The young prince in Hanover

Frederick spent his early childhood as a focus of attention at the Hanoverian court. His development was closely supervised by his grandfather, who in September 1713 appointed Johann Friedrich Grote, of a senior Hanoverian court family, as his governor and senior tutor, and a Latin scholar, Nikolaus Ernst von Neubour, as sub-tutor. This regime remained in place after 1714, when most of the royal family moved to their new home in Great Britain. Frederick was left behind in Hanover as a representative of the electoral family. The choice of a seven-year-old boy as George I's representative was not a difficult decision to take; George I wanted to emphasize that the direct line of the dynasty was not abandoning Hanover, and the option of leaving his son George Augustus there would have been unwise, destabilizing the dynasty in both Britain and Germany by apparently excluding the new prince of Wales from the political and social life of the London court, while allowing him opportunities for independent action on the continent that could have made a breach between father and son more perilous than disagreement on British soil. George I's youngest brother, Ernest Augustus, also remained in Germany to ensure that the dynasty's interests were protected and that government was not entirely left to ministers.

Frederick acted as the ceremonial head of the Hanoverian court during the long absences of George I, where he received visiting diplomats and royal and aristocratic travellers. Care was taken that he learned English, under a French protestant tutor, Mr Hanet, and during his grandfather's reign he met several British ministers, including John, Baron Carteret, and Charles, Viscount Townshend, and some young noblemen who diverted to Hanover while on the grand tour, such as John Hervey, later Lord Hervey.

Frederick was involved as far as possible in the process of making the Hanoverian royal family British, despite his residence in Hanover. In 1716 both he and his great-uncle Ernest Augustus, by this time reigning bishop of Osnabrück, were made knights of the Garter at a ceremony at the Leine Palace. In Britain Frederick was known in this period as the duke of Gloucester, even though he was never actually given this title either in a royal warrant or letters patent; however, this title identified him with a previous boy protestant heir, William, son of Queen Anne, who had died aged eleven in 1700, and so Frederick became the embodiment of a lost promise that could in his person be fulfilled. Ragnhild Hatton suggested that among the strongest support for the removal of Frederick to Britain was that which came from English clergy who hoped to be able to educate Frederick in the principles of the established church in Oxford or Cambridge. If this was a wish for a monarch brought up in the Church of England like Queen Anne, they were to be disappointed; George I may well have wished his grandson to avoid becoming embroiled in the intellectual disputes of the established church at an impressionable age. However, as he grew older he was kept informed of British affairs. In 1723 he was recorded as receiving a packet of reports of parliamentary proceedings, probably a regular occurrence, and in the same year he received models of British warships to study.

George I was an early advocate of inoculation for smallpox, a cause also supported by Frederick's mother, Caroline. Both had supported Charles Maitland's experiments with smallpox inoculation at Newgate prison in 1721, and in 1723 Maitland was commissioned (with a fee of £1000) to visit Hanover and inoculate Frederick. Maitland reported that although uncomfortable from the eruption, Frederick was still able to entertain his attendants 'with that pleasant facetious humour, which is easy and natural to him' (BL, Sloane MS 4076, fol. 98), and although he complained of soreness on his skin Maitland did not expect there to be any lasting scars.

Frederick was not forgotten in his grandfather's iconography, for his portrait was included in the painted hall at Greenwich Hospital by Sir James Thornhill, derived from sketches made on a visit by the painter to Hanover in 1719. Yet, as his parents became established as prince and princess of Wales without him, his German upbringing had no part to play in their emphatically British shadow monarchy. Family relationships were broken. Frederick occasionally corresponded with his eldest sister, Anne, but they do not seem to have developed a close bond, and from 1721, when Caroline produced a healthy, British-born prince, William Augustus, the prince and princess of Wales were able to show physical evidence on British soil of the permanence of the protestant succession. Frederick and William were made British peers at the same time in 1726, Frederick becoming duke of Edinburgh, and William duke of Cumberland, but the fact that Frederick was nineteen and William five at the time of their ennoblement could have already suggested how William's profile was being enhanced at Frederick's expense. George I is said to have arranged, informally, Frederick's first engagement, to his cousin Wilhelmine, daughter of his aunt Sophia Dorothea, who had married Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, and according to Wilhelmine's memoirs the wedding was to take place in Hanover in summer 1727, but was cancelled following the death of George I at Osnabrück on 11/22 June 1727.

No moves were made to bring Frederick to London on the accession of George II; Frederick was able to lead the mourning at his grandfather's funeral, and act as the focus of Hanoverian celebrations for George II's coronation, without interference or guidance from Britain. At Westminster Abbey, Frederick was forgotten as his six-year-old brother William walked in state as the embodiment of the continuance of the protestant succession. The issue of Frederick's removal to London was left unresolved, perhaps because negotiations were continuing for the marriage of Frederick to his cousin Wilhelmine of Prussia, although without enthusiasm from either George II or Friedrich Wilhelm I, and George II and the British government were reluctant to give Frederick an establishment before the terms of his marriage were finalized.

