The “nobles” in question were two Scottish authors, Thompson and Mallett, neither of them distinguished by the neatness of their attire. It was alas! on the lawn at Cliefden, that Frederick received a blow, some say from a cricket ball, others while at a game of tennis, which was the indirect cause of his death some years after. Here at Cliefden, and at his other residences, were to be seen his boon companions; the Earl of Chesterfield, courtier, politician, satirist and mimic. Lady Huntingdon, who left his world for Whitfield’s, and whose name may be seen in almost every town in England on Dissenting Chapels to the present day; Bathurst, Queensberry, the clever Pulteney, Cobham, Pitt, the Granvilles, Lyttleton, the prig Bubb Doddington, whose one aim in life was to be a lord. There were the two Hedges--(Charles, who wrote epigrams)--erratic Lord Baltimore and peevish Lord Carnarvon, Townshend, whom George the Second much objected to, and his wife as well--the Townshends seem to have been very staunch to the Prince--chatty Lord North, the Earl of Middlesex, who allowed his wife’s name to be coupled with the Prince’s, although the lady’s descriptions “short and dark, like a winter’s day,” and “as yellow as a November’s morning,” were hardly those to fascinate an artistic nature such as Frederick’s. Yet she certainly took part in the “Judgment of Paris” in 1745 as one of the Graces. Last of all to be mentioned, there was that “stuttering puppy,” as George the Second called him, Johnny Lumley, brother of the Earl of Scarborough. The maids of honour in attendance on the Princess of Wales, however, must have been very different to that charming trio, “the Swiss,” “Belladine,” and the “Schatz,” who waited upon Queen Caroline when Princess of Wales. They do not appear to have been popular in the Prince’s household at any rate, for his head coachman made a most curious will concerning them, in which he left his considerable savings to his son, on condition that he never married a maid of honour! A compliment to those ladies which they no doubt appreciated. Among the many amusements with which the Prince and Princess delighted their friends, private theatricals had their place, _Cato_ being played on one occasion at Leicester House, when the young Prince George Frederick had grown sufficiently into boyhood to take the part of Portius, in which he was coached by Quin, who boasted he “had taught the boy to speak”; the boy who was afterwards to be George the Third. For the little theatre at Cliefden, Thompson, a pensioner of Frederick’s--and he had many--wrote his play “Alfred.” The Prince’s children came quickly, and Frederick showed himself to be a tender father. There had been that sad episode years before, when he had grieved so deeply--so deeply that his mother and sisters had said they had not believed him capable of such sorrow--over the death of that little child who had no right to have been there at all, Anne Vane’s and his son.