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Frederick, Prince of Wales
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Prince Frederick | |
|---|---|
| Prince of Wales; Duke of Edinburgh | |
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| Portrait by Jacopo Amigoni, 1735 | |
| Successor | George, Prince of Wales |
| Spouse | Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha |
| Issue | |
| Princess Augusta, Duchess of Brunswick George III Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of York Princess Elizabeth Caroline of Wales Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland Princess Louisa Anne of Wales Prince Frederick William of Wales Caroline, Queen of Denmark and Norway |
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| Full name | |
| Frederick Louis (or Lewis) German: Friedrich Ludwig |
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| Titles | |
| HRH The Prince of Wales HRH The Duke of Cornwall HRH The Duke of Edinburgh HRH Prince Frederick Louis of Wales HRH Prince Frederick Louis of Cornwall HRH Prince Frederick Louis of Cambridge |
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| Royal house | House of Hanover |
| Father | George II |
| Mother | Caroline of Ansbach |
| Born | 1 February 1707 Hanover, Germany |
| Died | 31 March 1751 (aged 44) Leicester House, London |
| Burial | 13 April 1751 Westminster Abbey, London |
The Prince Frederick, Prince of Wales (Frederick Louis; 1 February 1707 – 31 March 1751) was a member of the British Royal Family, the eldest son of George II. He was born into the House of Hanover and, under the Act of Settlement passed by the English Parliament in 1701, Frederick was in the direct line of succession to the British throne. He moved to England following the accession of his father, and became the Prince of Wales. He predeceased his father however, and the throne, upon the death of George II on 25 October 1760, passed to Prince Frederick's eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, who reigned as King George III from 1760 until 1820.
Frederick served as the tenth Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, from 1728 to 1751.
Prince Frederick was famous for having a hostile relationship with his parents.
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Prince Frederick Louis (slightly-less commonly rendered Lewis), the grandson of the then Elector of Hanover (later George I) and Sophia Dorothea of Celle, was born in Hanover, Germany as Duke Friedrich Ludwig of Hanover. His parents, Prince George (later George II) 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.
His grandfather created him Duke of Edinburgh, Marquess of the Isle of Ely, Earl of Eltham in the county of Kent, Viscount Launceston in the county of Cornwall and Baron Snowdon in the county of Carnarvon, on 26 July 1726[1].
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 George II on 11 June 1727. In fact, Frederick continued to be known as Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hanover (with his British HRH style) even after his father had been created Prince of Wales. Frederick was created Prince of Wales on 8 January 1729.[2]
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 is depicted as a cellist in an oil portrait by Philip Mercier of Frederick and his sisters, now part of the National Portrait Gallery collection [1]. 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 favourite was Frederick's younger brother, Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, to the extent that the king looked into ways of passing over Frederick in the succession.
A permanent result of Frederick's patronage of the arts is Rule Britannia, up to the present one of the most well-known British patriotic songs. It was written by the Scottish poet and playwright James Thomson as part of the masque Alfred which was first performed in 1745 at Cliveden, the country home of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
A masque linking the Prince with both the ancient hero-king Alfred the Great's victories over the vikings and with the contemporary issue of building up the British sea power obviously went well with Frederick's political plans and aspirations.
Later the words, set to music by Thomas Arne - another of Frederick's favorite artists - got a permanent life of their own regardless of the masque. Thomson, who supported the Prince of Wales politically, also dedicated to him an earlier major work, Liberty (1734).
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 Bath. The list of other artists he employed—Philip Mercier, John Wootton, Phillips and the French engraver Joseph Goupy—represents some of the principal figures of the English Rococo. William Kent's neo-Palladian state barge of 1732 is still preserved, though Sir William Chambers' palace at Kew for his widow Augusta (1757) was demolished in 1802.
By the time Frederick arrived in England, cricket had developed into the country's most popular team sport and it thrived on gambling. Perhaps because he wished to "anglicise" and so fit in with his new society, Frederick developed an academic interest in cricket that soon became a genuine enthusiasm. He began to make wagers and then to patronise and play the sport, even forming his own team on several occasions.
