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FRE till 1302, the Guelphs and the Ghibelines from other parts of Italy actively sharing in it according to their respective interests. At last the two royal competitors came to an agreement. Frederick married Eleonora, the third daughter of Charles of Anjou, and consented to the reversion of Sicily to that house after his death. This point, however, was not considered binding by King Frederick, who, after having achieved some conquests in Greece, declared war against Robert of Naples, who had succeeded Charles II. on the throne. The contest became fiercer than ever; papal mediation was of no avail; interdicts and excommunications were held in contempt; and both Sicily and the mainland were subjected for seventeen years to all the desolations of war. Frederick steadfastly pursued his object, namely, the independence of the island, and the permanent establishment of his dynasty. He succeeded in both, and the Sicilians have ever since considered that Arragonese prince as the founder of their political institutions and of their national emancipation. Although Dante, his contemporary, did not think very highly of him, yet there is no doubt that he was a man of uncommon intellect and strength of character. He died in 1337, and was succeeded by his son Pietro II., a prince of little worth, after whose death his son Louis ascended the throne whilst yet a boy, and was succeeded in his turn by his brother—   III. of Sicily, who took the reins of government in 1355. During the minority of Louis, who died when seventeen years old, the country was distressed by internal anarchy and by the plots of the famous Giovanna, queen of Naples, who—seconded by her paramour Louis of Taranto, whom she married after he had assassinated her former husband, Andrea of Hungary—nearly succeeded in conquering the island. Messina had already fallen into her hands, and Catania was nearly subdued, when the people—true to their heroic traditions and to their hatred of the Anjou family—rose in arms, defeated with their navy the Neapolitan fleet in the Gulf of Catania, and fully restored their country to independence. The king signed, nevertheless, a disgraceful peace, and consented to marry Antonietta of Taranto, sister to Louis, submitting besides his people's rights to papal pretensions, and paying large sums to the holy see as a token of homage. He died in 1375.—A. S., O.   I. and II. . See I. and II.  , King of Saxony. See I.  . See.  . See.  FREDERICK,, the eldest son of George II., king of Great Britain, and Caroline of Brandenburg-Anspach, was born in 1707. His grandfather, on his departure for England with Prince George his father, left him in Hanover to represent the elector and family. Even while he and his father thus remained apart, quarrels had sprung up between them, partly from general incompatibility of temper, and partly also from the young Frederick's determination to marry his affianced cousin, Frederica Sophia Wilhelmina, afterwards margravine of Bareith. On the latter account, at his grandfather's death, he was called over to England. He there soon forgot his love; and, instead, followed his father's early example by accepting the lead of an opposition, numbering whigs, like Pulteney, Carteret, Chesterfield, and Cobham (the latter three ejected from office for resisting, as he himself had done, Walpole's general excise scheme), and high tories, like Bolingbroke and Wyndham. For the sake, too, of a contrast to his father's obtrusive contempt for letters, he was then installed as the patron of literature. Pope made verses on his dog, and Bolingbroke composed for his future guidance the Patriot King. Pitt and Lyttleton held offices in his household, and their maiden speeches were delivered on Pulteney's notice for an address to the king on the prince's marriage in April, 1736, to Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. The same event, by furnishing him with grounds for a demand, against the advice of Bubb Dodington, of an independent income of £100,000 a year, rendered permanent the dissensions in the royal family. In vain had the king offered by Lord Hardwicke a compromise. Pulteney's motion for an addition came on, and was lost only through the secession of the high tories who had promised their support. In his disappointment the prince hurried away his wife, when on the point of being confined, from his parents' residence at Hampton court. Yet he affected before the mob a semblance of reverence for his mother, kneeling down in the mud at St. James' to ask her blessing. His frivolous ill-temper disgusted even Bolingbroke, and he found it necessary to apologize to the