FREDERICK WILLIAM III. king of Prus sia, eldest son of King Frederick William II., was born at Potsdam on Aug. 3, 17 70. His father, then prince of Prussia, was out of favour with Frederick the Great and entirely under the influence of his mistress, and the boy led a solitary and repressed life. As a soldier he received the usual training of a Prussian prince, ob tained his lieutenancy in 1784, became a colonel commanding in 1790, and took part in the campaigns of 1792-94. In 1793 he married Louise, daughter of Prince Charles of Mecklenburg Strelitz, whom he met at Frankfort. He succeeded to the throne on Nov. 16, 1797, and at once began to remedy the worst abuses of his father's reign. But he had neither the strength nor the ability to meet the difficult foreign situation. The consequences of his infirmity of purpose are written large on the history of Prussia from the treaty of Luneville in 1801 to the downfall that followed the campaign of Jena in 1806. By the treaty of Tilsit (July 9, 1807) Frederick William had to surrender half his dominions, and what remained to him was exhausted by French exactions and liable at any moment to be crushed out of existence by Napoleon. Only the indomitable courage of Queen Louise helped the weak king not to despair of the state. She seconded the reforming efforts of Stein and the work of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in reorganizing the army, by which the resurrection of Prussia be came a possibility. When Stein was dismissed at the instance of Napoleon, Hardenberg succeeded him as chancellor (June 181o). In the following month Queen Louise died, and the king was left alone to deal with circumstances of ever-increasing difficulty. He was forced to join Napoleon in the war against Russia ; and even when the disastrous campaign of had for the time broken the French power, it was not his own resolution, but the loyal dis loyalty of General York in concluding with Russia the convention of Tauroggen that forced him into line with the patriotic fervour of his people.
Once committed to the Russian alliance, however, he became the faithful henchman of the emperor Alexander. He was one of the original co-signatories of the Holy Alliance, though he signed it with reluctance; and in the counsels of the Grand Alliance he allowed himself to be practically subordinated to Alexander and later to Metternich. At the various congresses, from Aix-la Chapelle (1818) to Verona (1822), he showed himself in sym pathy with the repressive policy formulated in the Troppau Protocol. The promise of a constitution, which in the excitement of the War of Liberation he had made to his people, remained un fulfilled. But though reluctant to play the part of a constitutional king, Frederick William laboured assiduously at the enormous task of administrative reconstruction involved in welding the heterogeneous elements of the new Prussian kingdom into a united whole. He was sincerely religious; but his well-meant efforts to unite the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, revealed the limits of his paternal power; not till 1834, after a regime of coercion and confiscation, was outward union secured on the basis of com mon worship but separate symbols, the opponents of the measure being forbidden to form communities of their own. With the Roman Catholic Church, too, the king came into conflict on the vexed question of "mixed marriages," a conflict in which the Vatican gained an easy victory (see BUNSEN, CHRISTIAN CHARLES