Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines

and upon his accession he got rid of both, slashing the royal budget by three quarters, sacking virtually the entire court (including the musicians), selling off most of his father’s horses, the royal silver, and the crown jewels. When he made the obligatory trip to Königsberg to receive Prussia’s homage to its new king, he took fifty horses and four days (to his father’s thirty thousand horses and two weeks), and instead of five million he spent exactly 2,547 thalers on the trip. From the first days of his reign, he made it plain that this would not be his father’s monarchy. The Saxon ambassador reported to Dresden:

      Every day his majesty gives new proofs of his justice. Walking recently at Potsdam at 6 in the morning, he saw a post coach arrive with several passengers who knocked for a long time at the post house which was still closed. The King, seeing that no one opened the door, joined them in knocking and even knocked in some window-panes. The master of the post then opened the door and scolded the travelers, for no one recognized the King. But His Majesty let himself be known by giving the official some good blows of his cane and drove him from his house and his job after apologizing to the travelers for his laziness. Examples of this sort, of which I could relate several others, make everybody alert and exact.

      Very much in contrast to the contemporary German princes Bach knew at the Knights’ Academy, a bunch of narcissistic, free-spending little Sun Kings, Frederick William built a model orphanage, provided for poor widows, recovered large tracts of wetlands for agriculture, and helped to elevate the craft of administration to the level of science, creating in his two universities the first chairs in cameralism, a theoretical approach to managing a centralized economy. In service to his almost obsessive attention to his kingdom’s finances—he was forever telling his son about the virtues of ein Plus machen, making a profit—he radically reorganized his administration with a remarkable “Instruction” to his ministers that covered everything from punctuality to trade policy. The structure he created became a fairly efficient bureaucracy, but the Instruction itself betrayed its autocratic (not to mention compulsive) author. For example, he was determined not to let Prussian goods get away by allowing his people to export wool, so he decreed that all of it would be used—and how:

      The General Directory shall compare the total of the wool manufactured with the total of the wool produced. Let us suppose the first total to be inferior to the second, and that 2,000 pounds of the wool at first quality and 1,000 pounds of medium quality will not find buyers. The General Directory shall establish in a city nine drapers, each of which will use 300 pounds of good wool, and employ one hundred operatives in the stocking manufactories, each of which will work up at least 10 pounds of medium wool. The evil is remedied.

      After he published this Instruction, the penalty for anyone caught exporting wool was strangulation.

      “A king needs to be strong,” he said. “In order to be strong he must have a good army. In order to maintain a good army he must pay it. In order to pay it he must raise the money.” His ideas were few and those borrowed—this one was the advice of his grandfather, the Great Elector—but he lived by them. During his reign he would build up ein Plus of no less than eight million thalers, he would double the size of his army, and through drill, discipline, and innovation, he would make them the envy of the great powers of Europe. Powerful nations, he told his son, “will always be obliged to seek a prince who has a hundred thousand men ready for action and twenty-five million crowns to sustain them … All the most imposing powers seek me, and emulate each other in fondling me, as they would a bride.”

      Really it was beyond fondling, they were all over him, but most of the time he had no clue they were taking advantage of him. His two closest ministers were employed as spies by the Hapsburgs. Their code name for the him was “Fatty.” “Have no fears,” one of them wrote in a dispatch. “Fatty’s heart is in my hands, I can do with him as I like …” Frederick William would have called this man one of his best friends.

      The result was a foreign policy that could only be described as a mess. At a time when diplomacy was as shadowy and filled with intrigue as it would ever be, Prussia had a king who did not deal well with ambiguity, and no one was more aware of this weakness than himself, one of the reasons he was frequently in a rage. The French ambassador wrote to Versailles: “The variable moods of the King of Prussia and his profound dissimulation are infinitely above all that Your Majesty can imagine.” In fact, though, he was less deceitful than simply confused most of the time, acting on the advice of spies, always stumbling out of the trouble they made for him and that he made for himself. He had witnessed and resented how his father and grandfather had been undercut and cheated by a variety of powers, including the Hapsburgs, but he was powerless to avenge them. “Follow the example of your father in finance and military affairs,” he told Frederick one day. “Take care not to imitate him in what is called ministerial affairs, for he understands nothing about that.”

      Frederick William’s chief consolations in life were getting drunk and kidnapping giants (not at the same time). He had stolen hundreds and thousands of very large, mostly moronic men for his ornamental guard, the Potsdam Grenadiers, from their homes and fields and from the armies of enemies and friends alike (another diplomatic blooper). At one point kidnapping the giants got a little expensive for him, so he tried breeding them instead, insisting that every large citizen of the realm marry an equally large person, but mixed results sent him back to kidnapping. His methods were varied and no-nonsense. A priest was taken from the altar of his church during mass. “Prussian recruiters hover about barracks, parade-grounds, in Foreign Countries,” Carlyle reports, adding that they “hunt with some vigor.”

      For example, in the town of Jülich there lived and worked a tall young carpenter: one day a well-dressed, positive-looking gentleman … enters the shop; wants “a stout chest, with lock on it [and] … must be six feet six in length … an indispensable point,—in fact it will be longer than yourself, Herr Zimmerman.” … At the appointed day he reappears; the chest is ready … “Too short, as I dreaded!” says the positive gentleman. “Nay, your Honor,” says the carpenter … “Well, it is.”—“No, it isn’t!” The carpenter, to end the matter, gets into the chest [and] the positive gentleman, a Prussian recruiting officer in disguise, slams down the lid upon him; locks it; whistles in three stout fellows, who pick up the chest [and go].

      In most cases these stories had unhappy endings, and this one was unhappier than most. When the coffin was opened the carpenter was found to have suffocated, and the positive gentleman, one Baron von Hompesch, spent the rest of his life in prison. Obviously, given the lengths to which the baron was willing to go, Frederick William’s gratitude for his giants was extreme. When he was in one of his melancholy moods, which were frequent, having a few hundred of them file past him was known to be a reliable pick-me-up.

      The other was beer. At night, almost every night, he took his place with his fellows—one hesitates to call anyone in his life a friend—on a wooden bench around a wooden table set with clay pipes, tobacco, wine, and beer. Here in the so-called Tobacco College, he and his closest advisers, most of them senior military officers, consulted, at least briefly, until they muzzily transitioned into song, loud toasts, and curses at the French. (It was in the Tobacco College, later rather than earlier in the evening, that the spies did their best work.) The unwitting jester at these revels was a man named Gundling, a university-educated drunk who had been found near destitution in a tavern by one of the spies and brought into the court to read the newspaper to the family at meals. He was the master of a thousand odd facts of geography, history, and other subjects, about all of which, being credulous as well as besotted, he was easily persuaded to speak. He was the easiest and most appealing kind of target for the king, who loved nothing more than to humiliate the pompous, and Gundling bore the brunt of jokes that became more brutal the more they all drank. Frederick’s biographer Nancy Mitford reports that the group once set him on fire. He objected to their taunts (especially, one imagines, to being set ablaze), but he always came back. To reward his loyalty, to keep him around, and most of all to show how little the king thought of scholars and scholarship, Gundling was appointed to succeed Leibniz, the most profound philosopher of his generation, as head of the Berlin Academy of Sciences.

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