Frederick’s birth, on January 24, 1712, remedied the anxieties of a line which had gained too much from the extinction of allied lines not to be keenly sensitive to its own lack of heirs. His father, Frederick William, gave vent to rude transports of joy at the arrival of a male heir. Frederick I., the royal grandfather, who had himself a third time plunged into wedlock in the hope of safeguarding the succession to the new Prussian crown, seized the opportunity to astonish Berlin by the pomp of the infant’s christening. The Prussian nation, living in tranquillity under the Hohenzollerns, shared in their rejoicing. The infant prince represented many noble lines, and, it might almost be said, two separate civilisations. Frederick William was a kind of Prussian Squire Western. His wife, Sophia Dorothea, was a princess of the rising House of Hanover, a lady soon to be nicknamed Olympia from her majestic bearing as queen. Through her and through his grandmother, a clever daughter of Sophia of Hanover, a thin strain of Stuart blood flowed in Frederick’s veins. His great-grandmother, the wife of the Great Elector, was a daughter of the House of Orange, born at the moment of its triumph over Spain. A generation farther back the Hohenzollerns had married into the House of the Palatinate, which in 1618 threw for the Bohemian crown and lost. But the virtues of every Protestant House in Europe could not compensate for the infirm health which had assailed both the father and the son of the Great Elector, and which there seemed reason to fear had descended to the offspring of his grandson Frederick William. Two older sons had died in infancy, a daughter, Wilhelmina, though she grew up and married, was never robust, and Frederick himself seems in his childhood to have been often ailing.