But in this happy time of a young father’s life, there were black clouds gathering over the Prince’s household and this is how the old Duchess of Marlborough speaks of them in her matter of fact way:
“They have found a way in the City to borrow thirty thousand pounds for the Prince at ten per cent. interest to pay his crying debts to trades-people. But I doubt that sum won’t go very far. But they have got it though great pains was taken to hinder it.
“The salaries in the Prince’s family are twenty-five thousand pounds a year, besides a good deal of expense at Cliefden in building and furniture. And the Prince and Princess’s allowance for their clothes is six thousand pounds a year each. I wish his Royal Highness so well that I am sorry there is such an increase of expense more than in former times, where there was more money a great deal, and really I think it would have been more for the Prince’s interest, if his counsellers had thought it proper to have advised him to live only like a great man, and to give the reasons for it; and in doing so he would have made a better figure, and have been safer; for nobody that does not get by it themselves can possibly think the contrary method a right one.” The Duchess of Marlborough to Lord Stair, 1738.
But though the pall of debt hung heavy over the Prince, yet there was hope ahead, for even as far back as 1737—it must have been the very end of the year—Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, writes to Lord Stair:—
“The courtiers talk much of a reconciliation. If there is any design to compass that, surely it was as ill-judged as everything else to publish such a character of the King’s son all over England.”[58]
From a wall of an alcove in the Prince of Wales’s garden at Cliefden, Bucks.
“Say, Frederick, fixed in a retreat like this,
Can ought be wanting to complete thy bliss?
Here, where the charms of Art with Nature join