Meanwhile, the young Princess waited patiently at Greenwich Palace for something to occur; she remained there it is said for forty-eight hours without anyone coming near her, except the Prince, this being a result, without doubt, of the King’s orders.
His Majesty, however, came down so far from his great altitude as to send the poor little Princess a message from himself and his family:
“Their compliments, and they hoped she was well.”
This was being taken to the warm bosom of a loving family with a vengeance! And yet the little Princess seemed to put up with it without a murmur. Perhaps she confided all her disappointments to her doll, and wept over them in secret with it, or what was still more probable, they did things differently in Germany and it was no surprise to her. Certainly the Royal Family could not have sent a barer message if the Prince had been going to marry Cinderella.
The Prince, however, was a gentleman and certainly did his best to make up for the coldness of his relatives whose excuse was that they were so bound up with etiquette that until Augusta became Princess of Wales they did not know upon what footing to treat her.
Frederick came down to Greenwich the next day after his first visit in his state barge and dined with his bride elect; then he did the exact thing to please a girl. He took her out for a row in his flag-bedecked barge on the Thames, with a band playing sweet music before them, guns firing from the river craft, and the people cheering them on the bank; these seeing their bright young faces, thought how happy the Prince of Wales must be, not knowing of course anything about his cousin Wilhelmina over in Berlin.
It is not a far-fetched idea to imagine that the Prince thought of his lost-love on that journey on the river—they went as far as the Tower and back again—and wondered how she would have looked in the same place beside him. It is just what a lover under such circumstances could not well help doing.
From “Caroline the Illustrious,” by permission of Messrs, Longmans, Green & Co.
PRINCESS AUGUSTA.
Wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales.
The account in the Gentleman’s Magazine for April, 1736, concludes by saying that the happy couple returned to Greenwich together, and “supped in public,” which meant that the young people took their meal near an open window for the people to see them.