Those who care to read in detail the coarse and violent expressions of this unnatural repulsion may glut their appetite in Lord Hervey's memoirs. One or two such passages will serve as specimens of the rest. The Queen and Princess Caroline, Frederick's sister, made no ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the Prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy. Princess Caroline, who, Hervey tells us, 'had affability without meanness, dignity without pride, cheerfulness without levity, and prudence without falsehood,' who was in a word an exemplary and charming person, declared that she grudged him every hour he had to breathe, and reproached Hervey with being 'so great a dupe as to believe the nauseous beast' (those were her words) 'cared for anything but his own nauseous self, that he loved anything but money, that he was not the greatest liar that ever spoke.' The Queen, not to be outdone, declared that she would give it under her hand 'that my dear firstborn 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.'[106] Even on her deathbed she could not be brought to receive or forgive him. If Lord Hervey, his bitter enemy, can be credited, this obduracy was not at the last without justification. Lord Hervey declares that the Prince crowded the Queen's anteroom with his emissaries to convey to him the earliest information of her condition. As the bulletins of the Queen's decline reached him, he would say, 'Well, now we shall have some good news; she cannot hold out much longer.' All this need not be literally believed, but it affords a picture of family rancour which can scarcely have been equalled in the history of mankind.
From the time of the public quarrel with his parents the Prince of Wales gave himself up to political opposition. He wielded, indeed, formidable weapons of offence. His father was avaricious, secluded, and disliked; Frederick laid himself out to be thought generous, accessible, and popular. He knew well that every symptom of national affection for himself was a stab to the King. He and his family, at a time when French fashions were all the rage, ostentatiously wore none but English goods. He trained his children to act Addison's Cato. Nor did he disdain more social arts. He would go to fairs, bull-baitings, races, and rowing matches; he would visit gipsy encampments; he became familiar to the people. He would assist at a fire in London, amid shouts from the mob, as he and his court alleged, of 'Crown him! crown him!' At Epsom there is a tradition that when living there he fought a chimney-sweep with his fists, and erected a monument in generous acknowledgment of his own defeat.
In private life he was essentially frivolous. When his father's troops were besieging Carlisle, the Prince had a model of the citadel made in confectionery, while he and the ladies of the court bombarded it with sugar-plums. This seems emblematic of his whole career.
But his main and favourite diversion had a graver aspect: it lay in political cabals of which he was the puppet and the figurehead, and in forming futile ministries and policies for his own reign. Of these last a curious example is preserved among the Bedford Papers.[107]
All political malcontents of the slightest importance were sure of a cordial reception at Leicester House or Kew. There all could warm their wants and disappointments with the sunshine of royal patronage and the cheering prospect of a new reign. 'Remember that the King is sixty-one, and I am thirty-seven,'[108] said Frederick, and this calculation coloured his whole life. The future was freely discounted and anticipated in the Prince's circle, so that there, as in the Court of the Pretender, the faithful adherent might receive some high office to be enjoyed after the death of the King, but with this substantial difference: that whereas what James distributed were shadows, the awards of Frederick required only common good faith and the death of an old man to make them realities. Bubb for example, the most avid and unabashed of political harlots, gravely kissed his patron's hand for a Secretaryship of State, and, according to Walpole, a dukedom, immediately afterwards nominating his under-secretary, to show the solidity of the arrangement. Henley, who was afterwards under different circumstances to be Chancellor, was grievously disappointed to find that Dr. Lee was to have the seals. And so they snapped and snarled over the spoils, while the Prince complacently made his appointments, and apportioned the functions of the future. So far as he was concerned it was all barren enough. His little projects, his little ambitions, his little ministries, his political post-obits, were all cut short by the sudden shears of Death. His councillors and followers were scattered to the winds, and Bubb had to hasten to make his peace with the powers that be, and to exchange his contingent Secretaryship of State for an actual Treasurership of the Navy. The Prince's other post-obits, his debts, were, it would seem, never paid.[109]
To sum up, with regard to Frederick we have a few certain facts: the hatred of his parents and sisters, and a singular unanimity of scorn from his contemporaries. There is not perhaps in existence a single favourable testimony. We have many portraits, one at Windsor of an innocent lad in a red coat playing the violoncello with his sisters, which is pleasant enough; the later ones all stamped with a pretentious silliness which affirms the verdict of his own day. Then we have the mysterious intimation of Lord Hardwicke of some deep and sinister cause for the alienation of his parents. This, however, unsupported and unexplained, carries us no further, and is merely an excuse for the unnatural aversion of his family. Beyond that mystery, the word 'fatuous' seems exactly to embody all that we know of this prince; his appearance, morals, manners, and intellect are all summed up in that single expression.
On the other hand, there are traits of generosity which are recorded, there is his apparent popularity, there is the general grief for his death; but it may well be surmised that it was not difficult for the son of George II. and the grandson of George I. to be popular and regretted. On the whole, may we not conclude that the arbitrary discipline of Hanover in early life made him incurably tricky and untruthful, that he was an empty and frivolous coxcomb, but not without kindly instincts; and that his weaknesses and frailties, whatever they may have been, laid a grave responsibility on the parents who reared and cursed him?