The earliest mention of Frederick in cricket annals is in a contemporary report reproduced by H T Waghorn in his The Dawn of Cricket. This concerns a major match on Tuesday 28 September 1731 between Surrey and London, played on Kennington Common. No post-match report was found despite advance promotion as "likely to be the best performance of this kind that has been seen for some time". It is interesting that "for the convenience of the gamesters, the ground is to be staked and roped out" which was a new practice in 1731 and could have been done partly for the benefit of a royal visitor. The advertisement refers to "the whole county of Surrey" as London’s opponents and states that the Prince of Wales is "expected to attend".
In August 1732, the Whitehall Evening Post reported that Frederick attended "a great cricket match" at Kew on Thursday 27 July.
By the 1733 season, he was really getting involved. We read of him giving a guinea to each player in a Surrey v Middlesex game at Moulsey Hurst. Then he awarded a silver cup to a combined Surrey & Middlesex team which had just beaten Kent, arguably the best county team at the time, at Moulsey Hurst on Wed 1 August. This is the first reference in cricket history to any kind of trophy (other than hard cash) being contested. On Friday 31 August, the Prince of Wales' XI played Sir William Gage's XI on Moulsey Hurst. The result is unknown but the teams were said to be of county standard, so presumably it was in effect a Surrey v Sussex match.
In the years following 1733, there are frequent references to the Prince of Wales as a patron of cricket and as an occasional player, though it is doubtful if he was actually any good as a player.
When he died on 31 March 1751, cricket suffered a double impact for his death closely followed that of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, who was the game's greatest patron. The loss of these patrons had an adverse impact on the game’s finances and the number of top-class matches reduced for some years to come, although economic difficulties arising from the wars of the period certainly inhibited many potential investors.
Indeed, it has frequently been said that the Prince of Wales died as a result of being struck on the head by a cricket ball. He may well have been hit on the head but that did not kill him; the cause of death was a burst abscess in a lung. Cricket has had its share of fatalities in its time, but Prince Frederick Louis was not one of them.
| List of early English cricketers to 1786 |
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Edward Aburrow senior | William Anderson | Robert Bartholomew | William Bedle | John & Thomas Bell |
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 sixteen year old 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 prematurely at the age of forty-four. The cause of death has been commonly attributed to an abscess created by a blow by a cricket ball or a tennis ball, but a burst abscess in the lung was given as the cause of death.[3] Frederick died at Leicester House in London and he was buried at Westminster Abbey.
- 1 February 1707–11 June 1727: His Royal Highness Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hanover
- 1 August–27 September 1714: His Royal Highness Prince Frederick Louis of Cornwall
- 27 September 1714–26 July 1726: His Royal Highness Prince Frederick Louis of Wales
- 26 July 1726–11 June 1727: His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh
- 11 June 1727–8 January 1729: His Royal Highness The Duke of Cornwall and Edinburgh
- 8 January 1729[4]–31 March 1751: His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales
| Name | Birth | Death | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Princess Augusta, Duchess of Brunswick | 31 August 1737 | 31 March 1813 | married, 1764, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick; had issue |
| George III | 4 June 1738 | 29 January 1820 | married, 1761, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz; had issue |
| Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of York | 14 March 1739 | 17 September 1767 | |
| Princess Elizabeth Caroline of Wales | 30 December 1740 | 4 September 1759 | |
| Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester | 14 November 1743 | 25 August 1805 | married, 1766, Maria Waldegrave, Countess Waldegrave; had issue |
| Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland | 27 November 1745 | 18 September 1790 | married, 1771, Anne Houghton; no issue |
| Princess Louisa Anne of Wales | 8 March 1749 | 13 May 1768 | |
| Prince Frederick William of Wales | 13 May 1750 | 29 December 1765 | |
| Caroline, Queen of Denmark and Norway | 11 July 1751 | 10 May 1775 | married, 1766, Christian VII of Denmark; had issue |
- Fredericksburg, Virginia is named after him.
- The town of Prince Frederick, Maryland is believed to have been named in the prince's honor.
- Fort Frederick, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada a fortification consisting mostly of earthworks (engineering) with a North wall of stone masonry is named after him. Fort Frederick contains one of the Martello Towers which houses the Royal Military College of Canada museum.
