Such was the father who directed Frederick’s education. His talent for detail was always at the service of the state. It could be devoted to no worthier object than the training of the future king. At the age of nine years, therefore, Frederick found every hour of the day assigned to some part of the scheme of education by which the crowned Podsnap designed to make him such another as himself.
For all its minuteness, the scheme failed in its main object. It failed because Frederick William was not the sole factor in moulding and inspiring his son. In the royal household were two trembling conspirators against the tyrant—his wife and his daughter. Sophia Dorothea and Wilhelmina formed with Frederick a trio who sighed after the genteel. Loathing the pipe-clayed Teutonism in which their lord delighted, they longed for newer fashions and society more polite, for the wit and gallantry of the French court, and for the splendour of their own opulent kinsfolk at Saint James’s. Their lines had fallen in far less pleasant places. In Berlin, a quiet country town with dull surroundings and a trying climate, they had at least palaces, parties, and scandal. In Wusterhausen, to this day a lonely village, they were in exile; and Wusterhausen was the favourite residence of the King. The Europe in which they lived, it must be remembered, was a Europe which believed with all its heart that whatever Louis XIV. might have been in politics, he was beyond doubt the Apollo of culture. German princes prided themselves on speaking French, on dressing _à la française_, on building palaces that might be named in the same breath with Versailles. Frederick’s mother spoke French so well that a Huguenot refugee paid her the supreme compliment of enquiring whether she understood German. His sister’s memoirs, like his own, are French in language and in inspiration. What sympathy, we may wonder, could there be between these ladies and a boor who hated everything French, whether language, literature, art, cookery, or dress, and whose ideal of life was to sleep on straw in a barn, wash at daybreak in a tub, don a plain uniform, inspect farms, account-books, and soldiers, gorge himself with rude German dishes in the middle of the day, snore under a tree in the afternoon, and devote the evening to tobacco, buffoonery, and strong drink?