It is not surprising that, when the King’s scheme of discipline outraged his son instead of moulding him, mother and sister were at hand with ready sympathy. The wayward boy never forgot their kindness, nor the indulgence of the tutors who connived at a more humane education than Frederick William had commanded them to inflict. Cordially as the King detested French culture, he did not venture to exclude it from a leading part in the education of his son. A French lady, Madame de Roucoulle, was entrusted with the oversight of his earliest years. Madame de Camas, whom he called Mamma, was the wife of a Frenchman. His tutor, Duhan, was a Huguenot. French was at that time the universal language of the polite and learned world. Frederick, who never learned English and was forbidden to learn Latin, therefore drew all his mental supplies from French originals or French translations.
German he never spoke or wrote with ease. To him it stood for whatever was dull in his education,—for windy sermons every Sunday, lessons of nearly two hours a day in the Christian religion, books full of dismal pedantry, the speech of boors and of his father. Thus he early acquired from France ideas which he proclaimed throughout his life. That literary creation is the highest achievement of man, and that next to creation stand patronage and culture; that religion is superstition; that the enlightened man is he who views with calm not only the rubs of fortune but also the frailties of mankind—such were the abiding traces of Frederick’s education. The King, as may readily be believed, did not fail to remark something of this and to loathe it. He leaped to the conclusion that a boy who preferred French to German, and flute-playing to parades, was a monster who would ruin Prussia. It never occurred to him that his own scheme could be imperfect, and life became one long collision between father and son.
Yet Frederick’s most irritating delinquencies—his delight in soft living and secret dissipation, his distaste for the uniform and duty of a soldier, his contempt for Germans and their tongue—may fairly be ascribed in great part to mere youthful squeamishness and to the tyranny of the King. Had Frederick William been wise enough to trust to the future and to the past, to reflect that in the long line of Hohenzollerns none had been traitor to his House, that a lad who could think for himself would be more easily influenced than coerced, that at the worst he himself was not twenty-four years older than his son and might train the state to survive Frederick II. as after the Great Elector it had survived Frederick I.—had he in short been either a sympathetic father or a man of real penetration, then history might have heard nothing of either the new Junius Brutus or the Ogre of Potsdam, and the million victims of Frederick’s wars might have been spared.