- The Prince of Wales' epigram:
"Here lies poor Fred who was alive and is dead, Had it been his father I had much rather, Had it been his sister nobody would have missed her, Had it been his brother, still better than another, Had it been the whole generation, so much better for the nation, But since it is Fred who was alive and is dead, There is no more to be said!"
- quoted by William Makepeace Thackeray, "Four Georges"
- Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales
- Unusual royal deaths at Ward's Book of Days
- From Lads to Lord's; The History of Cricket: 1300 – 1787
- ^ Yvonne's Royalty: Peerage
- ^ Prince of Wales: Previous princes
- ^ Deborah Fisher, Princes of Wales (University of Wales Press, 2006)
- ^ Prince of Wales - Previous Princes
- Fresh Light on 18th Century Cricket by G B Buckley (FL18)
- Sussex Cricket in the Eighteenth Century by Timothy J McCann (TJM)
- The Dawn of Cricket by H T Waghorn (WDC)
- At the Sign of the Wicket: Cricket 1742 – 1751 by F S Ashley-Cooper in Cricket Magazine (1900) (ASW)
- Cricket Scores 1730 - 1773 by H T Waghorn (WCS)
- Henry Churchyard "Royal Genealogies, Part 9"
- Sam Sloan "Big Combined Family Trees (pafg744)"
De-la-Noy, Michael. The King Who Never Was: The Story of Frederick, Prince of Wales. London; Chester Springs, PA: Peter Owen, 1996.
Walters, John. The Royal Griffin: Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1707-51. London: Jarrolds, 1972.
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Frederick, Prince of Wales
Cadet branch of the House of Welf
Born: 1 February 1707 Died: 31 March 1751 |
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| British royalty | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by George, Prince of Wales later became King George II |
Heir to the Thrones as heir apparent 1727 – 1751 |
Succeeded by Prince George of Wales later became King George III |
| Peerage of Great Britain | ||
| Preceded by Prince George, Duke of Cornwall and Cambridge later became King George II |
Prince of Wales 1729 – 1751 |
Succeeded by Prince George, Duke of Edinburgh later became King George III |
| Preceded by George, Prince of Wales later became King George II |
Duke of Cornwall 1727 – 1751 |
Succeeded by Prince George Augustus Frederick later became King George IV |
| New creation | Duke of Edinburgh 1st creation 1726 – 1751 |
Succeeded by Prince George of Wales later became King George III |
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HRH The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales |
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HRH The Prince Charles, Duke of Cornwall Edward, the Black Prince (1337-1376) · Richard II (1376-1377) · Henry V (1399-1413) · Henry VI (1421-1422) · Edward of Westminster (1453-1471) · Edward V (1470-1483) · Edward of Middleham (1483-1484) · Arthur, Prince of Wales (1486-1502) · Henry VIII (1502-1509) · Henry Tudor (1511) · Henry Tudor (1514) · Henry Tudor (1534) · Edward Tudor (1536) · Edward VI (1537-1547) · Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (1603-1612) · Charles I (1612-1625) · Charles II (1630-1649) · Charles James (1629) · The Old Pretender (1688-1689) · George II (1714-1727) · Prince Frederick (1727-1751) · George IV (1762-1820) · Edward VII (1841-1901) · George V (1901-1910)· Edward VIII (1910-1936) |
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HRH The Prince Charles, Duke of Rothesay David (1398-1402) · James I (1402-1406) · Alexander (1430) · James II (1430-1437) · James III (1452-1460) · James IV (1473-1488) · James (1507-1508) · Arthur (1509-1510) · James V (1512-1513) · James (1540-1541) · James VI (1566-1567) · Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (1603-1612) · Charles I (1612-1625) · Charles James (1629) · Charles II (1630-1649) · The Old Pretender (1688-1689) · George II (1714-1727) · Prince Frederick (1727-1751) · George IV (1762-1820) · Edward VII (1841-1901) · George V (1901-1910) · Edward VIII (1910-1936) |
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Prince Frederick (1726-1751) · George III (1751-1760) · Prince William Henry (1764-1805) · Prince William Frederick (1805-1834) · Prince Alfred (1866-1900) · HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1947–present) |
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