Sixty of the children of the aristocracy, dressed as little soldiers with drums beating and colours flying, entered the Palace and “elected their little Prince as their Colonel.” This important event concluded, they kissed the baby’s hand and departed.
The Prince and his wife—to whom he was devoted—seem to have had a variety of residences. Norfolk House, Leicester House—formerly the residence of his father when Prince of Wales—situated in Leicester Square on a site very near where the Empire Theatre now stands; Carlton House in Pall Mall, a house at Kew, and a Palace at Cliefden, built by Villiers, situated on a terrace overlooking the River Thames.
Here at this latter house the Prince seems to have lived the life of a country squire, and a lover of the river. He distributed prizes at rowing matches, and mixed freely with the people of the part. His dignity did not prevent him stopping to chat with a labourer at his cottage door, or even to enter in, and do what few Princes would condescend to do, sit down and share the cottager’s plain meal with him.
He would play cricket on the lawn at Cliefden with his children, when they were old enough, or stroll along the banks of the river of which he was very fond, and his companions were not always of the exalted order one would expect.
He was devoted to art, and loved talent wherever he found it.
“Lord Sir,” exclaimed a simple country servant to his master one day at Maidenhead, “I have seen the Prince of Wales accompanied by his nobles.”
The “nobles” in question were two Scottish authors, Thompson and Mallett, neither of them distinguished by the neatness of their attire.
It was alas! on the lawn at Cliefden, that Frederick received a blow, some say from a cricket ball, others while at a game of tennis, which was the indirect cause of his death some years after.
Here at Cliefden, and at his other residences, were to be seen his boon companions; the Earl of Chesterfield, courtier, politician, satirist and mimic. Lady Huntingdon, who left his world for Whitfield’s, and whose name may be seen in almost every town in England on Dissenting Chapels to the present day; Bathurst, Queensberry, the clever Pulteney, Cobham, Pitt, the Granvilles, Lyttleton, the prig Bubb Doddington, whose one aim in life was to be a lord. There were the two Hedges—(Charles, who wrote epigrams)—erratic Lord Baltimore and peevish Lord Carnarvon, Townshend, whom George the Second much objected to, and his wife as well—the Townshends seem to have been very staunch to the Prince—chatty Lord North, the Earl of Middlesex, who allowed his wife’s name to be coupled with the Prince’s, although the lady’s descriptions “short and dark, like a winter’s day,” and “as yellow as a November’s morning,” were hardly those to fascinate an artistic nature such as Frederick’s. Yet she certainly took part in the “Judgment of Paris” in 1745 as one of the Graces. Last of all to be mentioned, there was that “stuttering puppy,” as George the Second called him, Johnny Lumley, brother of the Earl of Scarborough.
The maids of honour in attendance on the Princess of Wales, however, must have been very different to that charming trio, “the Swiss,” “Belladine,” and the “Schatz,” who waited upon Queen Caroline when Princess of Wales.