Unhappily for his son and for the world, Frederick William was neither sensible nor sympathetic. His aversion to an heir who refused to resemble himself was doubled when the heir became the advocate of a matrimonial policy which he came to regard with loathing. From the hour of Frederick’s birth the dearest wish of the Hanoverian House, and of Sophia Dorothea most of all, had been to unite more closely the royal lines of England and Prussia. At length a double marriage was proposed. The Prince of Wales was to marry Wilhelmina, and Frederick his cousin Amelia, daughter of George II. In 1730, however, England and Prussia were estranged, yet Frederick William knew that his household had not given up their darling project. Flouted as a father and as a statesman, he treated his son so ill as to lend colour to the suspicion that he wished him dead. Not content with impounding his books, forbidding him the flute, compelling him to see his mother only by stealth, the tyrant actually rained blows upon him in public, even in the camp of the Saxon King. “Had I been so treated by my father,” he is said to have exclaimed, “I would have blown my brains out, but this fellow has no honour.” Unfortunately for Frederick William, the youth whom he thus outraged was Crown Prince of Prussia, and as such by no means lacked friends. To England, to Austria, and to his father’s ministers he was an important pawn in the game of politics. Some of the younger officers lent him countenance in the hope of favours to come. But the dearest friend of his life, Lieutenant von Katte, loved him for himself rather than for what he might be able to bestow. To Katte the prince confided his fixed purpose to flee from a tyranny that was past endurance. Together they planned to make use of the opportunity of escape which might arise when Frederick should approach the French frontier in the course of a forthcoming tour with his father among the German courts. [Illustration: PRINCESS SOPHIA DOROTHEA, DAUGHTER OF KING GEORGE THE FIRST. AFTER THE PAINTING BY HIRSEMAN.]