Frederick's maturity led him to test his capacity for wielding authority in Germany; his position was enhanced by the death of Ernest Augustus in August 1728, which left him the only male representative of the dynasty on German soil. It was rumoured that he visited Berlin that summer in order to meet Wilhelmine and revive negotiations for their marriage. This story was untrue, but he did meddle in the relations between Hanover and Prussia by accelerating marriage negotiations between his cousins Princess Frederica of Prussia and Wilhelm Friedrich, margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, without involving George II. This insult to his parents may have been intended to emphasize that he was an independent actor and force a speedy resolution to the issue of his marriage, but instead it alienated the kings of Great Britain and Prussia from each other, removed any real prospect that he might marry Wilhelmine, terminated the alliance between Hanover and Prussia carefully maintained by George I, and allowed Prussia to secure the reversion of the Rhineland duchies of Berg and Jülich, enhancing Prussia's power in northern Germany at Hanover's expense. Following this disaster, George II decided that his son would be more dangerous in Hanover than in London. On 4 December 1728 Frederick was abruptly taken from a ball in Hanover by emissaries from his father and almost secretly conducted to Great Britain, to the bewilderment of most British diplomats.

Prince of Wales

Following Frederick's arrival in London on 7 December 1728 os, he was created prince of Wales on 8 January 1729. Frederick was at first placed in the queen's apartments with his younger brothers and sisters; this was both a reprimand from George and Caroline, and a reminder that he was in tutelage as a British prince. None the less he was an adult male, in contrast to his favoured younger brother, and this had to be acknowledged: on 21 January 1729 Frederick took his seat in the Lords, and so demonstrated the dynasty's participation in British institutions. Frederick's early social calendar allowed him to affirm his espousal of the protestant cause that justified his family's place on the British throne. The audience Frederick gave to a Quaker delegation associated him with toleration, while his investiture as chancellor of the University of Dublin emphasized his and the dynasty's commitment to the established church.

Frederick's parents had reaped little political advantage from their period of estrangement from George I, and they had no intention of allowing their son to try to do better. Frederick was kept on a tight rein. His income was restricted to £2000 per month out of George II's receipts from the civil list, plus £9000 per annum from the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall. No application was made for a separate parliamentary grant as had been enjoyed by George II when prince of Wales. Frederick carried over £100,000 of debts from Hanover, which was not a recommendation to a frugal administration, nor to a British court that prided functionality before ostentation. His income was sufficient to provide for a household of his own, assembling a coalition of former employees of George I, young men that he had met in Hanover such as Henry Brydges, marquess of Carnarvon, and nominees of the government. Frederick's independence was real, but limited; his small court was established as a satellite of his parents' establishment and of the Walpole ministry. When George II left for his first visit as king and elector to Hanover in May 1729, Frederick was passed over as regent in favour of his mother, an action repeated on subsequent occasions, and interpreted as a snub. During the king's absence Frederick made several public appearances and visits to the nobility at their town and country houses, usually in the company of his mother and siblings so that he seemed to be largely under his mother's wing. He also began to advertise his cultural interests, organizing at least one theatrical performance at Richmond in 1729.

Frederick's financial situation may have tempted him, in summer 1730, to consider a marriage with a British heiress: many decades later, Horace Walpole reported that Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, had offered Frederick £100,000 if he would marry her granddaughter Lady Diana Spencer. Frederick wrote of his passion for a 'ldy Dye' (Suffolk RO, Ickworth papers 941/57/1, quoted in Vivian, chap. 13) about this time, but however 'unprecedentedly cordial' (F. Harris, 281) the relationship between the duchess of Marlborough and Frederick's parents, it was unlikely that they would have allowed the marriage of their eldest son to a commoner, or that Frederick would have closed off the opportunity, however remote it then seemed, for a more prestigious marriage with a European princess.

Frederick's closest friend in his early years in Britain was John, Lord Hervey, Queen Caroline's protégé and from 1730 vice-chamberlain to the royal household. Friends and courtiers, such as Hervey and John, Baron Ashburnham, his lord of the bedchamber, could advise him on artistic tastes as well as the political landscape. Frederick's early efforts to demonstrate his independence from his parents took the form of house-building. The aforementioned visits of 1729 led to Frederick's making the acquaintance of patrons such as Richard Boyle, third earl of Burlington, and also William Kent, who became Frederick's architect. In 1730 Frederick leased a house and grounds at Kew from Lady Elizabeth St André, sister of William Capel, third earl of Essex, one of Frederick's early hosts in London and an enthusiast for the arts. Kent extensively remodelled the house, adding two new wings and drastically altering the remainder. The house, known as the White House, was adjacent to the Dutch House, retained for Frederick's sisters, and so maintained Frederick's close association with the rest of the royal family, while at the same time emphasizing his individual connoisseurship. The house included a chimneypiece by Michael Rysbrack and carvings by John Boson, who had worked for Burlington at Chiswick. Frederick also acquired 50 acres at Kew to use as a farm; he thus reinvented himself as a country gentleman in miniature within easy reach of London.

