism in other parts of Germany ; and he was especially 

 active in restraining the liberty of the press, and putting down the 

 secret societies among the students in the universities, especially the 

 society called ' Burschenschaft,' the object of which was the gradual 

 regeneration of Germany, and the political independence of the whole 

 nation under one government. In 1820, and in the following years, 

 the continental kings held successively the congresses of Troppau, 

 Laibach, and Verona, where measures were taken against the political 

 movements in Italy and Spain, and here again Frederick William 

 showed that he hated representative constitutions in those countries 

 no less than in his own. Prussia was astonished and indignant at 

 this conduct in a king who owed his crown and his glory, nay his 

 very honour, to promises of political liberty. Between the reactionary 

 and the liberal party the king was wavering for some time, with 

 his accustomed want of decision in complicated matters, till he fell in 

 with the Protestant pietists. From this time the spirit of the Prussian 

 government became what it is now still more, a sort of Jesuitical 

 despotism, dressed in the smooth garb of piety and philosophy. He 

 adopted despotic measures of a most revolting character. One of the 

 most glaring instances of tho spirit in which his government was 

 carried on was the forced union of the Lutheran and Reformed 

 churches, or the introduction of the now ' agenda/ as it w;is gently 

 called, a violation of the liberty of conscience which iu another age 

 would have led to a religious war. The persecutions by which 

 Frederick William's government attained thoir object were number- 

 less, but there is no space here to dwell longer upon the subject. 

 Contemporary witli this ecclesiastical reform was the establishment 

 of the ' Landstiinde,' or provincial estates, a sort of middle-age repre- 

 sentation of the people in each province, but not a general representa- 

 tion of the whole nation. 



Small as the political liberties of Prussia were, and vexatious as the 

 military system was which reigned throughout the whole administra- 

 tion, a period of fifteen years was sufficient for Frederick William and 

 his councillors to raise Prussia again to the rank which she occupied 

 among the powers of Europe previous to the battle of Jena. Iu her 

 exterior relations Prussia behaved with prudence and generally with 

 dignity. The object of Frederick William was to make Prussia power- 

 ful, and he succeeded. Peace was the great object he had constantly 

 at heart, and he maintained peace even through the dangers occasioned 

 by the French revolution iu 1830. Though averse to the principles of 

 the French Revolution, he contented himself with keeping the French 

 within France, by declaring that he would make common cause with 

 Austria and Russia against her from the moment the French made 

 their cause a European one by continuing to revolutionise Europe 

 through her emissaries. He had to experience tho dangers of the 

 French Propaganda iu a riot at Aix-la-Chapelle, which was the first 

 and also la-it outbreak of a plot to revolutionise the Rhenish pro- 

 vinces. But while adopting towards France a passive policy, he was 

 ready enough to assist Russia in crushing revolutionary principles iu 

 Poland. During the last Polish revolution he not only supplied the 

 Russian army with provisions and military stores, but allowed the 

 Russian generalissimo, Field-Marshal Paskiewicz, to cross the Vistula 

 on ths Prussian territory, which enabled him thus to attack Warsaw 

 and to put down the insurrection. A great number of Polish subjects 

 of Frederick William, having joined tbe army of their brethren in 

 Russia, were severely punished wheu they returned to Prussia after 

 the fall of Warsaw. 



Towards tho end of his reign Frederick William committed an act 

 which created a great sensation in Europe, by arresting and imprisoning 

 the archbishops of Cologne and Gnesen, for instructing the Roman 

 Catholic priests to withhold their sanction from marriages of Roman 

 Catholic women to Protestant husbands, in violation of the concordat 

 of 1820 between Pope Pius VII. and Frederick William III., by the 

 terms of which the issue of mixed marriages was to follow the religion 

 of the father, unless the parents agreed otherwise. The affair was only 

 settled at last between the pope and the present king in such a way 

 as to leave no doubt that Frederick William had acted imprudently as 

 well as unjustly in this matter. His policy in promoting the material 

 welfare of his subjects was wiser, and never were the trade, manu- 

 factures, agriculture, and navigation of Prussia in so flourishing 

 a condition as towards the close of his reign. He attained his object 

 in a great measure by concluding the great commercial league with 

 most of the other German states, the plan of which .was originally 

 conceived by the minister of finances, Mr. Von Maassen, and which is 

 known under the name of the ' Zollverein.' 



