When a deputation of Quakers waited on the prince to solicit him to support by himself and friends a clause of the Tything bill in their favour, he replied: ‘As I am a friend to liberty in general, and to toleration in particular, I wish you may meet with all proper favour; but, for myself, I never gave my vote in parliament; and to influence my friends or direct my servants in theirs does not become my station. To leave them entirely to their own consciences and understandings is a rule I have hitherto prescribed to myself, and purpose through life to observe.’ Andrew Pitt, who was at the head of the deputation, replied: ‘May it please the Prince of Wales, I am greatly affected with thy excellent notions of liberty, and am more pleased with the answer thou hast given us than if thou hadst granted our request.’ But the answer was _not_ a sincere one, and the parliamentary friends and servants of the prince were expected to hold their consciences at his direction. Once Lord Doneraile ventured to disregard this influence; upon which the prince observed: ‘Does he think that I will support him unless he will do as I would have him? Does he not consider that whoever may be my ministers, I must be king?’ Of such a man Walpole’s remark was not far wide of truth when he said that Frederick resembled the Black Prince only in one circumstance--in dying before his father! He certainly exhibited little of the chivalrous spirit of the Black Prince. In 1745, vexed at not being promoted to the command of the army raised to crush the rebellion, and especially annoyed that it was given to his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, who had less vanity and more courage, he ridiculed all the strategic dispositions of the authorities; and when Carlisle was being besieged by the rebels, a representation in paste of the citadel was served up at his table, at dessert, which, at the head of the maids of honour, he bombarded with sugar-plums. The young Prince George, afterwards George III., ‘behaved excessively well on his father’s death.’ The words are Walpole’s; and he establishes his attestation by recording, that when he was informed of his father’s decease, he turned pale and laid his hand on his breast. Upon which his reverend tutor, Ayscough, said, very much like a simpleton, and not at all like a divine, ‘I am afraid, sir, you are not well.’ ‘I feel,’ said the boy, ‘something here, just as I did when I saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew.’ It was not the speech of a boy of parts, nor an epitaph deeply filial in sentiment on the death of a parent; but one can see that the young prince was conscious of some painful grief, though he hardly knew how to dress his sensations in equivalent words.