Frederick also began to build his art collection. With the house at Kew, Frederick took possession of the extensive collection of seventeenth-century portraits assembled by Lady Elizabeth's great-aunt Dorothy (née Bennet), Lady Capel of Tewkesbury (d. 1721), including many by Anthony Van Dyck. The acquisition may have sparked an interest in seventeenth-century painting, if it did not already exist, that led Frederick to acquire many paintings by Van Dyck, Rubens, and others, many of which had once belonged to Charles I but had been dispersed under the Commonwealth. Frederick's first principal painter was Philip Mercier, who held the post from 1729 to 1736. As well as painting two portraits of Frederick, and three versions of The Music Party, which depicted Frederick playing the cello in the company of his sisters Anne, Amelia, and Caroline [see under Amelia, Princess], he bought pictures and books for Frederick's collection, although Mercier's contribution to its final shape seems to have been minor. Frederick's patronage of Mercier, a follower of Watteau, has been used to show Frederick as an early British supporter of the rococo style, but Frederick bought very little rococo work, except the silverware of George Wickes, and his other portrait commissions were from painters who exhibited a variety of differing influences. A more dramatic display was the barge designed by Kent that Frederick first used on the Thames on 15 July 1732. 67 feet long, surmounted by marine carvings, and with its own ‘state house’ for a cabin, it was both aesthetically more pleasing and faster in the water than any of the king's barges. It continued to be used by the royal family into Queen Victoria's reign, and in the early twenty-first century was still enjoying a distinguished retirement at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Construction was supervised by Charles Calvert, fifth Baron Baltimore, who had succeeded Ashburnham as Frederick's lord of the bedchamber in 1731. Baltimore also acted as a buyer for Frederick, travelling to Paris in 1735.

A mistress, music, and a garden

Frederick made other conspicuous assertions of majesty-in-waiting in 1732. One was the birth of his first child, Cornwall Fitz-Frederick, on 5 June 1732. The boy's mother was Anne Vane (d. 1736), one of Queen Caroline's maids of honour, daughter of Gilbert Vane, second Baron Barnard, and Mary, née Randyll. Lord Hervey and William Stanhope, first Baron Harrington, disputed the parentage, but Frederick was sufficiently certain of his fatherhood to set Anne Vane up in a series of impressive town houses and appoint Fitz-Frederick warden of the stannaries and master of Dartmoor Forest. Frederick's relationship with Vane marked the end of his friendship with Hervey. Hervey had once expressed the hope that their friendship could rival the passion Hervey enjoyed with Stephen Fox, and he regarded Frederick's liaison with Vane as a betrayal. Frederick also took George Dodington as his political adviser about this time, further aggravating the eclipsed Hervey. Dodington, like Hervey, held office from the crown (as a lord of the Treasury), but he was not as closely identified with the court as was Hervey. The last fruit of the friendship between Frederick and Hervey was a play, The Modish Couple, which opened at Drury Lane, London, on 10 January 1732. It was credited to Charles Bodens, an army officer, but was probably written by Hervey and Frederick. Frederick appeared on the third performance, the author's benefit, but the play was unpopular and on the fourth night was booed from the stage.

Frederick's other blow to assert his independence in 1732 was his sponsorship of the Opera of the Nobility, established as a rival to the Haymarket season presided over by Handel. This was a natural development of Frederick's interest in theatre and music. Hervey presented it as a deliberate attempt to polarize society between supporters of the court, who continued to attend Handel's operas, and supporters of Frederick attending the Opera of the Nobility, but the case was not clear-cut, and in the first and last of the four seasons between 1733 and 1737 in which Handel and the new opera company presented rival productions, each company received Frederick's £250 bounty. It may have sometimes suited Frederick to identify himself wholly with the younger generation of aristocrats who supported the new opera, but he could not afford to offend Britain's greatest composer or his clientele for very long.

Frederick's political education had been furthered by Dodington, who knew the levers of patronage from the vantage point of a borough patron as well as that of a courtier. Frederick's new town residence, Carlton House, acquired from Burlington in March 1733, was adjacent to Dodington's home in Pall Mall, and the two properties were joined by a connecting passage, which critics said was used for Frederick to visit prostitutes procured by Dodington. In contrast to the rebuilding of the White House at Kew, Frederick seems to have sanctioned little rebuilding beyond the remodelling of some interiors (including a library) and the building of a new façade. The house's purchase cost £6000, a sum that Frederick borrowed from his treasurer, John Hedges, and was paid off with £1000 from Frederick's own resources and a further £5000 loan from Dodington.

Carlton House's importance for Frederick lay in its potential for display. Its location at St James's was an attraction, as it could be presented as part of a complex of royal residences, both an extension of and in opposition to St James's Palace. It came with a large garden alongside St James's Park, which was extensively replanned by Kent. The garden at Carlton House may have been the first formal garden in Britain to eschew a geometric plan: Sir Thomas Robinson, a near neighbour, wrote that 'it has the appearance of beautiful nature, and without being told, one would imagine art had no part in the finishing' (Coombs, 154); Kent was applying similar ideas to the grounds of Stowe, the Buckinghamshire seat of Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, at the same time. Kent added a garden building, the octagon, in which paintings from Frederick's collection were displayed. Peter Scheemakers and Michael Rysbrack were among the sculptors who were commissioned to provide garden ornaments, Rysbrack contributing the two busts of Alfred the Great and Edward, the Black Prince, that were installed at the entrance to the octagon in 1736. During his lifetime Frederick planted over 15,200 trees in the garden, and despite its 9 acres, the garden at Carlton House has been claimed as the ancestor of the garden squares that were to grow up in London.

