Unhappily for his son and for the world, Frederick William was neither sensible nor sympathetic. His aversion to an heir who refused to resemble himself was doubled when the heir became the advocate of a matrimonial policy which he came to regard with loathing. From the hour of Frederick’s birth the dearest wish of the Hanoverian House, and of Sophia Dorothea most of all, had been to unite more closely the royal lines of England and Prussia. At length a double marriage was proposed. The Prince of Wales was to marry Wilhelmina, and Frederick his cousin Amelia, daughter of George II. In 1730, however, England and Prussia were estranged, yet Frederick William knew that his household had not given up their darling project. Flouted as a father and as a statesman, he treated his son so ill as to lend colour to the suspicion that he wished him dead. Not content with impounding his books, forbidding him the flute, compelling him to see his mother only by stealth, the tyrant actually rained blows upon him in public, even in the camp of the Saxon King. “Had I been so treated by my father,” he is said to have exclaimed, “I would have blown my brains out, but this fellow has no honour.”
Unfortunately for Frederick William, the youth whom he thus outraged was Crown Prince of Prussia, and as such by no means lacked friends. To England, to Austria, and to his father’s ministers he was an important pawn in the game of politics. Some of the younger officers lent him countenance in the hope of favours to come. But the dearest friend of his life, Lieutenant von Katte, loved him for himself rather than for what he might be able to bestow. To Katte the prince confided his fixed purpose to flee from a tyranny that was past endurance. Together they planned to make use of the opportunity of escape which might arise when Frederick should approach the French frontier in the course of a forthcoming tour with his father among the German courts.
[Illustration: PRINCESS SOPHIA DOROTHEA, DAUGHTER OF KING GEORGE THE FIRST.
On August 4, 1730, the attempt was made. The confederates tried to steal from the royal camp at dawn and to ride into France. Such a flight was not without precedent in Hohenzollern history. Frederick’s grandfather, sharing the general belief that his stepmother had poisoned his brother and meant to poison himself, had first sought shelter at Cassel with his aunt and at a later date had quitted the Great Elector’s court altogether. But for the heir to a crown to flee beyond the bounds of Germany was a still graver step. The youth of eighteen had hardly calculated the probable consequences of success. Where was Frederick William’s heir to find a safe asylum? Louis XV. was not likely to be to him what Louis XIV. had been to the Old Pretender. George of England would hardly expose Hanover to the vengeance of the King of Prussia. His envoy had in fact refused to countenance the scheme. Nor would the Emperor care to sacrifice the Prussian alliance to mere sentiment. Even if Frederick should succeed in finding a refuge for himself, he would none the less have left two dear hostages at the mercy of the King. “Your mother would have got into the greatest misery,” declared Frederick William a year later. “Your sister I would have cast for life into a place where she would never have seen sun and moon again.”