There is some mystery about the origin of the extraordinary ill-will shown both by George II. and Caroline towards their heir, a feeling surpassing the antipathy between father and son that made an heirloom in this family for generations. The King tried to keep Frederick from coming to England; then, later on, he was half-willing to cut off Hanover from the English Crown that it might be bestowed upon his favourite, William of Cumberland. The eldest son he usually abused as a puppy, a fool, a beast, and by other such elegant epithets; while the Queen, if we are to believe Lord Hervey, offered once to give him her opinion in writing “that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it.” Yet, when father and son were not on speaking terms, all the family lived together at St. James’s, till, after the birth of the Prince’s first child, he was turned out at short notice to take refuge at Kew, and at makeshift London residences which became in turn the head-quarters of the Opposition. One would suppose that in the country those cat-and-dog neighbours might have chosen to have at least a river between them; but at Kew they were separated only by a road.

Kew House, then, began to figure in history as the country-seat of the Prince of Wales. Frederick was by no means a model husband nor a princely man; but he had affection and respect for his wife, the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and they at least lived decently together. Here were in part brought up their children: George III.; Edward, Duke of York, who died abroad in 1767; William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who lived to 1805; Henry, Duke of Cumberland, who, as well as the last-mentioned, came into disfavour through a mésalliance; Prince Frederick and Princess Louisa, who both died young; and Caroline Matilda, who married the worthless King of Denmark, and had a miserable end. Horace Walpole sneers at Frederick’s desire to name his children from heroes of English history, not always with his father’s approval; but this trait goes to show the Prince’s aspirations to be a patriotic king. He is said to have taken the “Black Prince” as a model he got no chance of following, perhaps as well for his possible subjects; but the scanty records of his career suggest rather one of Browning’s characters:—

All that the old Dukes were without knowing it,

This Duke would fain know he was without being it.

During the married life of Frederick and Augusta, the memoirs of the time give slight and sometimes rather spiteful hints of their doings at Kew, as to which, indeed, Lord Hervey’s caustic pen has no worse to tell than that they walked three or four hours daily in the lanes and fields about Richmond, with a scandal-blown lady-in-waiting and a dancing-master for company. The Prince was much given to private theatricals, but also to athletic games, among them such innocent ones as rounders, tennis, and base-ball, the last not yet banished across the Atlantic. The dog given to him by Pope is remembered by the couplet inscribed on its collar:—

I am His Highness’s dog at Kew,

Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

This poet-neighbour boasted himself not a follower but a friend of His Highness, who did not want for two-legged dogs wagging their tails to him in town and country, on the speculation that his father’s death might any day change the tap of honour and profit. But all such expectations were nipped short. In March 1751 the Prince caught cold at Kew, and had symptoms of pleurisy. Supposed to be out of danger, he went back to Kew, where he walked about like a convalescent; but the same night, after returning to town, showed signs of a fresh chill. Again he seemed to be on the mend, then suddenly one evening was seized with a violent fit of coughing. “Je sens la mort!” he exclaimed, and these were his last words. It proved that a tumour had burst, produced either by a fall or by a blow from a tennis ball three years before.

“Thus,” says Horace Walpole, “died Frederick, Prince of Wales, having resembled his pattern the Black Prince in nothing but in dying before his father.” He appears to have been not unpopular with the mob, as princes are apt to be who make the money fly; but history has no good to tell of him, unless one kindly act in his intercession for Flora Macdonald. Scholars and divines duly lamented him with overdone effusions in the Tu Marcellus eris vein; but these crocodile tears of the Muses are less well-remembered than that uncourtly epitaph that seems to have better expressed the not even lukewarm loyalty of the first Georgian generation:—

Here lies Fred