Frederick's plans for his residences and the expansion of his collection of art and books placed a great strain on his resources. His allowance from the civil list still languished at £24,000 a year, and his father's failure to find him a wife helped push him further towards outright opposition. The excise crisis of 1733 tempted him to come out in open opposition to the Walpole administration, but he was persuaded not to by Dodington, and in the following year he did not use his patronage of borough seats to shape an opposition party in the Commons. By this time he had new political advisers: his new equerry George Lyttelton, the first of Frederick's advisers to be younger than the prince, and (at Lyttelton's suggestion) Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield. Despite the opposition of both to the Excise Bill, they wished Frederick to bide his time. Frederick had also been courted by other opposition groups. It was believed by John Perceval, first earl of Egmont, that the tory leader Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, had advised his followers to try to build a coalition around Frederick. For the moment Frederick remained connected to the court; his presidency of St George's Hospital, adopted in 1734, can be viewed in these terms as much as expressing Frederick's interest in voluntary institutions, as the hospital's founders included court physicians, and the wards were named after members of the administration.

Marriage

Frederick regarded the wedding of his sister Anne to William, prince of Orange, in 1734 as an insult; the message conveyed by the union was that Anne, not Frederick, was to be first relied upon to secure the protestant succession. Following his sister's marriage Frederick formally requested that his parents redress the snub by finding him a bride. While he waited, his resentment at his parents' treatment of him was expressed in a satire, the Histoire du Prince Titi, published in 1736; it was probably at least co-written by Frederick, and depicts its prince as a hero of the people who replaces his narrow-minded father on the throne after the king tries to exclude him from the succession—reflecting the lingering wish of George and Caroline that their eldest son should never be king of Great Britain. Eventually, in 1735, on George II's next visit to Hanover, the king selected Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719–1772) as the prospective princess of Wales. This news provided Frederick with a reason finally to repudiate Anne Vane, whom he had neglected following the birth of their short-lived daughter Amelia in 1733, and who (apparently without Frederick's knowledge) had renewed her old affair with Hervey. Both Fitz-Frederick and Vane were dead by the end of March 1736, providing Frederick with, if not a clean slate, then at least no unwanted family responsibilities to disturb his marital plans. Frederick had also by this time acquired a new female companion whom his enemies described as his mistress; if so, Frederick was more discreet about the sexual nature of their relationship. Lady Jane Hamilton (d. 1753) was the youngest daughter of James Hamilton, sixth earl of Abercorn, and his wife, Elizabeth Reading, and was the third wife of Lord Archibald Hamilton, younger brother of George Hamilton, first earl of Orkney, hence her usual style of Lady Archibald Hamilton. (Orkney, a friend of George I, had been visited by Frederick at Cliveden in 1729.) They were frequently seen in each other's company and she perhaps also fulfilled the role of slightly older mentor figure previously enjoyed by Hervey and Dodington.

Augusta landed at Greenwich on 25 April 1736; Frederick sailed down the Thames in his barge to meet her at the Queen's House before dining with her in public. Frederick's journey down the Thames with Augusta to the Tower of London was calculated to arouse attention, although his plan for Augusta to travel to St James's in a carriage with a guard of honour was vetoed by George II. The wedding, on 27 April 1736 at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace, was a public-relations triumph for Frederick, despite the ceremonial being less grand than that enjoyed by his sister. Handel provided a new anthem, 'Sing unto God', for the wedding service, and also celebrated the marriage with the opera Atalanta. The couple appeared devoted to one another, and Augusta declared her wish to follow Frederick's wishes in everything; she even persuaded George II to sanction the appointment of Lady Archibald Hamilton as her mistress of the robes and keeper of her privy purse. The king also raised Frederick's allowance to £50,000.

Opposition to Walpole

Among the speeches in the Commons congratulating Frederick on his marriage were two from George Lyttelton and William Pitt, arguing that the wedding had been forced on George II and Walpole by popular demand. The speeches implicitly flattered Frederick by depicting him as a people's hero, and represented part of a bid by the group of ‘Cobham's cubs’—the young opposition whigs sponsored by Frederick's fellow gardening enthusiast Viscount Cobham—to make Frederick their ally and an important weapon in their battle against Walpole. Frederick's favour was also sought by older whigs. When in February 1737 Frederick went to the Commons in a bid to force his father to increase his allowance, William Pulteney, not Lyttelton or Pitt, proposed the motion demanding that £100,000 be settled on the prince.

Frederick may have felt that as the threat of outright opposition had brought him his marriage, more systematic acts of defiance would win a more comfortable financial settlement. This was the assumption of the king and the ministry. In anticipation of the opposition motion, Walpole persuaded George II to settle £50,000 on the prince as an independent allowance, as well as giving Augusta a separate jointure, also of £50,000, bringing their joint income to the level enjoyed by George II and Caroline when prince and princess of Wales. Frederick's response was to declare that 'the Affair was now out of his Hands, and therefore he could give no Answer to it' (GM, 7.483), thereby placing his faith in the efforts of the opposition and not the Walpole ministry's proposals. The motion was defeated; some of Frederick's erstwhile allies, such as Dodington and his followers, voted with the government rather than be identified with a strategy that cut into the royal prerogative.

