It was not fears for her son's Protestantism alone that moved her. She was aware that he and the King were concocting between them, a scheme of which she thoroughly disapproved. This was a wild and utterly unfeasible plan for founding a colony in Madagascar, of which Rupert was to be leader, organiser, and ruler. He had always taken a keen interest in naval affairs, and now he devoted himself eagerly to the study of ship-building. But his unfortunate mother was frantic at the idea. In her eyes, the boy's only fit vocation was "to be made a soldier, to serve his uncle and brother,"[16] and she entreated her friend Roe to put such "windmills" out of this new Don Quixote's head. No son of hers, she declared, fiercely, should "roam the world as a knight-errant;"[17] not foreseeing, poor woman, that such was precisely her children's destined fate. From Roe at least she had full sympathy: "I will only say," he wrote to her, "that it is an excellent course to lose the Prince in a most desperate, dangerous, unwholesome, fruitless action."[18] But to mockery and exhortation Rupert turned a deaf ear. His mother, finding her letters treated with indifference, sent her agent, Rusdorf, to represent to the boy his exalted station as a Prince of the Empire, the grief he was causing to his grandmother, mother and sisters, {26} and the necessity of his remaining in Europe to combat his ancestral enemies. Rupert listened in absolute silence, and remained unmoved at the end. Nor could his brother Charles make the least impression on him. "When I ask him what he means to do I find him very shy to tell me his opinion,"[19] was the young Elector's report. Rupert probably knew Charles well enough to guess that anything he did tell him would be at once repeated to his mother, and he was always good at keeping his own counsel.