There can be little doubt from an incident which followed that in this demand for a wife, the Prince had in his mind his old love, his cousin Wilhelmina, still unmarried.
The King, his father, however, had no intention whatever of uniting his son with that Princess; he and the King of Prussia had been quarrelling for years, even going the length of challenging one another to single combat, an encounter which would have been exceedingly grotesque but for the redeeming point that though George the Second was very little, yet he was undoubtedly plucky for his size, and would have given a good account of himself in any case. But, “unfortunately,” as some historians put it, no mortal combat came off, and Europe had to put up with the two sovereigns for some years longer. The King, as usual, talked the matter of his son’s request over with his Queen, especially the part about the £100,000 a year, which her Majesty was dead against, she had all along resisted the demand of the Prince of Wales for a regular income, and this opposition being persevered in on her part had undoubtedly made matters worse between them.
The King and Queen’s talk resulted in the conclusion that it would be cheaper to marry him off and make him an allowance than to keep on paying some of his debts, therefore having put their heads together for the last time on the subject, they sent a message by five of the Privy Council, proposing to the Prince of Wales a marriage with the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the young lady whom the King had seen when abroad. But this was evidently not what the Prince expected, for this is what happened.
In the first place more than a year after his coming to England, when there had been a spark of revival in the double marriage scheme, Frederick had written to Hotham, the Special Envoy in Berlin, on the subject of Wilhelmina:
“Please, dear Hotham, get my marriage settled, my impatience increases daily for I am quite foolishly in love!”[32]
There is something plaintive in this message, for whatever were his faults, and they were numerous, yet this constancy to the girl he wished to make his wife was honest and admirable, and had he been given her, he might have become a different man. But Wilhelmina was a strange girl, and in her diary, written long after, affects to think it was only his characteristic obstinacy which caused the Prince to evince such affection. Perhaps it was the old tale of the sourness of the fruit which had not come her way.
When therefore the deputation of the five Privy Councillors from the King waited upon the Prince of Wales and proposed to him a marriage with the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, they evidently threw him into a state of consternation. It was not Augusta he wanted, but Wilhelmina, his cousin.
He appears to have remonstrated with some heat[33] and then to have sent for Baron Borck, the Prussian Minister.
To him he complained that his father, the King, was forcing him to marry a lady he had never seen and to renounce all hopes of “a Prussian Princess”—there could not be much doubt about the identity of this Princess.
He requested him to lay this statement before the King of Prussia. He expressed his heartfelt grief at not being allowed to take a wife from a family which he loved more than his own, and to which, from infancy, all his desires had been directed. He begged for the King of Prussia’s favour and friendship notwithstanding, and deplored that he should be denied his support. He complained, too, that he should still be under the control of his father and mother, for it was a part of King George’s scheme that the young married couple should live with him, presumably to save expense.