Frederick's next act forced a decisive breach with his parents' court and the ministry. On the evening of 31 July 1737, while the royal family was residing at Hampton Court, Augusta went into labour. Despite the protestations of his staff, including Lady Archibald Hamilton, Frederick insisted on leaving immediately for St James's, where there were few servants and no bed prepared; Augusta gave birth to a daughter there before midnight. The episode was greeted with incredulity by the court, but Frederick insisted in his letter to Queen Caroline on 1 August that he had always intended that Augusta should lie in at St James's, and had already told the queen and his sisters so. The birth of an heir in London meant that Frederick could more easily act as the focus of metropolitan celebrations of the birth, and distance George and Caroline from the securing of the protestant succession in a further generation. George II maintained a show of decorum until after the baptism of Frederick's daughter, also Augusta [see below], on 29 August, after which the king and queen refused to see Frederick. On 10 September Frederick was ordered to leave St James's Palace with his family as soon as it was safe for his wife to travel; the guard was withdrawn from Frederick's residences; furthermore, anyone who held office from the king was barred from entering Frederick's presence. Frederick left St James's on 12 September to the acclaim of the crowd, whom he hailed with the words 'God bless the King and God bless the poor' (Hervey, 3.822). He could now plausibly present himself as a people's prince, on whom the king had turned his back. The death in November of Caroline, who the court had once hoped would act as an intermediary between king and prince, did nothing to help matters, Caroline confirming her hatred of her son on her deathbed.

The separation of the households lost Frederick those officers who preferred the security of government employment, and confirmed his alignment with the opponents of Walpole. He met Pulteney, Carteret, and Sir William Wyndham at Kew in October, formally appointed Lyttelton as his secretary that month, and in February 1738 made William Pitt a groom of the bedchamber. Pitt's brother Thomas Pitt became assay master of the stannaries in March 1738 and Frederick's election manager, with the intention of returning opposition candidates in the boroughs where Frederick, through the duchy of Cornwall, was the dominant property owner. Bolingbroke returned to Britain from France in July 1738 in the hope that Frederick would take a more outspoken role. This was unlikely, however, given that Frederick still needed to be able to rebuild his relationship with George II should he cease to be a proscribed person. Furthermore, opposition rhetoric militated against Frederick becoming a party man. Bolingbroke's The Idea of a Patriot King circulated in manuscript about this time, and for the more idealistic of Frederick's political allies the document expressed their hope that Frederick would become a virtuous king who would restore the mixed constitution, corrupted by Walpole's domination of the monarch and the executive's control of the legislature. This message appealed to disenchanted whigs and proscribed tories alike; Frederick commissioned a miniature of Charles I in 1738, and was happier than either his father or grandfather to be seen as the heir of the Stuarts. Behind the rhetoric, the opposition leaders manoeuvred to gain ascendancy over Frederick while waiting for the moral revolution.

Without his apartments in St James's, and with a growing family, Frederick needed a town residence that was larger than Carlton House, and late in 1737 acquired the lease of Norfolk House, the town residence of the duke and duchess of Norfolk in St James's Square. Frederick extensively refurbished the house, consuming more of his slender resources. It was at Norfolk House that Frederick's second child and eldest son, the future George III, was born on 24 May 1738. Frederick also needed a country house that was larger than the White House at Kew. In 1738 he began to make quarterly payments for Cliveden, which he rented from Anne O'Brien, née Hamilton, suo jure countess of Orkney, daughter of the earl, who had died in 1737, and her husband, William O'Brien, fourth earl of Inchiquin. Unlike Norfolk House, Cliveden did not undergo any major alterations. In 1739 he additionally bought Park Place, near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, from Lord Archibald Hamilton, which became a base for hunting.

Excluded from court, Frederick found that much more of his time was his own. A visit to Bath in October and November 1738 helped him to show that he and his wife were determined to be part of the modern, fashionable world, and provided a spectacle in which Frederick, at the centre of fireworks and illuminations, could profess his loyalty to the king and to the patriot whig causes of English trade and English liberty. In November he prohibited his courtiers from wearing fabrics that were not made in England. He had assumed patronage of racing at Epsom, where he kept stables, and in 1739 took the lease on a house there, called Durdens, from one of his gentlemen of the bedchamber, Francis, seventh Baron North. As well as racing, Frederick was an enthusiastic huntsman (he commissioned several paintings of hunting scenes from John Wootton) and also captained cricket sides for Surrey and London.

In January 1739 Frederick voted in the House of Lords for the first time, against the convention of Pardo with Spain, which failed to meet the demands of one of his constituencies, the City of London merchants; Pitt had led the attack in the Commons. When war with Spain broke out in October, Frederick appeared in the City to toast the crowd. The parliamentary diarist William Hay thought that Frederick entirely turned himself over to the tories, led by Wyndham, during 1739, but Frederick's court remained broadly composed. He visited Lord Cobham at Stowe in July 1739, where he was welcomed into the heart of patriot whig imagery, Stowe landscape gardens. His major contribution to patriot propaganda was his commissioning of Alfred, a masque written by James Thomson and David Mallet, with music by Thomas Arne, staged at Cliveden on 1 August 1740. The event projected Frederick as the successor to Alfred the Great, depicted as 'piously English' and advised by 'an ancient hermit living in a cave by the Athelney marshes' (Gerrard, 135). The masque was performed by the Covent Garden company in the small amphitheatre in Cliveden's gardens, and included 'Rule, Britannia!', which remains Frederick's most obvious contribution to Britain's self-image.

Reconciliation with George II

The general election of 1741 provided Frederick with a substantial parliamentary party of about twenty-five. Frederick's members helped bring Walpole's majority down to twenty-six, and assisted in forcing Walpole from office early in 1742. His conduct once Walpole fell revealed his lack of political sure-footedness. After allowing his allies in January 1742 to negotiate with Walpole, in February he supported demands that tory leaders should be included in the new ministry, and opposed Pulteney for making easy terms with the court. Pulteney then met Frederick and emerged as his new advocate, negotiating an agreement with George II that gave Frederick £100,000 per annum as an independent allowance; George II agreed to it reluctantly and after much wavering the sum passed the Commons in May 1742 only with the stipulation that it should be paid last from the exchequer.

