Frederick William IV

Frederick William IV was king of Prussia from 1840 until his death in 1861. He is remembered as the monarch who refused a German crown because it was offered by a parliament rather than by princes. Deeply religious and drawn to the medieval past, he was nicknamed the romanticist on the throne and believed he ruled by divine right. His ideal was a state organised through the Christian estates of the realm, not a constitution. His early reign was nonetheless conciliatory: he eased press censorship, released political prisoners, and settled the long quarrel with his Catholic subjects in the Rhineland. He also resumed construction of Cologne Cathedral, unfinished since the Middle Ages, as a monument to the German past he admired. The revolutions of 1848 caught him between instinct and necessity. After troops fired on crowds in Berlin in March he made a show of submission, riding through the city under the black-red-gold colours and promising a constitution. In December he dissolved the Prussian National Assembly when its proposals proved too radical and imposed a constitution of his own, with a parliament elected under a three-class franchise weighted by tax paid. In April 1849 the Frankfurt Parliament offered him the crown of a united Germany. He refused it, reportedly calling it a crown from the gutter, on the grounds that no assembly had the right to dispose of a crown. The refusal killed the liberal path to unification and left the question to Bismarck and the Prussian army two decades later. His own attempt at unity on conservative terms, the Erfurt Union, collapsed under Austrian pressure at Olmütz in 1850. A series of strokes from 1857 left him incapable of governing, and his brother William ruled as regent before succeeding him.

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