Prince Frederick’s vanity was piqued at the delay and he was indignant at his father’s neglect, so, early in the year 1728, he determined to take matters into his own hands. He sent Lamotte, a Hanoverian officer, on a secret mission to Berlin to Sastot, one of the Queen’s chamberlains. When Lamotte reached Berlin he went to Sastot and said: “I am the bearer of a most important confidential message. You must hide me somewhere in your house, that my arrival may remain unknown, and you must manage that one of my letters reaches the King.” Sastot promised, but asked if his business were good or evil. “It will be good if people can hold their tongues,” replied the Hanoverian, “but if they gossip it will be evil. However, as I know you are discreet, and as I require your help in obtaining an interview with the Queen, I must confide all to you. The Prince Frederick Louis intends being here in three weeks at the latest. He means to escape secretly from Hanover, brave his father’s anger, and marry the Princess. He has entrusted me with the whole affair, and has sent me here to find out if his arrival would be agreeable to the King and Queen, and if they are still anxious for this marriage. If she is capable of keeping a secret and has no suspicious people about her, will you undertake to speak to the Queen on the subject?”[28]
The same evening the chamberlain went to Court and confided to the Queen the weighty communication with which he was entrusted. The Queen was overjoyed, and the next day communicated the glad news to her daughter. “‘I shall at length see you happy, and my wishes realised at the same time; how much joy at once,’ cried the Queen. ‘I kissed her hands,’ said Wilhelmina, ‘which I covered with tears.’ ‘You are crying,’ my mother exclaimed. ‘What is the matter?’ I would not disturb her happiness, so I answered: ‘The thought of leaving you distresses me more than all the crowns of the world could delight me.’ The Queen was only the more tender towards me in consequence, and then left me. I loved this dear mother truly, and had only spoken the truth to her. She left me in a terrible state of mind. I was cruelly torn between my affection for her, and my repugnance for the Prince, but I determined to leave all to Providence, which should direct my ways.”[29]
The Queen held a reception the same evening, and, as ill-luck would have it, the English envoy Bourguait came. The Queen, forgetting her prudence, and thinking the plan was well matured, actually confided to him the Prince’s project. Bourguait, overwhelmed with astonishment, asked the Queen if it were really true. “Certainly,” she replied, “and to show you how true it is, he has sent Lamotte here, who has already informed the King of everything.” “Oh! why does your Majesty tell me this? I am wretched, for I must prevent it!” exclaimed the envoy. Greatly dismayed, the Queen asked him why. “Because I am my Sovereign’s envoy; because my office requires of me that I should inform him of so important a matter. I shall send off a messenger to England this very evening. Would to God I had known nothing of all this!” The Queen entreated him not to do so, but he was firm, and despatched the messenger to England. Thus did Queen Sophie Dorothea defeat the scheme for which she had toiled many years at the very moment of its fruition.
On receipt of the news George the Second sent Colonel Lorne to Hanover, with commands to bring the Prince over to England without an instant’s delay. When Lorne arrived at Hanover a few days later he found Prince Frederick giving a ball at Herrenhausen. He gave the King’s message, and acted with so much despatch that at the end of the ball the Prince, escorted by Lorne, and attended by only one servant, quitted Hanover for ever. His plot had failed; there was nothing else to be done. The rage and disappointment when the news of the Prince’s departure reached the Court of Berlin was very great. The King blustered and swore, called Wilhelmina “English canaille,” and beat her and her brother in a shocking manner; the Queen broke down and took to her bed; Wilhelmina fainted away. But it was all to no purpose; not only her marriage, but the double marriage scheme, vanished into thin air.[30]
Frederick did not find a warm welcome awaiting him from his parents. The Prince landed in England the first week in December (1728), and made his way to London; he arrived at St. James’s without any ceremony, and was smuggled up the backstairs as though he had been a pretender rather than the heir-apparent to the crown. “Yesterday,” we read, “His Royal Highness Prince Frederick came to Whitechapel about seven in the evening, and proceeded thence privately in a hackney coach to St. James’s. His Royal Highness alighted at the Friary, and walked down to the Queen’s backstairs, and was there conducted to her Majesty’s apartment.”[31]
It must have been a strange meeting between mother and son. The Queen received him amiably; the succession could not be altered, so she determined to make the best of him, but the King was very harsh. George had an unnatural and deep-rooted aversion to his eldest son, whom he regarded as necessarily his enemy. This peculiarity was hereditary in the House of Hanover for some generations, for the Sovereign and his first-born were always at war with one another. Some pity must be extended to the young Prince, who never had a fair chance. He was only twenty-two years of age when he came to England, and he found himself among strangers and enemies in a country of which he knew nothing. He was very shy and frightened at first, and his father’s manner did not tend to reassure him. Lord Hervey says that, “Whenever the Prince was in the room with him (the King) it put one in mind of stories that one has heard of ghosts that appear to part of the company but are invisible to the rest; and in this manner, wherever the Prince stood, though the King passed him ever so often, or ever so near, it always seemed as if the King thought the Prince filled a void of space”. The Prince did not dine in public at St. James’s the Sunday after his arrival, but the Queen suffered him to hand her into her pew at the Chapel Royal, and this was his first appearance before the English Court. But, however much his parents might slight him, the fact remained that he was, by Act of Parliament, heir to the throne, and, through the insistence of the Privy Council, the King soon after his arrival created him Prince of Wales. But he was careful not to give him the allowance of £100,000 a year which had been voted by Parliament for the Prince of Wales in the Civil List. True, Parliament had given the King control over the Prince’s income, and he exercised it by giving him only a small allowance. The young Prince quickly made friends, some of them not of a very desirable character. He had been taught to speak English fairly well, and he had pleasant manners. He had inherited from his mother a taste for letters, and he also possessed the art of dissimulation and a love of intrigue. He had not the slightest affection for either of his parents—how could he have?—and he soon began to deceive them, a task in which he found plenty to help him. Lady Bristol in one of her letters gave a very flattering account of him as being “the most agreeable young man it is possible to imagine, without being the least handsome, his person little, but very well made and genteel, a loveliness in his eyes that is indescribable, and the most obliging address that can be conceived.” The poets praised him; and one sycophant rhapsodised over him as follows:—
Fresh as a rose-bud newly blown and fair
As op’ning lilies: on whom every eye
With joy and admiration dwells. See, see
He rides his docile barb with manly grace.