[6] Lady Hervey’s Letters.
Frederick Prince of Wales died suddenly on March 20, 1751, to the great grief of his wife and children, and the consternation of his political adherents. The Prince had been suffering from a chill, but no one thought that there was any danger. On the eighth day of his illness, in the evening, he was sitting up in bed, listening to the performance of Desnoyers, the violinist, when he was seized with a violent fit of coughing. He put his hand upon his heart and cried, “Je sens la mort!” The Princess, who was in the room, flew to her husband’s assistance, but before she could reach his side he was dead. Later it was shown that the immediate cause of death was the breaking of an abscess in his side, which had been caused by a blow from a cricket ball a few weeks before. Cricket had been recently introduced into England, and Frederick was one of the first to encourage the game, which soon became national. He often played in matches at Cliveden and Kew.
No Prince has been more maligned than Frederick Prince of Wales, and none on less foundation. He opposed Walpole and the Whig domination, and therefore the Whig pamphleteers of the time, and Whig historians since, have poured on him the vials of their wrath, and contemptuously dismissed him as half fool and half rogue. But the utmost that can be proved against him is that he was frivolous, and unduly fond of gambling and gallantry. These failings were common to the age, and in his case they were largely due to his neglected youth. Badly educated, disliked by his parents, to whom he grew up almost a stranger, and surrounded from the day of his arrival in England by malcontents, parasites and flatterers, it would have needed a much stronger man than Frederick to resist the evil influences around him. His public utterances, and there is no real ground for doubting their sincerity, go to show that he was a prince of liberal and enlightened views, a friend of peace and a lover of England. It is probable that, had he been spared to ascend the throne, he would have made a better king than either his father or grandfather. It is possible that he would have made a better king than his son, for, though he was by no means so good a man, he was more pliant, more tolerant, and far less obstinate. Speculation is idle in such matters, but it is unlikely, if Frederick had been on the throne instead of George III., that he would have encouraged the policy which lost us our American colonies. Dying when he did, all that can be said of Frederick politically is that he never had a fair chance. Keeping the mean between two extreme parties in the state he was made the butt of both, but the fact remains that he attracted to his side some of the ablest among the moderate men who cared little for party and much for the state. Certainly nothing in his life justified the bitter Jacobite epigram circulated shortly after his death:—
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,