Avec nous toujours heureux.
It may here be stated that in the year 1735 there appeared in Paris a silly book which was attributed—by his enemies—to Prince Frederick, or said to be “inspired” by him, if that term could be applied to a children’s fairy tale, for so it was regarded for many years in France. It was translated into English and published under the title of “The Adventures of Prince Titi,” and was supposed to be a travestie of the King and Queen.
As, however, no evidence exists to connect it with the Prince of Wales, it deserves no further comment.
As an example of the way in which Prince Frederick has been misrepresented in history, Dr. Doran’s comment on the latter of the two above songs in his “Queens of the House of Hanover” will be instructive; he says with reference to the French song addressed by the Prince to the ladies with whom he was going to act in “The Judgment of Paris”:
“It was full of praise of late and deep drinking, of intercourse with the fair,” an expression liable to be misunderstood, “of stoical contempt for misfortune, of expressed indifference, whether Europe had one or many tyrants, and of a pococurantism for all things and forms, except his chère Sylvie, by whom he was good-naturedly supposed to mean his wife.”
Now Horace Walpole records the fact that “Sylvie” was the Princess of Wales, and he certainly cannot be credited with an abundance of good-natured feeling towards the Prince.
If Dr. Doran thought all he wrote, then—Dr. Doran’s knowledge of French—at least the Prince’s French—could not have been perfect.
The English verses are not good; he was bred abroad; but it is quite clear that the object of the Prince’s love-rhapsodies in the French song is his wife, though those rhapsodies are expressed in the language of the time, none too delicately. Still for a Prince to fall into passionate verse over the delightful attractions of his wife is not a matter to be jeered at; as far as we are permitted to search into the private doings of such exalted personages, history certainly conveys the impressions in divers places, that their habit was usually to fall into passionate rhapsodies over somebody else’s wife, a custom which has not been without honour in our own time.
As regards our unfortunate Prince, nobody appears to have thought him of sufficient importance to write any sort of connected history about him. When he had to be mentioned, the faithful historian appears to have dived either into Hervey’s “Memoirs” or those of Horace Walpole, and to have taken all he found there as Gospel truth without waiting to consider that both those gentlemen were reckoned among the Prince’s enemies; enemies who were not sufficiently gentlemen to treat him with common fairness.
We have but to read the satires and pamphlets of the time, many of them written or inspired by at any rate one of the above staunch adherents of the Prince’s parents, to see how much of fairness and “noblesse” was meted out to a political enemy in those days even by men of education and supposed refinement.