During the Wilmington administration Frederick seems to have tried to keep as many friends as possible from his former opposition colleagues while remaining faithful to his reconciliation with his father; although many of his allies were happy to be found offices in the government at Frederick's request, others, particularly Pitt and Lyttelton, disagreed with both the men and the measures of the new ministry. Ayscough wrote in August 1742 that 'The Prince has neither Power, Influence, or Credit—His interfering for any one is the sure way of ruining their Interest—Undone with his own Party—neglected by the Court' (R. Harris, 393). Frederick admired both Pitt and Lyttelton and tried to keep them loyal to him. He affected neutrality on the issue of British subsidies to Hanoverian troops which the Cobhamites opposed throughout the early 1740s; Frederick, however, maintained ties to Hanoverian courtiers and was defensive of the interests of the electorate.

The reconciliation with George II had even less success on a personal level than it had on a political one. Without the diplomacy and interest of Caroline to break the boulders in a rocky relationship, Frederick was an even more semi-detached member of the court than he had been before 1737. Frederick had been a focus of the movement that had forced Britain to go to war, but was marginalized once the War of the Austrian Succession began. He was refused permission to take up arms and add practical experience to the military theory he had learned in Hanover, and instead had to see his brother Cumberland be compared by versifiers in the press to the Black Prince and Henry V, antecedents who Frederick had once thought would be his exclusively. The most Frederick could do was commission paintings of battles from the War of the Spanish Succession from John Wootton for Leicester House. During the Jacobite rising of 1745–6, Frederick was reduced to staging a mock siege of Carlisle Castle as part of a dessert, ridiculing the military campaign that was bringing his brother a heroic reputation in London. Furthermore, Frederick's political alliances had continued to disintegrate. Lyttelton joined the ministry in December 1744 as part of the reconstruction that excluded Carteret; as Frederick admired Carteret as a war minister, Lyttelton was dismissed as Frederick's secretary. Pitt joined a ministry dominated by Henry Pelham and other old enemies of Frederick in February 1746, and also lost his place in the prince's household. Another long-term adviser, the prince's mistress Lady Archibald Hamilton, had resigned her place with the princess the previous summer.

Frederick seems to have had no further mistress and instead remained faithful to his wife. Despite his political marginalization, Frederick's and Augusta's large family ensured their significance in dynastic terms. Their first two children were followed by Edward Augustus (1739–1767); Elizabeth Caroline (1740–1759); William Henry (1743–1805); Henry Frederick (1745–1790); Louisa Anne (1749–1768); and Frederick William (1750–1765). In 1743 Frederick acquired the lease on Leicester House, his parents' home when prince and princess of Wales, which provided better accommodation for his growing family than Norfolk House. A painting commissioned from Barthélémy du Pan in 1746 showed the children playing in the garden at Carlton House, incorporating the children into Frederick's iconography. Frederick maintained his reputation for philanthropy by accepting the presidency of Bath General Hospital in 1746.

Frederick had hoped that he would be able to support the ministry 'as a Son, and not as a Courtier' (R. Harris, 394); this translated into respect from his father coupled with a decisive voice in parliament and the ministry. Frederick never received the first and he lacked the ability to establish the second. The election of 1747, called early in apprehension of Frederick's disenchantment with the ministry, was calculated to raise a Pelham-dominated Commons; anticipation of the election's intended result confirmed Frederick's return to opposition.

Leader of the opposition

Frederick again worked on coalition-building, issuing the 'Carlton House declaration' on 4 June 1747. This offered the tories an end to 'Distinctions of Party' as well as place and militia bills, a civil list fixed at £800,000 a year rather than one that fluctuated with the hereditary revenues of the crown, and a £300 p.a. qualification for JPs. This document was not accepted by the tory leaders until the following February, and then with suspicion, but it became the basis for a developing commitment to co-operation between Frederick and the tories. Frederick had maintained his core following in the Commons at the general election of 1747, again managed for him by Thomas Pitt and Francis Ayscough, although he had not advanced, as former allies, such as Hugh Boscawen, Viscount Falmouth, in Cornwall, supported the Pelham ministry. The prospect of Frederick's imminent accession, as George II entered his late sixties, probably encouraged government supporters to defect. The most prominent of these was John Perceval, second earl of Egmont, who had been returned as a ministerialist at the election but soon afterwards joined Frederick, becoming his principal political adviser. George Dodington also rejoined Frederick's household, taking up a specially invented post as Frederick's treasurer of the chamber. The dominance of the reversionary interest also helped suppress the differences in political outlook between the different factions among Frederick's supporters. Frederick's own views often diverged from those held by the majority of his followers: he opposed the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, for example, arguing that Britain would have gained more by pursuing the war with France, a war the City had tired of. Meanwhile he irritated the ministry by unsuccessfully competing with the duke of Newcastle for the position of chancellor of Cambridge University, a contest which dragged on throughout 1748.

