Upbringing and education
Christian VI and Queen Sophie Magdalene were deeply devoted to Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that combines its emphasis on biblical doctrine with an emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life. As a consequence, Frederick was given a strictly religious upbringing. At the age of 7, he received his own royal household with the German nobleman Georg Wilhelm von Söhlenthal as his hofmeister. Söhlenthal was an ardent supporter of the Moravian Brethren, and his home was the center of the pietistic circles in Copenhagen. He shared a deep religious piety with the king, and for a time he was Christian VI's adviser on ecclesiastical matters. However, Söhlenthal did not succeed in influencing the spiritual development of the Crown Prince, as he was an overly gentle and weak character, and in 1738 he was dismissed from his position as hofmeister.
Frederick's education became rather deficient. In 1730 the king entrusted the significant and well-educated privy councillor Iver Rosenkrantz supervision of Crown Prince Frederick's upbringing, but this had no influence on the actual teaching. Rosenkrantz was a supporter of the traditional Lutheran orthodoxy, while Christian VI more and more became a proponent of Pietism and lost confidence in Rosenkrantz. The Crown Prince's education was therefore completely carried out in the German Pietist spirit that prevailed at court. Like his ancestors at the then primarily German-speaking court in Copenhagen, he only had a poor command of the Danish language, and knew German better than Danish all his life. None the less, his mother ironically referred to him as "Der Dänische Prinz" (literally The Danish Prince in German) because he occasionally spoke Danish. Apart from a certain interest in coin collecting, he only had modest cultural or intellectual interests.
Prince Frederick proved himself from an early age to have a completely different nature from his strict and somewhat gloomy parents. He was gentle and kind in nature, cheerful and accessible to everyone, and wanted to see his subjects happy. Unlike his secluded parents, who were rarely seen outside their palaces, he enjoyed spending time in public with people from all walks of life. Despite his upbringing in a strictly pietistic home, he was not himself gripped by pietism. Although certainly not unfamiliar with religious sentiments, Frederick grew into a hedonist who enjoyed the pleasures of life such as deer stalking, wine and women.
This hedonism, however, evolved to debauchery, and Frederick became well known for a libertine lifestyle marked by sexual licentiousness and alcoholism. With a group of other rakes, he would tour the city's taverns and brothels, to an extent that his father at one point considered having him declared legally decapacitated. The King's more prudent advisers, however, spoke against it, as it would legally be a violation of the King's Law (Latin: Lex Regia; Danish: Kongeloven), the absolutist constitution of Denmark and Norway from 1665. Furthermore, it would also compromise the monarchy to an unprecedented degree to admit that the future king was unfit to rule.
Of the outmost importance for the future of the Crown Prince and his realm, was the 1730 appointment as his chamber page of Adam Gottlob Moltke, a nineteen year old nobleman from Mecklenburg who was eleven years older than Frederick. Moltke had been a page to his father, and the King and Queen counted on Moltke to teach the Crown Prince to control himself. In 1743 Moltke was promoted to Hofmeister. In fact, Moltke did nothing to control Frederick's sexual appetite nor his alcohol consumption, but in return a lifelong relationship of trust was established between the two men, which was to become crucial after Frederick's ascension to throne.
In 1740, the Crown Prince was confirmed, and from then on as heir to the throne was given a seat in the Council of State. During the Swedish succession crisis in 1743 following the death of Queen Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden in 1741, when it was clear that no legitimate heir was to be expected, Crown Prince Frederick in 1743 had great prospects of being elected heir to the throne in Sweden. The peasantry unilaterally elected Crown Prince Frederick, and in Dalecarlia the peasants even instigated a rebellion, the Dalecarlian rebellion or stora daldansen (Swedish: the great Dalecarlian dance) to enforce his election. However, as a result of the Treaty of Åbo in 1743, which ended the Russo-Swedish War of 1741–1743, Adolf Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp was appointed heir to the throne in place of Crown Prince Frederick, after pressure from the Russian empress Elizabeth Petrovna.
