he concerted with an officer in the army,
whose name was Kat, a man in whom he placed great confidence, and
whom, having chosen him for the companion of his flight, he
necessarily trusted with the preparatory measures. A prince cannot
leave his country with the speed of a meaner fugitive. Something was
to be provided, and something to be adjusted. And, whether Kat found
the agency of others necessary, and, therefore, was constrained to
admit some partners of the secret; whether levity or vanity incited
him to disburden himself of a trust that swelled in his bosom, or to
show to a friend or mistress his own importance; or whether it be in
itself difficult for princes to transact any thing in secret; so it
was, that the king was informed of the intended flight, and the
prince, and his favourite, a little before the time settled for their
departure, were arrested, and confined in different places.

The life of princes is seldom in danger, the hazard of their
irregularities falls only on those whom ambition or affection combines
with them. The king, after an imprisonment of some time, set his son
at liberty; but poor Kat was ordered to be tried for a capital crime.
The court examined the cause, and acquitted him: the king remanded him
to a second trial, and obliged his judges to condemn him. In
consequence of the sentence thus tyrannically extorted, he was
publickly beheaded, leaving behind him some papers of reflections made
in the prison, which were afterwards printed, and among others an
admonition to the prince, for whose sake he suffered, not to foster in
himself the opinion of destiny, for that a providence is discoverable
in every thing round us.

This cruel prosecution of a man who had committed no crime, but by
compliance with influence not easily to be resisted, was not the only
act by which the old king irritated his son. A lady with whom the
prince was suspected of intimacy, perhaps more than virtue allowed,
was seized, I know not upon what accusation, and, by the king's order,
notwithstanding all the reasons of decency and tenderness that operate
in other countries, and other judicatures, was publickly whipped in
the streets of Berlin.

At last, that the prince might feel the power of a king and a father
in its utmost rigour, he was, in 1733, married against his will to the
princess Elizabetha Christina of Brunswick Luneburg Beveren. He
married her indeed at his father's command, but without professing for