Much of the effort of Frederick's advisers was concentrated on the succession. Egmont prepared a detailed plan for the first few weeks of Frederick's reign which would have enabled bills for the civil list and settlements on the putative Queen Augusta and Prince George to be quickly piloted through parliament by Frederick's ministers while the Pelhams and their friends were just as rapidly to be expelled from office. Another document, prepared by Egmont in 1749 and regularly updated by him and Frederick, charted the intended composition of the House of Commons. With it was a list of politicians that Frederick and Egmont intended should be kept from the house, including major talents such as Henry Fox, William Pitt, and George Grenville, all of whom had alienated Frederick in one way or another, or were reckoned too formidable opponents by Frederick and his supporters. Among the prince's party, Egmont admitted he knew 'not one man qualified to take that great and supreme part upon him which it is absolutely necessary some man should do' (Newman, Leicester House politics, Camden Miscellany, 185).

Frederick's plans also included a strong dynastic element. He knew of the intention of George I that Britain and Hanover should be divided, but had been unwilling to assent to George II's variant of this plan, that Frederick should succeed to Hanover while the duke of Cumberland should become king of Great Britain. He proposed that his eldest son, George, should surrender Hanover to his second son, Edward. His third son, William, was to marry Frederick's niece Carolina of Orange, then the heir to the hereditary stadholderate of the United Provinces, and live at The Hague. His eldest daughter, Augusta, was also intended to make a dynastic marriage, to the heir to the duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The most imaginative fate was reserved for his fourth son, Henry, who was to live in the West Indies as head of a new colony, 'be entirely dedicated to the sea' (Newman, Leicester House politics, Camden Miscellany, 193), and be duke of Virginia, living on £20,000 raised from the North American colonies. Prince George was to be appointed lord high admiral on Frederick's accession, which Frederick considered safer than his eldest son being 'bred among Troops' (ibid., 175), and thereby disposed to support the standing army Frederick was pledged to disband. Frederick left a message for his eldest son urging Prince George to adopt his proposals should Frederick not survive George II. Something of this plan was rehearsed in the prologues and epilogues spoken by Frederick's older children in their performance of Joseph Addison's Cato at Leicester House in January 1749, where Prince George declared his love for liberty and England, Lady Augusta accepted that she:

must wed a foreigner,And cross the sea—the lord knows where

GM, 19.37and Edward looked forward to military command. Frederick had a paternal as well as a dynastic concern for his children; his surviving correspondence with them shows he emphasized reading—'tis only by that one forms ones self' (Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, RA GEO 54133–54134)—the study of history, and proficiency in French and German, but also displays his great affection for them, including his supposedly neglected eldest son.

Frederick worked hard to secure his party through personal contact. In late summer 1750, while George II was absent in Hanover, he made two journeys around the south and west of England, partly to meet supporters such as Lord Bathurst, but also to show himself to the people as a conscientious king; events were selectively reported in the newspaper Frederick sponsored, The Remembrancer. His younger sons joined him for part of the trip, and were taken sea-bathing near Southampton. In Gloucestershire he was publicly entertained on the Severn by Richard Cambridge and gave money to an innkeeper whose premises had been destroyed by lightning. Despite Frederick's attempts to make himself personally known to his supporters, there remained suspicion between the tories and the opposition whigs in the alliance. There was also rivalry between leaders; the theorist Egmont and the realist Dodington were at loggerheads. Furthermore, there were no great issues of the day on which to unite and expand the opposition. The Pelham ministry actually increased its average majority between 1748 and 1750. By early 1751 Frederick was renewing his connections with William Pitt and the duke of Newcastle, of whose foreign policy, based on subsidies to continental powers and the encirclement of France, he approved.

A king in waiting

Frederick furthered a number of extra-parliamentary projects during his second period in opposition. Perhaps the most enduring resulted from the return of his attention to Kew, where between 1749 and 1751 he acquired over 70 more acres, and where he began an extensive scheme to introduce exotic plants, to be accompanied by ornamental buildings, many of which were to be Chinese in design. Frederick corralled his household into participating in the physical labour at Kew. He also extended his protection of British trade. In November 1748 he reissued his prohibition of foreign fashions—explicitly French ones—from his court. In 1750 he took the lead in establishing the British Herring Fishery Company, dedicated to the better exploitation of British fishing reserves against Dutch imports, and in October was installed as its governor. Frederick also combined his philanthropic and musical interests by attending the Handel concert at the Foundling Hospital in May 1749; 'the custom of standing up for the “Hallelujah” chorus may have originated with the Prince of Wales on this occasion' (Burrows, 300) as there is no evidence that George II ever attended a performance.

Frederick made or planned major initiatives in the arts. From 1749 he employed George Vertue as his art adviser, and commissioned him to make lists of the royal art collections at the prince's residences and at the king's, as well as making copies of the inventories of the collections of Charles I and their sale by the Commonwealth. Vertue's notes reveal that Frederick had already succeeded in building a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings, including French, Italian, and Dutch work, that included some works owned by Charles, but suggest what a royal collection might have looked like had the English monarchy not been overthrown in 1649. Frederick was also intending to support an academy for British painters, but his death prevented the scheme reaching fruition.

Frederick did not have presentiments of death. Apart from his political and gardening plans he had been discussing commissioning a sculpture of himself from William Hoare of Bath. However, in March 1751 he was taken ill after superintending his workmen at Kew, 'complaining of a violent pain in his side' (Newman, Leicester House politics, Camden Miscellany, 195); he suffered this, with feverishness and fainting, for two weeks. On Wednesday 20 March 1751 he was pronounced 'quite safe' (ibid., 198) by his physicians, but about 9.30 p.m., at Leicester House, he felt ill again and soon afterwards 'laid his head upon his pillow and without a convulsion sigh or groan or the least movement—rattled in his throat and was dead in three minutes'. His death was subsequently blamed on a burst abscess in one lung, perhaps the result of an old sporting injury, from which has arisen the legend that Frederick died soon after being hit by a cricket or tennis ball. He was buried in Henry VII's chapel, Westminster Abbey, on 13 April 1751. At the time of his death, Augusta was pregnant with Caroline Matilda (1751–1775), afterwards queen of Denmark.

