1/8 Thaler - Frederick II

Frederick II of Hesse-Cassel is best remembered not for his coinage but for leasing approximately 19,000 Hessian troops to the British Crown during the American Revolutionary War — a transaction that made him extraordinarily wealthy but cost him considerable popular legitimacy. The subsidy payments from Britain flowed directly into his treasury throughout the late 1760s and 1770s, funding ambitious building projects and a art collection that would eventually form the nucleus of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel.

This fractional issue falls at the opening of that arrangement's negotiation period, minted while Frederick was simultaneously converting Hesse-Cassel to Catholicism in 1754 — a move deeply unpopular with his Lutheran subjects.