The memoirs of the Markgräfin Wilhelmine give a perfect, but none too attractive, picture of the little Court of Bayreuth. She was the daughter of King Frederick William of Prussia, and her mother was a Princess of Hanover, sister of George the First of England. Her life as a child and as a young lady was one long misery. Her mother hated her, and the hatred was increased by the failure of all her conspiracies to marry the girl to her first cousin, the Prince of Wales. Her father, too, had his views as to marrying her to suit his whims or interests, so that she became immeshed in a perfect network of intrigues and plots and counterplots. Frederick William was a man of such a violent temper that one is tempted sometimes to doubt his sanity. His cruelty to his children was, even if we largely discount the Markgräfin’s story, simply incredible. His son, afterwards Frederick the Great, when a grown-up youth, beaten, cuffed, kicked, and dragged round the room by his hair; later on arrested, threatened with torture, and his best friend, Katt, beheaded before his face;—Wilhelmine struck in the face with his clenched fist and handed over to governesses who ill-used and tortured her. He was a man of no little political sagacity, and he laid the foundation upon which Frederick the Great built up the greatness of Prussia, but in his home he was a savage utterly without control. The marriage with the Prince of Wales fell through because King George very properly refused to subscribe to the King of Prussia’s conditions; the suitors favoured by the King were sent to the right-about by Wilhelmine’s own strength of character. She fought with her back to the wall, she won the day, and they were dismissed. And so it came to pass that at the age of twenty-two she, in 1731, married the hereditary Prince of Bayreuth. The Royal Family of Prussia were anything but a happy gathering. The King and Queen were objects of terror so little tempered by any dutiful regard that, although Wilhelmine now and again makes little attempts at an expression of filial affection, too gushing to be real, they were rather hated than beloved by their children: the sisters were for ever quarrelling and plotting the one against the other, and as they grew up and married small Princes there was plenty of opportunity for the exhibition of petty jealousies and spite. Between Wilhelmine and her brother, Frederick the Great, there was some show of affection, at any rate on her side, and in the days of his dire calamities she did what she could to stand between him and the cruelty of their father; but on his side the affection was only intermittently returned; and indeed by her own showing she can hardly have been the sort of person who would arouse sympathy or attract love: clever she was, beyond a doubt—her correspondence with Voltaire testifies to that; but there was nothing soft or womanly about her character.