They do not appear to have been popular in the Prince’s household at any rate, for his head coachman made a most curious will concerning them, in which he left his considerable savings to his son, on condition that he never married a maid of honour! A compliment to those ladies which they no doubt appreciated.
Among the many amusements with which the Prince and Princess delighted their friends, private theatricals had their place, Cato being played on one occasion at Leicester House, when the young Prince George Frederick had grown sufficiently into boyhood to take the part of Portius, in which he was coached by Quin, who boasted he “had taught the boy to speak”; the boy who was afterwards to be George the Third.
For the little theatre at Cliefden, Thompson, a pensioner of Frederick’s—and he had many—wrote his play “Alfred.”
The Prince’s children came quickly, and Frederick showed himself to be a tender father. There had been that sad episode years before, when he had grieved so deeply—so deeply that his mother and sisters had said they had not believed him capable of such sorrow—over the death of that little child who had no right to have been there at all, Anne Vane’s and his son.
That sad note had struck the one most tender chord in the despised Prince’s nature, the depths of which his mother and sisters could not sound; the love of little children. When his own grew up around him, that great fount of love welled up and covered many of his sins, as we know that love will do.
This is what is said of him at that time:
“Notwithstanding this, he played the father and husband well. He loved to have his children with him, always appeared most happy when in the bosom of his family, left them with regret, and met them again with smiles, kisses and tears.”
And this was the nature which Queen Caroline could not understand; was it not one full of love to shower on some one? Had he but had the chance of a mother’s full love in those cold years of his childhood spent in Hanover, is it not reasonable to think that his whole nature would have been altered, and that he might have so wound himself around Caroline’s heart that even her handsome younger son could never have loosened those tendrils of affection.
But alas! there were those fourteen years of separation, when the boy was left practically to his own resources to grow up without the tenderness of a mother’s love to guide him.
How different was his conduct as a father to that of his own father, who candidly admitted that he could not bear to have his children playing about in the same room with him.