So George returned to England and made himself exceedingly disagreeable to his wife when he got there, as a testy love-sick gentleman of fifty-two might be expected to do who had recently left a new and youngish lady-love hundreds of miles behind. For the time being Caroline and the English bored him; with regard to the latter he expressed himself as follows: “No English, or French cook could dress a dinner; no English confectioner set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, no English jockey ride, nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any English woman how to dress herself.”[31] How this particular strain of English King must have degenerated since James the First’s daughter made a _mésalliance_ and married the King of Bohemia! But the little King had not wasted all his time in Hanover, he had seen a Princess--the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha--whom he thought would do for a daughter-in-law, and had straightway communicated this fact to his Queen, mixed up with accounts of his own prowess on the field of love, in a less innocent direction. No sooner, however, had the King set foot in England, than the Prince of Wales, urged to this filial act of duty by Doddington, put in an appearance at one of his father’s first Levees, from which functions he had absented himself for a considerable time. His father, however, once more scented mischief in the air, and once more his olfactory nerves had not led him astray. Frederick at once renewed his demands, this time asking for his full allowance of £100,000 a year, a separate establishment, and--a wife. The Prince was insistent. There can be little doubt from an incident which followed that in this demand for a wife, the Prince had in his mind his old love, his cousin Wilhelmina, still unmarried. The King, his father, however, had no intention whatever of uniting his son with that Princess; he and the King of Prussia had been quarrelling for years, even going the length of challenging one another to single combat, an encounter which would have been exceedingly grotesque but for the redeeming point that though George the Second was very little, yet he was undoubtedly plucky for his size, and would have given a good account of himself in any case. But, “unfortunately,” as some historians put it, no mortal combat came off, and Europe had to put up with the two sovereigns for some years longer. The King, as usual, talked the matter of his son’s request over with his Queen, especially the part about the £100,000 a year, which her Majesty was dead against, she had all along resisted the demand of the Prince of Wales for a regular income, and this opposition being persevered in on her part had undoubtedly made matters worse between them.