The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

To this institutional conflict George II and Frederick added the bad blood that characterized the house of Hanover. Queen Caroline evinced a hatred toward her son almost inconceivable in a mother. “My dear firstborn,” she was reported to have said, “is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast, in the whole world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it.” In her final moments, when Frederick expressed a desire to see his mother, she refused, saying, “I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed—I shall never see that monster again.” Frederick’s father—whose experience with his own father foreshadowed that with his son—shared his wife’s hatred and disdain for their son. “Bid him go about his business,” George said in response to Frederick’s plea for a last chance at reconciliation, “for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour to bear his impertinence.”