ABSTRACT
George William, awkward and sickly, last but one of Brandenburg’s Electors, has traditionally hung as whipping-boy and scapegoat among the other rulers of his line in the family portrait gallery. George William was already a sick man when he assumed the Electoral Crown that his half-paralysed and drink-sodden father was no longer capable of wearing. An injury to one leg that never properly healed caused lameness, and as he soon overstrained his other sound leg, in his later years—there were but forty-five of them in all—he was usually obliged to use a Sedan-chair. George William, limping back to his Berlin castle from Prussia, where the Polish King had just enfeoffed him as dux Prussiae, found this family imbroglio awaiting him. George William’s economies, under which his son, Frederick William, groaned and grumbled as Crown Prince, had also their justification.
