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Frederick, Prince of Wales, by Jacopo Amigoni, 1735His Royal Highness The Prince Frederick, Prince of Wales (Frederick Louis) ( February 1, 1707 - March 31, 1751) was the only man of that name ever to hold the title Prince of Wales, and is best remembered as the father of King George III of the United Kingdom and as the subject of the epigram which begins:
- "Here lies poor Fred,
- Who was alive, and is dead..."
Prince Frederick Louis, the grandson of the then Elector of Hanover (later King George I of Great Britain) was born in Hanover, Germany as Duke Friedrich Ludwig of Brunswick-Lüneburg. His parents, Electoral Prince George (later King George II of Great Britain) and Princess Caroline of Ansbach, were called upon to leave the country when their eldest son was only seven years old, and they did not see him again until he arrived in England in 1728 as a grown man. By then, they had several younger children, and they rejected Frederick both as their son and as a person, referring to him as a "foundling" and nicknaming him "Griff", short for the mythical beast known as a griffin.
The motives for the ill-feeling between Frederick and his parents may include the fact that he had been set up by his grandfather, even as a small child, as the representative of the house of Hanover, and was used to presiding over official occasions in the absence of his parents. He was not permitted to go to England until his father took the throne as King George II of Great Britain, in 1727. He had a will of his own and sponsored a court of ‘opposition’ politicians at his residence, Leicester House. Frederick and his group supported the Opera of the Nobility in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a rival to Handel's royally-sponsored opera at the King’s Theatre in Drury Lane. Frederick was a genuine lover of music who played the cello; he enjoyed the natural sciences and the arts, and became a thorn in the side of his parents, thwarting their every ambition and making a point of opposing them in everything, according to the court gossip Lord Hervey . At court the favorite was Frederick's younger brother, Prince Prince William Augustus, Duke of CumberlandPrince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland ( April 15, 1721 October 31, 1765), a younger son of King George II of Great Britain and Queen Caroline, was a noted military leader. He was born in London, England, where his parents had moved after his grandfa, to the extent that the king looked into ways of passing over Frederick in the succession.
Unlike the king, Frederick was a knowledgeable amateur of painting, who patronized immigrant artists like Amigoni (illustration above right) and Jean Baptiste Vanloo , who painted the portraits of the prince and his consort for Frederick's champion William Pulteney, 1st Earl of BathWilliam Pulteney ( 1684 July 7, 1764) was an English politician, created Earl of Bath in 1742 by King George II. The son of William Pulteney by his first wife, Mary Floyd, he was born in April 1684 into an old Leicestershire family. He was educated at Wes. The list of other artists he employed— Philip Mercier , Wooton, Phillips and the French engraver Goupy—represents some of the principal figures of the English RococoRococo Furniture Style. The Rococo style developed as a relief from formalities of Late Baroque interiors. It probably received its name among young assistants in the atelier of the neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, who used the word whimsically t. William KentWilliam Kent (Bridlington, Yorkshire, c. 1685 April 12, 1748) was a British architect and landscape architect. According to Horace Walpole, Kent "was a painter, an architect, and the father of modern gardening. In the first character he was below mediocri's neo-PalladianI Quattro Libri dell'Architettura in a modestly-priced English translation published in London, 1736. Palladian architecture is a European style of architecture originally designed by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio ( 1508 1580). Today, any building state barge of 1732 is still preserved, though Sir William ChambersSir William Chambers ( 1723- 1796) was a Scottish architect, (though born in Stockholm where his father was a merchant). Between 1740 and 1749 he was employed by the Swedish East India Company making several voyages to China where he studied Chinese archi' palace at KewThe Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew are extensive gardens and botanical glasshouses between Richmond upon Thames and Kew in southwest London. They originated in the exotic garden at Kew House formed by Lord Capel of Tewkesbury, enlarged and greatly extended by for his widow Augusta (1757) was demolished in 1802.
Quickly accumulating large debts, Frederick relied for an income on his wealthy friend, George Bubb Dodington. The prince's father refused to make him the financial allowance that the prince considered should have been his, and Parliament was obliged to intervene, resulting in further bad feeling between the two. Although in his youth he was undoubtedly a spendthrift and womaniser, Frederick settled down, on his marriage, in 1736, to the much younger Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and soon became a devoted family man, taking his wife and eight children (his youngest daughter was born posthumously) to live in the countryside at Cliveden, since he was effectively banished from court. His political ambitions remained unfulfilled, because he died, in strange circumstances (usually attributed to an abscess created by a blow on the head by a cricket or tennis ball), at the age of forty-four. His death occurred at Leicester House in London and he was buried at Westminster Abbey.
