t
Wusterhausen and elsewhere, is the remarkable little Crown-Prince of his
century growing up,--prosperously as yet.

Chapter X. -- THE HEIDELBERG PROTESTANTS.

Friedrich Wilhelm holds Tabagie nightly; but at Wusterhausen or wherever
he may be, there is no lack of intricate Official Labor, which, even
in the Tabagie, Friedrich Wilhelm does not forget. At the time he was
concocting those Instructions for his little Prince's Schoolmasters, and
smoking meditative under the stars, with Magdeburg "RITTER-DIENST" and
much else of his own to think of,--there is an extraneous Political
Intricacy, making noise enough in the world, much in his thoughts
withal, and no doubt occasionally murmured of amid the tobacco-clouds.
The Business of the Heidelberg Protestants; which is just coming to a
height in those Autumn months of 1719.

Indeed this Year 1719 was a particularly noisy one for him. This is
the year of the "nephritic colic," which befell at Brandenburg on some
journey of his Majesty's; with alarm of immediate death; Queen Sophie
sent for by express; testament made in her favor; and intrigues, very
black ones, Wilhelmina thinks, following thereupon. [_Memoires de
Bareith,_ i. 26-29.] And the "Affair of Clement," on which the old Books
are so profuse, falls likewise, the crisis of it falls, in 1719. Of
Clement the "Hungarian Nobleman," who was a mere Hungarian Swindler, and
Forger of Royal Letters; sowing mere discords, black suspicions, between
Friedrich Wilhelm and the neighboring Courts, Imperial and Saxon: "Your
Majesty to be snapt up, some day, by hired ruffians, and spirited away,
for behoof of those treacherous Courts:" so that Friedrich Wilhelm fell
into a gloom of melancholy, and for long weeks "never slept but with a
pair of loaded pistols under his pillow:"--of this Clement, an
adroit Phenomenon of the kind, and intensely agitating to Friedrich
Wilhelm;--whom Friedrich Wilhelm had at last to lay hold of, try, this
very year, and ultimately hang, [Had arrived in Berlin, "end of 1717;"
stayed about a year, often privately in the King's company, poisoning
the royal mind; withdrew to the Hague, suspecting Berlin might soon
grow dangerous;--is wiled out of that Territory into the Prussian, and
arrested, by one of Friedrich Wilhelm's Colonels, "end of 1718;" lies
in Spandau, getting tried, for seventeen months; hanged, with two
Accomplices, 18th April, 1720. (See, in succession, Stenzel, iii. 298,
302; Fassmann,