This second Sophie Dorothea was not a happy woman. The fate of her imprisoned mother weighed heavily upon her. Secretly, she corresponded with her mother, and did her best to set her free. Again, as in the case of the Electress of Hanover, England furnished the life ambition of a German princess. Sophie Dorothea ardently wished to effect a double marriage between her two children, Frederick and Wilhelmine, and the son and daughter of George II., then crown prince of England. Disappointment at the failure of this project, embittered and shortened her life. The tall grenadiers, the royal cane and the parsimony of Frederick William and their effect upon his thoroughly subjugated family are well-known. The intense brotherly and sisterly love that existed between Frederick and Wilhelmine was cemented, verily, by a bond of affliction. Hunger and blows were often the portion of these sensitive royal children. Wilhelmine writes of their "summer vacation": "We had a most sad life then. We were awakened at seven every morning by the King's regiment, which exercised in front of the windows of our rooms on the ground floor. The firing went on incessantly, piff, puff, and lasted the whole morning. At ten we went to see our mother and accompanied her into the room next the King's, where we sat and sighed all the forenoon. Then came dinner time. The dinner consisted of six small, badly cooked dishes, which had to suffice for twenty-four persons, so that some had to be satisfied with the mere smell. At table nothing else was talked of but economy and soldiers. The Queen and ourselves, too unworthy to open our mouths, listened in humble silence to the oracles which were pronounced. After dinner the King slept in his armchair for two hours, and we had to keep as still as mice until he awoke. Then we read with the Queen. When, at last, the King went to his tobacco parliament we were free for a little while." That Frederick and his sister grew up, under this repressive system, into nothing worse than a pair of neurasthenics seems almost a miracle. During the eighteenth century there were two distinct types of history-making men in Germany the Frenchified-German, fond of pageants and rich raiment, and the rugged, harsh, yet true-hearted, fighting men of the Dessauer stamp. The Prince of Anhalt-Dessau was the field-marshal of Frederick William I. To Dessau the science of warfare owes an enormous debt. When a young man, this impetuous prince fell in love with the daughter of an apothecary named Fos. In spite of all obstacles of birth and wealth, he determined to marry the girl of his choice; and because he was, says Carlyle, "perhaps the biggest mass of inarticulate human vitality", certainly, one of the biggest then going about in the world, marry her he did. In spite of Dessauer's being, to quote Carlyle again, "a very whirlwind of a man," the marriage was most happy.