In a honeyed letter of February 4, 1732, the King broke the news to his son. “She is a creature who fears God,” he wrote, “and that is everything.” The bridegroom elect thought otherwise. He wrote to Grumbkow that he hated severe virtue, and rather than marry a fanatic, always grimacing and looking shocked, he would prefer the worst character in Berlin. “When all is said and done he cried, there will be one more unhappy princess in the world.” “I shall put her away as soon as I am master,” he twice declared. “Am I of the wood out of which they carve good husbands?” “I love the fair sex, my love is very inconstant; I am for enjoyment, afterwards I despise it. I will keep my word, I will marry, but that is enough; _Bonjour, Madame, et bon chemin_.” Frederick’s marriage, by which he brought to an end the sternest period of his second education, was a crime, but the bridegroom was not guiltless. All his outcry was made in secret. To the King, in whose hands his fate lay, he showed himself all submission. Frederick William had in his own young days received the names of three princesses from whom his father desired him to choose a bride. He protested with success against such compulsion and his marriage with Sophia Dorothea was something of a love-match. Here was an argument to which he could hardly shut his ears. His son preferred to purchase greater liberty for himself by condemning to a life of misery an innocent creature who had never harmed him. At the same time, by making a happy home-life impossible, he shut out what was perhaps the last chance that he might become in any sense of the words a good man. For the moment, however, his submission brought him freedom. On March 10, 1732, he went through the formal ceremony of betrothal. Some of the guests remarked that his eyes were filled with tears and that he turned abruptly from his betrothed to a lady who was supposed to be the mistress of his heart. But a year’s respite was granted him. While Austrian statesmen schemed to turn the timid, ignorant Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern into a woman of the world, who might make her husband a Hapsburg partisan, Frederick was learning his work as colonel not far from the field of Fehrbellin. It was drudgery, but it was not Cüstrin. After a year of it he wrote: “I have just drilled, I drill, I shall drill. That is all the news. But it is delightful to indulge in a few moments’ breathing-space, and I would rather drill here from dawn to dusk than live as a rich man at Berlin.” June 12, 1733, was Frederick’s wedding-day. The Austrian diplomats, who had made the match, went far towards flinging away their advantage. At the last moment they dared to suggest that Frederick William should accommodate the Emperor by entering into a new combination which assigned an English bride to his son. The King was furious at the slight, and the marriage was only another step towards the alienation of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns.