Frederick William I of Prussia
Frederick William I doubled the Prussian army, filled the treasury, collected giants, beat his son with a cane, made the boy watch his best friend beheaded, and left him the instrument with which the boy became Frederick the Great, which the son acknowledged and did not forgive. He was born in 1688, the grandson of the Great Elector and the son of the first king, whose court of wigs and Versailles manners he despised, and when he succeeded in February 1713 he dismissed most of it the same day, sold the furniture and cut the household from a hundred thousand thalers to a tenth. What he wanted was an army that could not be ignored and money that could not run out. The army went from forty thousand to over eighty, the fourth largest in Europe for the thirteenth largest population, drilled by Leopold of Dessau to fire and march faster than anyone; the Potsdam Giants, a regiment of men over six feet gathered by purchase and kidnapping from across Europe, were the one extravagance. The canton system of 1733 gave every regiment a district whose peasants were its recruits and its reservists. The money came from the General Directory of 1723, one board for domains, taxes and war, from a civil service paid to be honest and watched to see that it was, from the king's own inspections in a plain blue coat, and from spending nothing: the army got five-sevenths of the revenue and the rest was saved in barrels in the cellar. He made schooling compulsory in 1717 on paper, took Stettin from Sweden in 1720, and otherwise kept the army for its own sake and fought almost nobody. The crown prince read French, played the flute and tried to run away to England in 1730 with Lieutenant Katte. The king had Katte beheaded under the boy's window at Küstrin and kept the boy under arrest until he submitted. He died in May 1740 of the dropsy, having gone over the accounts with his heir to the last, and left eight million thalers and the army; the son invaded Silesia within the year with both.
- Lived: 1688 CE – 1740 CE
- Nationality: Prussian
- Roles: king, monarch