king. The latter did not accept the excuse, and, on the advice of Walpole, "to take it short at once," ordered him to quit St. James' for Norfolk house, and his friends were forbidden the court. The queen continued implacable even to her death, though Horace Walpole ascribes her refusal to see him to her husband's commands. For this extreme severity Lord Hardwicke declared there were secret reasons. Later, the prince urged on the war with Spain, giving his first vote in the lords against the convention with that country; and, when Walpole was forced into hostilities, he attended the heralds, and drank success, at the Rose tavern, Temple bar, to our arms. In the motion, in the lords of February, 1741, for Walpole's removal he did not concur; nor again, to Chesterfield's vexation, in the opposition to the treaty with Maria Theresa. But he refused the bribe of an addition to his income to support Sir Robert, and promised protection only on the minister's actual fall. On that event, the Leicester house faction soon broke up; and he in vain strove at a meeting, at which he presided, to appease the chiefs of opposition quarrelling over the spoils. A very cold reception at court was his sole share of the triumph. It was not long before he relapsed into fresh opposition, but of an intermittent kind; for in 1744 he combined, but fruitlessly, with his father in an endeavour to support the pro-Hanoverian minister, Carteret, against the Pelhams—a display of weakness which caused Pitt's resignation of a place in his household; and this and other recent defections occurring at the same time with an addition of strength to the king's cabinet, reduced his councillors, Bolingbroke and Bubb Dodington, to great straits to maintain the semblance of a party. Yet, small as was his party, and yet smaller as it became before his death, it had factions in it—the chief one led by the prince's favourite, Perceval, earl of Egmont. On the 20th March, 1751, he died of a pleurisy, leaving eight children and the princess pregnant.—W. S., L.  FREDERICK,, the reputed son of Theodore, king of Corsica, born about 1730. The duke of Wirtemburg gave him the rank of brevet-colonel, appointed him his agent in England, and invested him with the cross of the order of merit, with a pension of £200 per annum. He was the chief companion of Count Poniatowski (subsequently king of Poland) during his residence in England. On the 1st February, 1797, he shot himself under the west porch of Westminister abbey, in consequence of great pecuniary embarrassments increased by the loss of his pension. The jury at the inquest over his body returned a verdict of "lunacy." On the 6th of the same month he was interred by the side of his supposed father in St. Ann's church, Soho. His true history was known only to his great friend, the widow of David Garrick. He published "Memoires pour servir à l'Histoire de Corse," and a "Description of Corsica."—W. A. B. <section end="530G" /> <section begin="530H" />FREDRO,, a Polish author of the seventeenth century. He was a man of very considerable talent, and having been placed during his various career in many important posts, both civil and military, had ample opportunity of becoming acquainted with the affairs of the political world. The fruit of his keen observation was given to the public in the following works—"Monita politico-moralia et Icon Ingeniorum;" "Militarium, seu Axiomatum Belli ad harmoniam Togæ accommodatorum Libri;" "Fragmenta Scriptorum Togæ et Belli;" "Vir Consilii monitis Ethicorum, nec non Prudentiæ Civilis discendum instructus." He was the author also of two works written in the Polish tongue; one entitled "Considerations on the Military Service," and the other, "Proverbs and Advice, moral, political, and military."—R. M., A. <section end="530H" /> <section begin="530I" />FREEMAN,, was born in Gloucestershire about 1590, and entered Magdalene college, Oxford, in 1607. He wrote, amongst other compositions, two hundred epigrams, to which he owed his reputation, and it would seem that his contemporaries, and amongst them Shakspeare and Donne, thought highly of these compositions. They are now very scarce. Specimens of Freeman's poetry are given in the Athenæ Oxonienses.—J. F. W. <section end="530I" /> <section begin="530Zcontin" />FREGOSO or CAMPO FREGOSO, a celebrated family of Genoa, which, through commercial enterprise, rose to a high station in that republic. Genoa was, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, constantly agitated by civil war. Feudal lords, Guelphs and Ghibelines, ambitious burghers, and a riotous mob, kept the republic in a state of permanent strife, which was <section end="530Zcontin" />