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Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel., Frederick Louis Prince of Wales, Frederick the Great, Friedrich II of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, King George II of Great Britain, Philippine-Charlotte of Prussia, Prince Friedrich of Bayreuth, Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, Wilhelmine of Prussia
Part IV
Sophia-Dorothea spent many days talking to her eldest son, Crown Prince Friedrich, in the library, and was informed of his plans to escape from his father’s custody. In August 1730, during a tour he made with his father through the provinces, Crown Prince Friedrich made an unsuccessful attempt to escape from Prussia, and was brought back a prisoner. The king informed the queen of the event through Sophie de Kamecke before their arrival.
Sophia-Dorothea, Queen Consort in Prussia
There were compromising letters by the queen and princess Wilhelmine in Friedrich’s portefeuille, which was forwarded to them by a friend after the arrest of Friedrich’s accomplice Katte. They burned the letters and replaced them with fabricated and uncompromising ones. However, “as there were near fifteen hundred of the originals, although we worked very hard, not more than six hundred or seven hundred could be completed in the time”.
The portefeuille was also filled with ornamental articles. When the portefeuille was later opened, Friedrich did not recognize its content. Grumbkow immediately suspected what had transpired and stated: “These cursed women have outwitted us!”
When the king returned, he told the queen that her son was dead. She replied: “What! Have you murdered your son?” When given the reply: “He was not my son, he was only a miserable deserter,” she became hysterical and screamed repeatedly: “Mon Dieu, mon fils! mon Dieu, mon fils!” The king then started to beat Wilhelmine and would possibly have killed her. Her siblings and ladies-in-waiting intervened.
Friedrich’s accomplice Katte arrived as a prisoner, so the king beat him instead. When Friedrich was imprisoned at the fortress in Küstrin, Grumbkow acted as mediator between Friedrich and his parents, managing to reconcile them.
The imprisonment was followed by continuous conflict between the king and the queen about the marriage of princess Wilhelmine. While the king pressed for a marriage to the Margrave of Schwedt or the Prince of Weissenfels, the queen exchanged secret messages with her daughter and urged her not to accept any other groom than the Prince of Wales.
Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia
This conflict caused the king to threaten to beat the queen and have Mademoiselle Sonsfeld publicly whipped. Finally, Wilhelmine was formally offered the choice between the Margrave of Schwedt, the Duke of Weissenfels, or the Prince of Bayreuth. She chose to marry the latter (as she had not seen him but had seen and disliked the other two), on condition that her father free her brother.
Her decision was made against the will of her mother, who threatened to disown her for what she considered to be her daughter’s lack of courage, and ordered her not to speak to her future groom when he arrived. The king was furious at the cold demeanor of the queen during the following visit of the Prince of Bayreuth.
After the betrothal of Wilhelmine and the Prince of Bayreuth, a message arrived in which George II of Great Britain consented to Wilhelmine marrying the Prince of Wales without her brother marrying his daughter Amelia. This message convinced the queen that a Prussian-British marriage alliance was possible. She therefore made a point of harassing the Prince of Bayreuth to stop the wedding. On the day of the wedding (November 20, 1731), Sophia-Dorothea tried to delay the ceremony by disarranging her daughter’s hair every time it had been dressed, saying she was not satisfied with the effect, in the hope that a British courier might arrive in time to stop the ceremony.
King Friedrich-Wilhelm I in Prussia
When Crown Prince Friedrich was liberated after his sister’s wedding, Sophia-Dorothea resumed negotiations with Great Britain to marry him to Princess Amelia, and her next daughter, Philippine-Charlotte, to Frederick-Louis, Prince of Wales, which would complete her life project of a Prussian-British marriage alliance.
These plans was crushed in 1733, when King Friedrich-Wilhelm instead announced a marriage alliance with Brunswick by marrying Friedrich to Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern and Philippine-Charlotte to Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
But Sophia-Dorothea continued to pursue a Prussian-British marriage alliance, accomplishing a “reconciliation between the houses of England and Prussia negotiated by the Queen”, this time by the marriage of the Prince of Wales to her third daughter Louisa-Ulrika.
This plan was crushed upon the marriage of the Prince of Wales in 1736 to Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Louisa-Ulrika went on to become the Queen of Sweden when she married King Adolf-Fredrik of Sweden on July 17, 1744.