Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines

fact that his son, a man so different from him in so many ways, would unconsciously incorporate so many of the qualities in his father that he most despised.

      Of course, Frederick William carefully presided over his crown prince’s growth and education. Presided is in fact a small word for what he did. Frederick’s days and lessons were prescribed minutely by another obsessive-compulsive “Instruction” from the king to his tutors. This is Sunday:

      [Frederick] is to rise at seven; and as soon as he has got his slippers on, shall kneel at his bedside, and pray to God so as all the room shall hear it … in these words: Lord God, blessed Father, I thank thee from my heart that thou hast so graciously preserved me through this night. Fit me for what thy holy will is; and grant that I do nothing this day, or all the days of my life, which can divide me from thee. For the Lord Jesus my Redeemer’s sake. Amen. After which the Lord’s prayer. Then rapidly and vigorously wash himself clean, dress and powder and comb himself … Prayer, with washing, breakfast, and the rest, to be done pointedly [by] a quarter-past seven.

      That was the first fifteen minutes of a schedule that took him minute by minute up to early evening, and Sunday was his easy day.

      What is most notable about the education his father set out for Frederick is what was not there: no reading in the classics, no history prior to the sixteenth century, no natural sciences or philosophy (Frederick William called it “wind-making”), no Latin. He was, however, steeped in Calvinist theology. His father instructed his pastors not to teach the boy to believe in predestination, since he was convinced it would lead to desertions by fatalist soldiers, but they taught it to Frederick anyway. In fact, years later, even when he seemed not to believe anything at all, Frederick still spoke well of predestination.

      Other than religion and economics, there was only one lesson that Frederick William insisted Frederick’s tutors teach: They were charged to “infuse into my son a true love for the [life of a] Soldier … and impress on him that, as there is nothing in the world which can bring a Prince renown and honour like the sword, so he would be a despised creature before all men, if he did not love it, and seek his sole glory therein.” The same year he was submitted to the Instruction—that is to say, at the age of six—the crown prince was given his own corps of human toy soldiers, the “Crown Prince Royal Battalion of Cadets,” 131 luckless little boys whom he was to drill to Prussian standards. Two years later he was also given his own little arsenal, complete with miniature versions of the weapons in the Prussian armory, and a working cannon.

      For a few years, Frederick appeared to be all his father could have hoped. Not long after he began working with his cadets, he wrote the king a letter in which he praised his troops for their precision in maneuvers and reported that he had shot his first partridge (Frederick William was an avid huntsman). The following year, at the age of seven, he sent his father an essay he had written, “How the Prince of a Great House Should Live” (“he must love his father and mother … he must love God with all his heart … he must never think evil,” etc.). At the same time his teacher was reading to him from Telemachus, a novel by Fénelon, pen name of the Archbishop of Cambrai, who wrote his novel about the son of Odysseus as a manual on monarchy for the education of Louis XIV’s grandson. Frederick William’s mother had read the book to him, and it was filled with the sort of advice to a monarch-in-waiting of which the king very much approved. “The Gods did not make him king for his own sake,” Mentor advises Telemachus. “He was intended to be the man of his people: he owes all his time to his people, all his care and all his affection, and he is worthy of royalty only in as much as he forgets his own self and sacrifices himself to the common weal.” In the age of Louis XIV, that sentiment could not have been popular at the French court, but both Frederick’s later characterization of himself as “first servant of the state” and Frederick William’s rebellion from the splendiferous court and self-image of his father have a root here.

      As time went on, Frederick’s curiosity ranged further and further from the cramped curriculum his father had prescribed for him. Fortunately for his education, his tutor Jacques Duhan was a wise and intrepid teacher, who followed his student’s interests and even, over time, helped him to amass a secret library, hidden in the locked closets of a house he rented near the castle. The library eventually grew to almost four thousand volumes, ranging from pre-Socratic philosophers to the writers of the early Enlightenment. When his father ended Frederick’s formal education at the age of fifteen and pensioned off the tutor, Frederick wrote Duhan: “I promise that when I have my own money I will give you 2400 crown a year and I will always love you, even a little more than now if that is possible.”

      FREDERICK WILLIAM’S PROGRAM for his son was subtly but relentlessly subverted by Frederick’s mother. For much of his childhood he lived at her palace, called Monbijou, with his sister Wilhelmina, his elder by three years. Queen Sophia Dorothea was a Hanover, the daughter of England’s King George I and sister of George II. (She was also the first cousin of her hus-band, whose mother was a Hanover.) In a replay of his par-ents’ relationship, Frederick William loved his wife (he called her his Fiechen, a diminutive of Sophia), and Sophia Dorothea felt greatly diminished by her marriage. She painted Potsdam as rough and provincial in comparison to Hanover, and she let her children know of her distaste for her egregiously fat husband, who dressed every day in his faded military uniform, got drunk every night with his silly smoking party, and was forever talking about ein Plus machen. She was more than free with her opinions with her children: She consciously deployed them as part of a strategy to win them over to her vision of a real court (Hanover), the majesty of a real royal life (certainly not this one), the beauty of elaborate balls at which the latest in courtly music was played by the finest musicians. In this way and more direct ones, she made it clear to the children that they had a choice to make between her and their father. At one point, Wilhelmina wrote, her mother fiercely upbraided her for going to her father about some minor matter. She “reminded me that she had ordered me to attach myself to her exclusively; and that if I ever applied to the King again, she would be fiercely angry …”

      Their father placed no less claim on their affection, of course, so Frederick and Wilhelmina, caught between antagonistic parents and their separate, dueling courts, found shelter in each other. They giggled conspiratorially at both parents’ dinner tables, made faces at each other when forced by their father to listen to his pastor’s sermons, and delighted in their common passion for music, which was perhaps the only unalloyed delight of their young lives.

      Both clearly came to favor their mother. In her memoir, Wilhelmina paints a distinctly (and justly) unfavorable portrait of both parents but reserves her faintest praise for the king. “His table was served with frugality,” she wrote. “It never exceeded necessities. His principal occupation was to drill a regiment.” As for Frederick, Wilhelmina (at least as a child) had only deep affection and loyalty. “He was the most amiable prince that could be seen,” she wrote of her younger brother, “handsome, well made, of an understanding superior to his years, and possessed of every quality that forms a perfect prince.”

      What the queen wanted more than anything was that her children would marry Hanovers, who were now England’s royal family. Wilhelmina was to marry the prince of Wales and Frederick his sister, Princess Amalia. Sophia Dorothea, then, would someday be mother not only to the king of Prussia but also to the queen of England, a prospect which suited her. The spies, of course, had to make sure that never happened, since it would put Prussia in England’s camp rather than the empire’s. Until the “double-marriage” plan could be completely unraveled, therefore, the spies worked “Fatty” hard, and so did the queen. Both sides used the same carrot: the aggrandizement of Prussia. The empire dangled two provinces on the Rhine, Jülich and Berg, that both the Great Elector and Frederick William’s father felt, with justice, the empire had taken from them wrongly. (The empire had no intention of actually supporting the claim, and it was characteristic of their view of Prussia that they offered as a prize something they had blatantly appropriated.) England, in its alliance with France against the empire, held out a future for Prussia as a coequal, independent, sovereign state rather than the role of imperial lackey and also support for his claim to Jülich-Berg. In trying