On the other hand, Miss Vane published the prince’s offer to her, and therewith her own letter in reply. The world was unanimous in condemning him as mean and cruel. Not a soul ever thought of finding fault with him as immoral. At length a compromise was effected. The prince explained away the cruel terms of his own epistle, and Miss Vane withdrew what was painful to him in hers. The pension of 1,600_l._ a year was settled on her, with which she retired to a mansion in Grosvenor Street, her little son accompanying her. But the anxiety she had undergone had so seriously affected her health that she was very soon after compelled to proceed to Bath. The waters were not healing waters for her. She died in that city, on the 11th of March 1736, having had one felicity reserved for her in her decline, the inexpressible one of seeing her little son die before her. ‘The Queen and the Princess Caroline,’ says Lord Hervey, ‘thought the prince more afflicted for the loss of this child than they had ever seen him on any occasion, or thought him capable of being.’ One of the most cherished projects of George the Second was the union by marriage of two of his own children with two of the children of the King of Prussia. Such an alliance would have bound more intimately the descendants of Sophia Dorothea through her son and daughter. The double marriage was proposed to the King of Prussia, in the name of the King of England, by Sir Charles Hotham, minister-plenipotentiary. George proposed that his eldest son, Frederick, should marry the eldest daughter of the King of Prussia, and that his second daughter should marry the same King’s eldest son. To these terms the Prussian monarch would not agree, objecting that if he gave _his_ eldest daughter to the Prince of Wales, he must have the eldest, and not the second, daughter of George and Caroline for the Prince of Prussia. Caroline would have agreed to these terms; but George would not yield: the proposed intermarriages were broken off, and the two courts were estranged for years. The Prussian princess, Frederica Wilhelmina, has published the memoirs of her life and times; and Ranke, quoting them in his ‘History of the House of Brandenburgh,’ enters largely into the matrimonial question, which was involved in mazes of diplomacy. Into the latter it is not necessary to enter; but to those who would know the actual causes of the failure of these proposed royal marriages the following passage from Ranke’s work will not be without interest:--