Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/618

Rh 582 WILLIAM [GERMANY. On the death of his father in 1840 the new king, Frederick William IV., being childless Prince William, as heir presumptive to the throne, received the title of prince of Prussia. He was also made lieutenant-governor of Pomerania and appointed a general of infantry. In politics he was decidedly Conservative; but at the outbreak of the revolutionary movement of 1848 he saw that some concessions to the popular demand for liberal forms of government were necessary. He urged, however, that order should be restored before the establishment of a constitutional system. At this time he was the best-hated man in Germany, the mass of the Prussian people believ ing him to be a vehement supporter of an absolutist and reactionary policy. He was even held responsible for the blood shed in Berlin on 18th March, although he had been relieved nine days before of his command of the guards. So bitter was the feeling against him that the king entreated him to leave the country for some time, and accordingly he went to London, where he formed intimate personal relations with Prince Albert, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, and other English statesmen. On 8th June he was back at Berlin, and on the same day he took his seat as member for Wirsitz in the Prussian national assembly, and delivered a speech in which he ex pressed belief in constitutional principles. In 1849, when the revolutionary party in the grand-duchy of Baden be came dangerous, he accepted the command of &quot; the army of operation in Baden and the Palatinate,&quot; and his plans were so judiciously formed and so skilfully executed that in the course of a few days the rebellion was crushed. At the beginning of the campaign an unsuccessful attempt was made on his life. In October 1849 he was appointed military governor of the Rhineland and Westphalia, and took up his residence at Coblentz. In 1854 the prince was raised to the rank of a field-marshal and made governor of the confederate fortress of Mainz. When the king was attacked with a disease of the brain, Prince William assumed the regency (7th October 1858). On 2d January 1861 Frederick William IV. died, and his brother succeeded him as William I. For the internal conflict between the king and the house of representatives on the question of military reorganization, which filled up the first years of his reign, see GERMANY (vol. x. p. 510) and PRUSSIA (vol. xx. p. 12). The events and results of the war with Denmark, and of that with Austria which arose out of the Schleswig-Holstein question, belong to the history of Austria and of Prussia, and have been already described under those articles. The brilliant achievements of the army in this last contest finally convinced the king s subjects that his aims had been wise. On his return to Berlin he was received with unbounded enthusiasm, and from this time he was looked up to as a father rather than as a sovereign. On the outbreak of the war with France in 1870 all Germans rallied round the king of Prussia, and, when on 31st July he quitted Berlin to join his army, he knew that he had the support of a united nation. He crossed the French frontier on the llth of August, and personally commanded at the battles of Gravelotte and Sedan. It was during the siege of Paris, at his head quarters in Versailles, that he was proclaimed German emperor on 18th January 1871. On 3d March 1871 he signed the preliminaries of peace which had been accepted by the French assembly; and on 21st March he opened the first imperial parliament of Germany. On 16th June he triumphantly entered Berlin at the head of his troops. After that period the emperor left the destinies of Ger many almost entirely in the hands of Bismarck, who held the office of imperial chancellor (see PRUSSIA). In his personal history the most notable events were two attempts upon his life in 1878, one by a working lad called Hodel, another by an educated man, Karl Nobiling. On the first occasion the emperor escaped without injury, but on the second he was seriously wounded. These attacks grew out of the socialist agitation ; and a new reichstag, elected for the purpose, passed a severe anti-socialist law, which was afterwards from time to time renewed. The socialists, however, far from being crushed, again and again gave proof of their power by returning a considerable number of deputies to parliament. In the hope of alienating from them the mass of the working class, Bismarck introduced, with the cordial approval of the emperor, a series of measures for the benefit of the poorer members of the community. Until within a few days of his death the emperor s health was remarkably robust; he died at Berlin on 9th March 1888. The reign of William I. marked an era of vast importance in the history of Germany. In his time Prussia became the first power in Germany and Germany the first power in Europe. These momentous changes were due in a less degree to him than to Bismarck and Moltke ; but to him belongs the credit of having recognized the genius of these men, and of having trusted them absolutely. Personally &quot;William was a man of a singularly noble and attractive character. His supreme wish was to discharge loyally the duties which had been imposed upon him, and he never shrank from any personal sacrifice that seemed to be demanded in the interests of his people. The best traditions of the Hohenzollerns were maintained, not only by the splendour of the achievements with which his name will always be intimately associated, but by the simplicity, manliness, and uprightness of his daily life. WILLIAM IV. (1532-1592), landgrave of Hesse, well known as an astronomer, son of Philip the Magnanimous, was born at Cassel on 14th June 1532. During his father s captivity after the battle of Mvihlberg (1547) he carried on the government in his name for five years, and succeeded him on his death in 1567. At an early age he became interested in astronomy; and in 1561 he built an observa tory at Cassel, where observations were regularly made, first by himself, afterwards by Rothmann and Biirgi. The last-named was not only a very skilful mechanic (it seems- probable that he applied the pendulum to clocks long be fore Huygens did) but an original mathematician, who independently invented logarithms. William died on 25th August 1592. Most of the mechanical contrivances which made Tycho Brahc s instruments so superior to those of his contemporaries were adopted at Cassel about 1584, and from that time the observations made there seem to have been about as accurate as Tycho s ; but the re sulting longitudes were 6 too great in consequence of the adopted solar parallax of 3. The principal fruit of the observations was a catalogue of about a thousand stars, the places of which were deter mined by the methods usually employed in the 16th century, con necting a fundamental star by means of Venus with the sun, and thus finding its longitude and latitude, while other stars could at any time he referred to the fundamental star. It should be noticed that clocks (on which Tycho Brahe depended very little) were used at Cassel for finding the difference of right ascension between Venus and the sun before sunset ; Tycho preferred observing the angular distance between the sun and Venus when the latter was visible in the day time. The Hessian star catalogue was published in Lucius Barettus s Historia Ccelcstis (Augsburg, 1668), and a number of other observations are to be found in Call ct Sidcrum in co Errantium Observationes Hassiacse, Leyden, 1618, edited by SNELLIUS (&amp;lt;j.v.}. R. Wolf, in his &quot; Astronomische Mittheilungen,&quot; No. 45 (Vicrtd- jahrsschrift d. naturforschcndcn Gcscllscliaft in Zurich, 1878), has given a resume of the manuscripts still preserved at Cassel, which throw much light on the methods adopted in the observations and reductions. WILLIAM (1533-1584), surnamed the SILENT, prince of Orange, count of Nassau, was born at the castle of Dil- lenburg in Nassau on 16th April 1533. He was the eldest son of William of Nassau (died 1559) and his second wife, Juliana of sStolberg, a woman of remarkable piety and dis cretion, who devoted much thought and care to the training of her children. In 1544 he inherited from his cousin Rene or Renatus the principality of Orange and the great estates belonging to his family in the Netherlands (see HOLLAND, vol. xii. p. 74 sq.}. He was educated at the court