Legacy and assessment

Frederick's political party died with him. Augusta and Egmont supervised the destruction of all Frederick's political papers and made their peace with the court; Egmont's copies survived. Very little of Frederick's dynastic policy was carried out, and Frederick's eldest daughter, Augusta duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1737–1813), consort of Charles II, suffered accordingly. As Frederick had intended, Augusta married Charles, hereditary prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1735–1806). The ceremony took place at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace, on 16 January 1764. George III, obsessed with economy, had no wish for his sister and her husband to be a drain on national finances by remaining in London as his father had wished, and they left for Germany soon after the wedding; the public adulation that the couple received on their appearances at the theatre, in contrast to the mob's dislike of George III, probably confirmed the king in his intentions. Augusta and her husband had seven children: Augustina (1764–1788); Charles (1766–1806); Caroline (1768–1821), later the wife of George IV; George (1769–1811); Augustus (1770–1820); Frederick William, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1771–1815); and Amelia (1772–1773). The marriage, however, was unhappy, as Charles was insensitive and unfaithful. Augusta was visited by her mother in 1768, but was only allowed to return to Britain in 1772 when her mother was dying. Her husband became duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in 1780. The crisis of the revolutionary wars with France, and her daughter's marriage to George, prince of Wales, in 1795, gave Augusta the opportunity to spend more time in Britain, and she eventually took a house in Hanover Square, London, where she died on 23 March 1813. She was buried in St George's Chapel, Windsor.

Despite his aversion to his father's plans for his family, many of George III's activities as king owed something to Frederick's intentions. George was advised by his father's fellow enthusiast for botany, John Stuart, third earl of Bute: the tories were readmitted to court, the civil list was fixed at £800,000, and the whig oligarchy that Frederick had distrusted was broken. In establishing the Royal Academy, George III was also putting one of his father's schemes into effect; and although he lacked his father's devotion to art, George III continued to buy paintings of the kind his father had favoured. The visits that George III began to make in the middle of his reign, to Portsmouth, the west country, and the south coast, owed more to Frederick's tours than to the occasional appearance at a military parade made by George II; Frederick's belief that the monarch, or the monarch in waiting, should show himself regularly to his subjects eventually became an accepted feature of the practice of monarchy in Britain.

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.

The rhyme, quoted by Horace Walpole, was a commonly used scurrilous epitaph that had been used for others besides ‘Fred’. None the less, it came to encapsulate Frederick's status as a forgotten and misunderstood figure. Partly this was because his legacy to George III was not wholly beneficial; George III was still paying off Frederick's debts well into his reign. He was also an example of filial disloyalty, a stance that his grandson George IV took to extremes. The nineteenth century, influenced by Hervey and Horace Walpole, found little good to say of him. John Doran assessed him as 'a child in character, pretty as a child, and even as self-willed as pretty children generally' (Doran, 482), and Thomas Finlayson Henderson, writing for the Dictionary of National Biography in 1889, thought him a representative of the vices of the age, financially and sexually debauched, and wrote: 'Though he affected to patronise the arts and literature, his tastes were not otherwise refined, and in their pursuit he was not too regardful of his dignity.' Frederick's reputation improved in the twentieth century; Sir George Young, in his biography Poor Fred: the People's Prince (1937), saw Frederick's political career as an attempt to revitalize the political class against a corrupt and inefficient leadership, and hoped to draw lessons from Frederick's activities for the benefit of Edward VIII. In the second half of the century scholarly work on the royal collection by Sir Oliver Millar and others drew attention to Frederick's contribution towards royal patronage of the arts and the image of the monarchy in general, a contribution brought to the attention of a wider audience by the inclusion of Frederick in a BBC television series about royal patrons of the arts, Royal Heritage (1977). Analysis of parliamentary politics also helped to build a greater appreciation of Frederick's position as a prince attempting to hold his position in a factional political system. By the close of the century scholarship was starting to bring together the characters of Frederick the patron of the arts, Frederick the politician, and Frederick the focus of literary productions from patriot writers; the traditional view that Frederick was, politically, an 'empty space' (Colley, 242) was balanced by awareness that he carefully manipulated his image and was a discriminating and intelligent connoisseur.

In 1738 Frederick was dedicatee of a new edition of Sir Charles Cornwallis's life of Henry Frederick, prince of Wales. Henry Frederick had asserted his prerogatives as an independent figure in the state, enjoying a special relationship with the king and with parliament. This might suggest the sort of figure Frederick had hoped to be, but even if he had enjoyed the charisma, the insight, or the determination to make more of a political impact, it is unlikely that he would have succeeded; the mixed court and parliamentary politics of mid-eighteenth century Britain did not allow for a junior king, only for an heir apparent who was expected not to make too much trouble for his father and the administration. Perhaps Frederick's problem was that he expected too much; but while attempting to gain the near impossible goal he thought he deserved, he was able to provide a focus for the evolving concept of opposition and also strengthen the foundations of the Hanoverian dynasty in Britain.