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Frederica-Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, French Revolution, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, King Friedrich II The Great of Prussia, King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, King Louis XVI or France and Navarre, Landgrave Ludwig IX of Hesse-Darmstadt, Prince August-Wilhelm of Prussia, Prince-Elector of Brandenburg, Wilhelmine Enke
Friedrich Wilhelm II (September 25, 1744 – November 16, 1797) was King of Prussia from 1786 until his death in 1797. He was in personal union the Prince-Elector of Brandenburg and (via the Orange-Nassau inheritance of his grandfather) sovereign prince of the Canton of Neuchâtel.
Friedrich Wilhelm was born in Berlin, the son of Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia (the second son of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia) and Duchess Luise of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. His maternal Aunt, Elisabeth Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was his mother’s elder sister, and was the wife of his paternal uncle, King Friedrich II (“Frederick the Great”).
Friedrich Wilhelm became heir-presumptive to the throne of Prussia on his father’s death in 1758, since Friedrich II had no children. The boy was of an easy-going and pleasure-loving disposition, averse to sustained effort of any kind, and sensual by nature.
Friedrich Wilhelm’s accession to the throne (August 17, 1786) was, indeed, followed by a series of measures for lightening the burdens of the people, reforming the oppressive French system of tax-collecting introduced by Frederick, and encouraging trade by the diminution of customs dues and the making of roads and canals.
This gave the new king much popularity with the masses; the educated classes were pleased by Friedrich Wilhelm II’s reversal of his uncle’s preference for the French language and the promotion of the German language, with the admission of German writers to the Prussian Academy, and by the active encouragement given to schools and universities.
Friedrich Wilhelm II also terminated his predecessor’s state monopolies for coffee and tobacco and the sugar monopoly. Under his reign the codification known as Allgemeines Preußisches Landrecht, initiated by Friedrich II, continued and was completed in 1794.
On July 9, 1788 a religious edict was issued forbidding Evangelical ministers from teaching anything not contained in the letter of their official books, proclaimed the necessity of protecting the Christian religion against the “enlighteners” (Aufklärer), and placed educational establishments under the supervision of the orthodox clergy.
Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and Prince-Elector of Brandenburg
On December 18, 1788 a new censorship law was issued to secure the orthodoxy of all published books. This forced major Berlin journals like Christoph Friedrich Nicolai’s Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek and Johann Erich Biester’s Berliner Monatsschrift to publish only outside the Prussian borders. Moreover, people like Immanuel Kant were forbidden to speak in public on the topic of religion.
Finally, in 1791, a Protestant commission was established at Berlin to watch over all ecclesiastical and scholastic appointments. Although Wöllner’s religious edict had many critics, it was an important measure that, in fact, proved an important stabilizing factor for the Prussian state.
Aimed at protecting the multi-confessional rights enshrined in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the provisions of Wöllner’s edict were intended to safeguard against religious strife by imposing a system of state sponsored limits. The edict was also a notable step forward regarding the rights of Jews, Mennonites, and Herrnhut brethren, who now received full state protection.
Given the confessional divides within Prussian society, primarily between Calvinists and Lutherans but increasingly Catholics as well, such a policy was important for maintaining a stable civil society.
The attitude of Friedrich Wilhelm II towards the army and foreign policy proved fateful for Prussia. The army was the very foundation of the Prussian state, as both Friedrich Wilhelm I and Friedrich II the Great had fully realised. The army had been their first care, and its efficiency had been maintained by their constant personal supervision.
Friedrich Wilhelm II had no taste for military matters and put his authority as “Warlord” (Kriegsherr) into commission under a supreme college of war (Oberkriegs-Collegium) under Charles Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick and General Wichard Joachim Heinrich von Möllendorf. It was the beginning of the process that ended in 1806 at the disastrous Battle of Jena.
Although the Prussian army reached its highest peacetime level of manpower under Friedrich Wilhelm II (189,000 infantry and 48,000 cavalry), under his reign the Prussian state treasury incurred a substantial debt, and the quality of the troops’ training deteriorated.
Under the circumstances, Friedrich Wilhelm II’s interventions in European affairs were of little benefit to Prussia. The Dutch campaign of 1787, entered into for purely family reasons, was indeed successful, but Prussia received not even the cost of her intervention.
An attempt to intervene in the war of Russia and Austria against the Ottoman Empire failed to achieve its objective; Prussia did not succeed in obtaining any concessions of territory, and the dismissal of minister Hertzberg (July 5, 1791) marked the final abandonment of the anti-Austrian tradition of Friedrich II the Great.
Meanwhile, the French Revolution alarmed the ruling monarchs of Europe, and in August 1791 Friedrich Wilhelm II, at the meeting at Pillnitz Castle, agreed with Emperor Leopold II to join in supporting the cause of King Louis XVI of France.
However the king’s character and the confusion of the Prussian finances could not sustain effective action in this regard. A formal alliance was indeed signed on February 7,1792, and Friedrich Wilhelm II took part personally in the campaigns of 1792 and 1793, but the king was hampered by want of funds, and his counsels were distracted by the affairs of a deteriorating Poland, which promised a richer booty than was likely to be gained by the anti-revolutionary crusade into France.
A subsidy treaty with the sea powers (Great Britain and the Netherlands, signed at The Hague, 19 April 1794) filled Prussia’s coffers, but at the cost of a promise to supply 64,000 land troops to the coalition. The insurrection in Poland that followed the partition of 1793, and the threat of unilateral intervention by Russia, drove Friedrich Wilhelm into the separate Treaty of Basel with the French Republic (April 5, 1795), which was regarded by the other great monarchies as a betrayal, and left Prussia morally isolated in the struggle between the monarchical principle and the new republican creed of the Revolution.
Personal life and patronage of the arts
Frederick William’s first marriage, to Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick (his first cousin) daughter of Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, contracted 14 July 1765
had ended after four years during which both spouses had been unfaithful. Their uncle, Friedrich II, granted a divorce reluctantly, as he was more fond of Elisabeth than of Friedrich Wilhelm.
Months after his first marriage Friedrich Wilhelm II then married Frederica Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, daughter of Ludwig IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt on July 14, 1769 also in Charlottenburg. His second marriage lasted until his death.
Frederica Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt
Although he had seven children by his second wife, he had an ongoing relationship with his mistress, Wilhelmine Enke (created Countess Wilhelmine von Lichtenau in 1796), a woman of strong intellect and much ambition, and had five children by her—the first when she was still in her teens.
In 1794–1797 he had a castle built for her on the Pfaueninsel. Moreover, he was involved in two more (bigamist) morganatic marriages: with Elisabeth Amalie, Gräfin von Voß, Gräfin von Ingenheim in 1787 and (after her death in 1789) with Sophie Juliane Gräfin von Dönhoff.
He had another seven children with those two women, which explains why his people also called him der Vielgeliebte (“the much loved”) and der dicke Lüderjahn (“the fat scallywag”).
His favourite son—with Wilhelmine Enke—was Graf Alexander von der Mark. His daughter from Sophie Juliane, Countess Julie of Brandenburg (1793 –1848) married to Friedrich Ferdinand, Duke of Anhalt-Köthen.
On November 16, 1797, Friedrich Wilhelm II died in Potsdam. He was succeeded by his son, Friedrich Wilhelm III, who had resented his father’s lifestyle and acted swiftly to deal with what he considered the immoral state of the court.
European Royal History 