What her children thought of all this is not precisely recorded, but it would seem that the King stood alone among them in the sympathy and support he gave to his mother. Prince Edward, Duke of York, and the Princess Augusta were openly hostile to Lord Bute. Prince Edward declared that he suffered "a thousand mortifications" because of him. Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was sullenly resentful, and even Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, made sarcastic remarks. What Matilda thought there is no means of knowing; she was too young to understand, but children are quick-witted, and since her favourite brother, Edward, and her favourite sister, Augusta, felt so strongly on the subject, she probably shared their prejudices. There is little doubt that the mysterious intimacy between the Princess-Dowager and Lord Bute was the cause of much ill-feeling between her and her children, and had the effect of weakening her authority over them and of losing their respect. Years after, when she had occasion to remonstrate with Matilda, her daughter retorted with a bitter allusion to Lord Bute. The Princess Augusta had inherited her mother's love of dabbling in politics, and as her views were strongly opposed to those of the Princess-Dowager the result did not conduce to the domestic harmony of Carlton House. The Princess Augusta, of all the royal children, had suffered most from the intimacy between her mother and Lord Bute. Horace Walpole wrote of her some time before: "Lady Augusta, now a woman grown, was, to facilitate some privacy for the Princess, dismissed from supping with her mother, and sent back to cheese-cakes with her little sister Elizabeth, on the pretence that meat at night would fatten her too much".[17] Augusta secretly resented the cheese-cakes, but she was then too young to show open mutiny. Now that she had grown older she became bolder. She was the King's eldest sister, and felt that she was entitled to a mind of her own. Therefore, with her brother, the Duke of York, she openly denounced Lord Bute and all his works, and lavished admiration on his great rival, Pitt. This was a little too much for the Princess-Dowager, who feared that Augusta would contaminate the minds of her younger brothers and sisters. She resolved therefore to marry her to some foreign husband, and thus remove her from the sphere of her present political activities. Moreover, it was quite time that Augusta was married. She had completed her twenty-sixth year and her youthful beauty was on the wane. "Lady Augusta," writes Horace Walpole, "is not handsome, but tall enough and not ill-made, with the German whiteness of hair and complexion so remarkable in the royal family, and with their precipitate yet thick Westphalian accent."[18] [17] _Memoirs of the Reign of George III._, vol. iii. [18] _Ibid._