Immediately after Walpole's downfall, messages were exchanged between Norfolk House and St. James's, and on February 17 father and son met and embraced at the palace. The Prince's friends came into office, and so happy was the Prince that he testified to his joy by liberating four-and-twenty prisoners from his father's Bench—the amount of their debts being added to his own. He was indeed so overcome with delight at his virtue in being reconciled to his father that he ventured upon a joke when Mr. Vane, who was notoriously in the court interest, congratulated him on his reappearance at St. James's. "A vane," quoth he to the courtier, "is a weathercock, which turns with every gust of the wind, and therefore I dislike a vane." Witty, generous Prince!
The reconciliation was shortlived, and thereafter, for the rest of his life, Frederick was again in opposition to the court; but of these later years there is little or nothing to record, save that he solicited in vain the command of the royal army in the rebellion of '45. In March, 1751, he caught cold, and on the 20th inst., while, by his bedside, Desnoyers was playing the violin to amuse him, crying, "Je sens la mort," he expired suddenly—it is said from the bursting of an abscess which had been formed by a blow from a tennis ball. The King received the news at the whist table, and, showing neither surprise nor emotion, he crossed the room to where the Countess of Yarmouth sat at another table, and, after saying simply, "Il est mort," retired to his apartments. "I lost my eldest son," he remarked subsequently, "but I am glad of it."
The writers of the day were fulsome in their praise of the deceased Prince. Robert Southy says, Frederick died "to the unspeakable affliction of his royal consort, and the unfeigned sorrow of all who knew him;" and he sums him up as "a tender and obliging husband, a fond parent, a kind master, liberal, candid and humane, a munificent patron of the arts, an unwearied friend to merit, well-disposed to assert the rights of mankind, in general, and warmly attached to the interests of Great Britain."[32] In fact, Sir Galahad and the Admirable Crichton in one! Southy was not alone in his outspoken admiration, for Mr. McCarthy reminds us of a volume issued by Oxford University, "Epicedia Oxoniensia in obitum celsissimi et desideratissimi Frederici Principis Walliæ. Here all the learned languages, and not the learned languages alone, contributed the syllables of simulated despair. Many scholastic gentlemen mourned in Greek; James Stillingfleet found vent in Hebrew; Mr. Betts concealed his tears under the cloak of the Syriac speech; George Costard sorrowed in Arabic that might have amazed Abu l'Atahiyeh; Mr. Swinton's learned sock stirred him to Phoenician and Etruscan; and Mr. Evans, full of national fire and the traditions of the bards, delivered himself, and at great length, too, in Welsh."[33] Amusing, too, was a sermon preached at Mayfair Chapel, in the course of which the preacher, lamenting the demise of the royal personage, declared that his Royal Highness "had no great parts, but he had great virtues; indeed, they degenerated into vices; he was very generous, but I hear his generosity has ruined a great many people; and then his condescension was such that he kept very bad company."
Very differently spoke those who knew the Prince. "He was indeed as false as his capacity would allow him to be, and was more capable in that walk than in any other, never having the least hesitation, from principle or fear of future detection, in telling any lie that served his future purpose. He had a much weaker understanding, and, if possible, a more obstinate temper than his father; that is, more tenacious of opinions he had once formed, though less capable of ever forming right ones. Had he had one grain of merit at the bottom of his heart, one should have had compassion for him in the situation to which his miserable poor head soon reduced him, a mother that despised him, sisters that betrayed him, a brother set up against him, and a set of servants that neglected him, and were neither of use nor capable of being of use to him, or desirous of being so."[34] So said Lord Hervey, and, though his known enmity to Frederick makes one reluctant to accept his estimate, yet it must be admitted that his remarks are borne out by others well qualified to judge. "A poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch, that nobody loves, that nobody believes, that nobody will trust, and that will trust everybody by turns, and that everybody by turns will impose upon, betray, mislead, and plunder." Thus Sir Robert Walpole, who, during the Prince's lifetime, thought that, if the King should die, the Queen and her unmarried children would be in a bad way. "I do not know any people in the world so much to be pitied," he said to Hervey, "as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day in the drawing-room at that door from which we this moment came, bred up in state, in affluence, caressed and courted, and to go at once from that into dependence upon a brother who loves them not, and whose extravagance and covetousness will make him grudge every guinea they spend, as it must come out of a purse not sufficient to defray the expenses of his own vices."
A later generation has not been more kind. "If," said Leigh Hunt, "George the First was a commonplace man of the quiet order, and George the Second of the bustling, Frederick was of an effeminate sort, pretending to taste and gallantry, and possessed of neither. He affected to patronise literature in order to court popularity, and because his father and grandfather had neglected it; but he took no real interest in the literati, and would meanly stop their pensions when he got out of humour. He passed his time in intriguing against his father, and hastening the ruin of a feeble constitution by sorry amours." "His best quality was generosity," Horace Walpole has recorded; "his worst insincerity and indifference to truth, which appeared so early that Earl Stanhope wrote to Lord Sunderland, 'He has his father's head, and his mother's heart.'"[35]
What is to be said in his favour? That through his intercession Flora Macdonald, imprisoned for harbouring the Chevalier, received her liberty: that when Richard Glover, the author of "Leonidas," fell upon evil days he sent him five hundred pounds; that he was a plausible speaker,[36] fond of music, the author of two songs, and had sufficient sense of humour to institute an occasional practical joke. On the other hand, he was a gambler and a spendthrift without a notion of common honesty; he was unstable and untruthful, a feeble enemy and a lukewarm friend; and is, indeed, best disposed of in the well-known verse:
"Here lies Fred,
Who was alive, and is dead.
Had it been his father,
I had much rather.
Had it been his brother,
Still better than another.
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her.
Had it been the whole generation,
Still better for the nation.
But since 'tis only Fred,
Who was alive, and is dead,
There's no more to be said."