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From the Emperor’s Desk: Yesterday, as it was the anniversary of the birth of King Friedrich Wilhelm I in Prussia. Today I’d like to examine the difficult relationship the King had with his son and heir Prince Friedrich. Part I today and Part II will be posted tomorrow.

The eldest surviving son of King Friedrich Wilhelm I in Prussia was the future King Friedrich II of Prussia born on January 24, 1712. Two older sons, Prince Friedrich Ludwig and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm did not survive infancy.

Friedrich Wilhelm wanted him to become a fine soldier. As a small child, Friedrich was awakened each morning by the firing of a cannon. At the age of 6, he was given his own regiment of children to drill as cadets, and a year later, he was given a miniature arsenal.

The love and affection Friedrich Wilhelm had for his heir initially was soon destroyed due to their increasingly different personalities. Friedrich Wilhelm ordered Friedrich to undergo a minimal education, live a simple Protestant lifestyle, and focus on the Army and statesmanship as he had.

However, the intellectual Friedrich was more interested in music, books and French culture, which were forbidden by his father as decadent and unmanly. As Friedrich’s defiance for his father’s rules increased, Friedrich Wilhelm would frequently physically beat or humiliate Friedrich (he preferred his younger sibling Prince August Wilhelm). Friedrich was beaten for being thrown off a bolting horse and wearing gloves in cold weather.

At age 16, Friedrich seems to have embarked upon a youthful affair with Peter Karl Christoph von Keith, a 17-year-old page of his father. Rumors of the liaison spread in the court, and the “intimacy” between the two boys provoked the comments of his sister, Wilhelmine, who wrote, “Though I had noticed that he was on more familiar terms with this page than was proper in his position, I did not know how intimate the friendship was.”

Rumors finally reached King Friedrich Wilhelm, who cultivated an ideal of ultramasculinity in his court, and derided his son’s supposedly effeminate tendencies. As a result, von Keith was dismissed from his service to the king and was sent away to a regiment by the Dutch border, while Friedrich was sent to the king’s hunting lodge at Wusterhausen in order to “repent of his sin”.

In the mid-1720s, Queen Sophia Dorothea attempted to arrange the marriage of Friedrich and his sister Wilhelmine to her brother King George II of Great Britain’s children Princess Amelia and Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales, who was the heir apparent.

Fearing an alliance between Prussia and Great Britain, Field Marshal von Seckendorff, the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, bribed the Prussian Minister of War, Field Marshal von Grumbkow, and the Prussian ambassador in London, Benjamin Reichenbach.

The pair undermined the relationship between the British and Prussian courts using bribery and slander. Eventually King Friedrich Wilhelm became angered by the idea of the effete Friedrich being married to an English wife and under the influence of the British court. Instead, he signed a treaty with Austria, which vaguely promised to acknowledge Prussia’s rights to the principalities of Jülich-Berg, which led to the collapse of the marriage proposal.