On the 21st of April, 1743, King George prorogued Parliament, and almost immediately hastened over to Hanover accompanied by his son, William, Duke of Cumberland, and Lord Carteret as Secretary of State, in attendance. The object of this departure was to aid Queen Maria Theresa of Hungary in her struggle against the French and Bavarians, and in so doing to gratify an ambition long cherished by King George to place himself at the head of an allied army. For whatever failings the little King is credited with, and we know he had many--those _foiblesses_ of which we have been so frequently reminded--he was certainly a soldier, and a brave one. Probably also he had a great desire to establish a reputation as a soldier for his favourite son William, also, that young man having at a very early period displayed a considerable penchant for the military art. This preference for his brother was very far from gratifying to the Prince of Wales, who would have much liked to have gone to the wars himself, although his training had never been in that direction. But to give him a command was about the last thing that King George would have thought of doing. Such an act would have given his eldest son fresh popularity, which he was far from desiring. Not only was Frederick denied a command, but he was also excluded from the regency which his father left behind him. Sir Robert Walpole remarked as follows upon it: “I think the Prince might have been of it, when Lord Gower is. I don’t think the latter more Jacobite than his Royal Highness.” So once more, as far as any active participation in the affairs of the state were concerned, the Prince of Wales was left in the galling position of being on the shelf. Meanwhile the British troops under the Earl of Stair, had commenced their march towards the end of February into Germany, but appear to have moved with incredible slowness as it was the middle of May before they crossed the Rhine. Lord Stair--the celebrated correspondent of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough,--appears to have been a very poor sort of a general, and in addition was hampered for want of a proper commissariat, which was not understood in those days. There appeared to be the same happy-go-lucky state of affairs--which seems to be national and chronic--to which the great Marlborough referred in 1702, by calling his native country: “England that is famous for negligence.”[66] Lord Stair’s army, however, struggled onward, and was joined on the way by some sixteen thousand Hanoverians in British pay, who had been in winter quarters in Liège, and by a few Austrian regiments. Eventually they all arrived at Hochst, between Mayence and Frankfort, and here Lord Stair’s command numbered about forty thousand men. Meanwhile, the French commander-in-chief, the Maréchal de Noailles, with sixty-thousand men, crossed the Rhine and approached the Southern bank of the River Maine, the northern bank of which was occupied by the British.