The Court of Berlin was very different to what it had been in the days of the splendour-loving King Frederick and his brilliant consort, Sophie Charlotte. The penurious habits which Sophie Charlotte had lamented in her son when he was a youth had now developed into sordid avarice, and his boorish manners into a harsh and brutal despotism. At the Prussian Court economy was the order of the day, and in the State everything was subservient to militarism. The misery and squalor of the King of Prussia’s household are graphically told in the Memoirs of his daughter Wilhelmina.[116] The half-mad King was subject to fits of ungovernable fury, in which he sometimes kicked and cuffed his children, starved them, spat in their food, locked them up, and cursed and swore at them. His Queen, except for the beatings, was subject to much the same treatment, and the home life was made wretched by perpetual quarrels. Queen Sophie Dorothea had much beauty and considerable ability, and despite her frequent disputes with her husband, she was, after her fashion, much attached to him, and he to her. But she had a love of intrigue and double-dealing, and she was incapable of going in the straight way if there was a crooked one. She was a woman of one idea, and this idea she clung to with an obstinacy and tenacity which nothing could weaken. For years--almost from the moment of the birth of her children--she had become enamoured of what was afterwards known as the “Double Marriage Scheme,” a scheme to unite her eldest daughter Wilhelmina, to Frederick, Duke of Gloucester (afterwards Prince of Wales), and her son, Frederick William (afterwards Frederick the Great), to the Princess Amelia, second daughter of the Prince and Princess of Wales. By continual arguments, and perpetual intrigues, she had brought her husband round to her way of thinking, and she had also worked upon her father, George the First, to the extent of gaining his consent to the marriage of the Princess Amelia, when she should be old enough, to the Crown Prince Frederick.