The English people had now been long looking towards that great battle-field of Europe, Flanders, mingling memories of past triumphs with hopes of future victories. George II. went heartily into the cause of Maria Theresa, when the French sought to deprive her of her imperial inheritance. In the campaign which ensued was fought that battle of Dettingen which Lord Stair so nearly lost, where George behaved so bravely, mounted or a-foot, and where the Scots Greys enacted their bloody and triumphant duel with the gens-d’arme of France. Meanwhile, Frederick was unemployed. When the King and the Duke of Cumberland proceeded to the army in Flanders, a regency was formed, of which Walpole says, ‘I think the prince might have been of it when Lord Gower is. I don’t think the latter more Jacobite than his royal highness.’ When the King and the duke returned from their triumphs on the Continent, the former younger for his achievements, the latter older by the gout and an accompanying limp, London gave them a reception worthy of the most renowned of heroes. In proportion as the King saw himself popular with the citizens did he cool towards the Prince of Wales. The latter, with his two sisters, stood on the stairs of St. James’s Palace to receive the chief hero; but though the princess was only confined the day before, and Prince George lay ill of the small-pox, the King passed by his son without offering him a word or otherwise noticing him. This rendered the King unpopular, without turning the popular affection towards the elder son of Caroline. Nor was that son deserving of such affection. His heart had few sympathies for England, nor was he elated by her victories or made sad by her defeats. On the contrary, in 1745, when the news arrived in England of the ‘tristis gloria,’ the illustrious disaster at Fontenoy, which made so many hearts in England desolate, Frederick went to the theatre in the evening, and two days after, he wrote a French ballad, ‘Bacchic, Anacreontic, and Erotic,’ addressed to those ladies with whom he was going to act in Congreve’s masque, ‘The Judgment of Paris.’ It was full of praise of late and deep drinking, of intercourse with the fair, of stoical contempt for misfortune, of expressed indifference whether Europe had one or many tyrants, and of a pococurantism for all things and forms except his _chère Sylvie_, by whom he was good-naturedly supposed to mean his wife. But this solitary civility cannot induce us to change our self-gratulation at the fact that a man with such a heart was not permitted to ascend the throne of Great Britain. In the year after he wrote the ballad alluded to, he created a new opposition against the crown, by the counsels of Lord Bath, ‘who got him from Lord Granville: the latter and his faction acted with the court.’ Of the princess, Walpole says, ‘I firmly believe, by all her quiet sense, she will turn out a Caroline.’