The New International Encyclopædia/Frederick William IV.

FREDERICK WILLIAM IV. (1795-1861). King of Prussia from 1840 to 1861. He was the son of Frederick William III., and was born October 15, 1795. He received a careful education, and was fond of the society of learned men. He ascended the throne June 7, 1840. He exhibited much of his father's vacillation and instability of purpose; and although he began his reign by granting minor reforms and promising radical changes of a liberal character, he always, on one plea or another, evaded the fulfillment of these pledges. He had high but vague ideas of ‘the Christian State,’ and showed through life a strong tendency to mystic pietism. Equally vague was his dream of a Germany united under a ‘college of kings’ ruling by divine right. A step in the direction of popular government was taken in 1847 by the convocation of the so-called ‘United Diet,’ whose activity, however, was to be merely that of an advisory body. The February Revolution in France in 1848 was followed by an outbreak in Prussia which shook the throne of the Hohenzollern to its foundations. On March 18 the people of Berlin rose in arms. To save his crown, the King yielded to the demand for constitutional reform. In May a national Constituent Assembly met, at the same time that the Frankfort Parliament assembled to reorganize the political system of Germany. On February 26, 1849, the new Prussian Chambers met, but the constitutional régime thus inaugurated was granted merely as the King's free gift, to be modified at his pleasure. On March 28, 1849, the Frankfort Parliament offered the Imperial crown of Germany to Frederick William, but he declined it. (See Germany.) In the meanwhile the King had been forced, in 1848, by the clamor of his subjects, to take up arms in support of the people of Schleswig-Holstein in their revolt against Denmark, but Prussia soon abandoned the cause of the duchies. After the complete cessation of the revolutionary movement in Germany, the reactionary régime was in full sway. The ‘pietists’ regained their former influence at Court, and the freedom of the press and of religious and political opinion was strictly circumscribed. In 1857 Frederick William was seized with intermittent attacks of insanity, and in 1858 he resigned the management of public affairs to his brother and heir, Prince William, who acted as regent of the kingdom till his accession, on the death of Frederick William, which occurred January 2, 1861. Consult Biedermann, Dreissig Jahre deutscher Geschichte (Breslau, 1896).