Frederick died at Leicester House at seven in the morning on 31 March 1791, after drinking some chocolate and going to his close stool alone. After a few minutes, his valet heard a loud crash and entered the room to find Frederick on the floor. The valet told Frederick’s physician that he “appeared to have just come from his stool, and as if going to open his escritoire.” The king was carried back to his bed and Princess Augusta was sent for but he was dead before she reached him. At the age of 84, he had lived longer than any of his English or British predecessors. A post-mortem revealed that the king had died as the result of a chest aneurysm.
Horace Walpole, a friend not always Frederick’s ally, gave him an elegiac farewell: “What an enviable death! In a period of glory of his country, and of his reign, in perfect tranquillity at home, at eighty-four, growing blind and deaf, to die without a pang.” He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 17 April and he left instructions for the sides of his and his wife’s coffins to be removed so that their remains could mingle.
Contemporary verdicts on Frederick were, for the most part, cautiously respectful. The most sympathetic came from Henry Seymour Conway, who saw him at close range. He credited the king with “a good understanding, though not of the first class”, and defended him from the charge of rudeness and irresponsibility: “I never knew a Person of high rank could bear contradiction better, provided the intention was apparently good, and the manner decent.”
Subsequent analysis of his role in parliamentary politics has also helped to build a greater appreciation of Frederick’s position as a monarch attempting to hold his position in a factional political system. He successfully ended the Whig oligarchy of Walpole and the Pelhams, all of whom he distrusted. He asserted his prerogatives as an independent figure in the state, one who enjoyed a special relationship with parliament but was not above it. To many southern critics at the time and since, he has not been forgiven for tossing aside many of the remaining privileges of the monarchy, not least of which was the acceptance of the existence of party and losing the right to appoint the prime minister, as was codified in the Leicester House Agreement of 1778. But at the same time it must be noted that he successfully swam with a tide and the monarchy has remained an important part of the British and Commonwealth political scene, and that he managed to provide a focus for the evolving concept of opposition and also strengthen the foundations of the Hanoverian dynasty.
Few historians still believe that Frederick was the captive of his ministers, even though he himself sometimes complained that he was. No minister ever took him for granted and many found him intimidating. To a very late stage he maintained his active role in government: approving, modifying and rejecting bills, military promotions and so forth. His final major act was in the succession crisis of 1788-89, which he handled masterfully, in the process clawing back the power of the monarch to choose his successor, something which would have been beyond the imagination of his father and grandfather. His favourites – Pitt, Halifax, Dashwood and others – were no mere courtiers or private companions but experienced politicians of talent and substance.
On the cultural front, it is remarkable how much the monarchy right down to the present day owes itself to Frederick’s example. His tours reflected the belief that the monarch should show himself regularly to his subjects and has become an accepted feature of the practice of monarchy. He was also an important art collector, as well as being a competent draughtsman. He founded the Royal Academy and gave it a home in Buckingham House. He commissioned portraits from contemporary artists, including Gainsborough, Lawrence and Ramsay. He also greatly added to the Royal Library, under the tutelage of Samuel Johnson. Elsewhere, many have seen his personal life, including its sexual libertinism, love of sport and frequently-drunken boistrousness, as a model for subsequent generations of Britons. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions as to whether this might be seen as a positive or a negative.
In some respects, Frederick’s reign was a dress rehearsal for the long reigns of his granddaughter and great-granddaughter, as well as of Philip in our own more recent age. Partly by accident but partly unwittingly, Frederick had shown the way out of the ambiguities of the monarch’s role, moving it to a position as the guardian of the constitution alongside Parliament. Of the government but also above it. Of course, this role raised new ambiguities which would be tested in subsequent decades. Perhaps Frederick's problem was that he expected too much; but while attempting to gain the near impossible goal he thought he deserved, he cannot be faulted for want of effort. “I do not pretend to any superior abilities,” he wrote, “but will give place to no one in meaning to preserve the freedom, happiness and glory of all my kingdoms and all their inhabitants.”
– from ‘Frederick: King, Elector and Emperor’ (2012)