The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach

Caroline’s satisfaction in the fulfilment of her own public role, as mother of a new generation of the electoral house, was less straightforward. With the self-containment habitual to her, she kept her own counsel. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my soul, that her Royal Highness, whom I value above all persons liveing, continues in so good health, and, as I am inform’d, in as good humor & temper as ever,’ John Toland wrote to Leibniz on 6 October.123 Her good humour was an aspect of Caroline’s infectious zest for life: she had learned long ago the value of counterfeiting even-temperedness.

Three further children completed the nursery in Hanover. Daughters Anne, Amelia – whom Caroline called ‘Amely’ – and Caroline were born at two-yearly intervals from 1709. Although Caroline would later tell one of her ladies of the bedchamber that ‘she thought the principal Duty of a Woman was to take care of her Children’, and at least one contemporary account claimed ‘she took infinite pleasure in amusing herself with the sportings and innocence of young children’, she was not consistently cosily maternal with her children when young.124 Even a sympathetic observer like her future woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Clayton protested at Caroline’s preference for ‘settling points of controversial divinity’ over vigilance in the matter of her children’s development; she was attentive to discipline, and the royal schoolroom included lessons in Latin, German, French, Italian and the work of ancient historians.125

Caroline’s apparent failure to react either swiftly or effectively to the infant Frederick developing rickets suggests negligence, but should be read within the context of contemporary parenting habits and widespread medical ignorance, and balanced by George Augustus’s assurance to her, in a letter written two years later, of his instinctive love for their new baby Anne, a clear indication that she valued affection between parents and children.126 In the event, credit for Frederick’s recovery mostly belongs to Sophia, who, by directing that ‘Fritzchen’ spend time outdoors in the gardens at Herrenhausen, exposed him to the light and fresh air which effected a cure around the time of his third birthday. In her letters, Sophia intimated that her contribution extended to supervising Fritzchen’s wetnurse and feeding regimen: first smallpox then pneumonia had separated Caroline from her baby.127 A subsequent appraisal would absolve Caroline of the besetting flaw of royal and aristocratic parenting, that ‘Parents of rank … have so little regard to … the happiness of their children, as by leaving them in the hands of their servants, to suffer them to receive their earliest impressions from those, who are commonly taken from the dregs of their people.’128 In Caroline’s case it was an assessment of variable accuracy, and Frederick benefited from the doting ministrations of his still energetic great-grandmother.

Caroline had miscalculated Frederick’s delivery date. Two years later, she made the same mistake with her second pregnancy. Ernest Augustus, Sophia’s youngest son, complained that the combination of Caroline’s muddle-headedness and George Augustus’s secrecy in relation to his ‘petite famille’ had left him again unsure whether Caroline was in fact pregnant. Perhaps she had lately miscarried or was on the brink of miscarriage?129 All doubts were resolved on 2 November 1709.

George Augustus was absent from the birth of his first daughter. Mindful of the restlessness of his nursemaiding two years earlier, Caroline had encouraged him to join the remainder of the court at the recently renovated electoral hunting box at Göhrde in the Celle forests. In his absence, he committed to paper effusions of love. ‘I am only a little bit angry that it [the birth] has caused you pain,’ he wrote with clumsy fondness. ‘You should know me well enough, my very dear Caroline, to believe that everything that concerns you attaches me the more deeply to you, and I assure you, dear heart, that I love the baby without having seen it. I pray you, take care of yourself, that I may have the pleasure of finding you well, and that still greater joy may be conferred upon a heart deeply desirous of it.’130 Sophia’s letters from Göhrde, full of the coldness of the weather and the splendour of the palace’s remodelling, echoed a similar strain, proof of an improvement in the women’s relationship since 1705. ‘I am sure you do not doubt that my heart is completely yours,’ the older woman wrote, ‘and that I defy even your Prince to love you more than I will do all my life.’131 To Bothmer she described the speediness of Caroline’s second labour.132

With a view to the family’s future prospects, the baby was christened Anne. At George Augustus’s invitation, the queen agreed to stand as godmother to her infant namesake. Further missives from Hanover prompted a christening gift of Anne’s own portrait miniature set in diamonds. To Caroline she wrote, ‘I take keen pleasure in giving, as often as I am able, proofs of the perfect friendship I bear for your husband as well as the whole electoral family,’ and added, ‘I believe the diamonds are very good.’133 Neither Sophia nor George Louis accepted either of these statements at face value, and indeed the gift had only been forthcoming after a number of tactful reminders. Loftily, Sophia dismissed Anne’s trinket as ‘the sort one gives to ambassadors’. Like her son, she was predictably irked by the queen’s request that Duchess Eléonore stand proxy for her at the baby’s baptism.

Anne’s stipulation may well have been a piece of calculated mischief-making. Certainly it was a reminder to her Hanoverian heirs that, for the moment at least, the balance of power tilted in her favour. The prize represented by the British throne was a considerable one. It had lately been augmented by the passing of the Act of Union, which prevented Scotland’s Parliament from nominating its own successor to Anne, thereby guaranteeing her heirs the double inheritance. Correctly Anne estimated Sophia’s greed for her crown, revealed in the elaborate courtesies she extended to British visitors to Hanover and her ‘many questions about [British] families, customs, laws, and the like’, noted by Toland as early as 1701.134 Diplomats kept the queen informed of efforts made by members of Sophia’s family to prepare themselves for coming apotheosis: lessons in English; the acquaintance of British politicians, men of letters and military men like Marlborough assiduously cultivated; Leibniz’s faulty attempts to master the intricacies of parliamentary opinion, including the divisions between those ‘vile enormous factions’, the Whigs, who supported the Hanoverian succession, and the Tories, who included those opposed to it, as well as the nature and extent of support for Jacobitism; the reception of a delegation from the University of Cambridge in 1706 and, following his appointment in the autumn of 1713, new English books dispatched from London by the Hanoverian resident George von Schütz. George Augustus had begun to learn English in 1701, soon after the Act of Settlement; Sophia extolled his speedy progress the following spring.135 Bilingualism would form a cornerstone of Frederick’s education. At necessary intervals Sophia also protested her fondness for her British niece: ‘I believe that it would be for the good of England that the Queen should live for a hundred years,’ she wrote cumbrously to the Duke of Marlborough.136 Out of earshot she grumbled at the failure of Anne’s government to grant her a pension or civil list payments, or to invest her with the title Princess of Wales. ‘I quite agree, “Altesse Royale” [Royal Highness] has become very vulgar now, much more common than “Your Electoral Serene Highness”,’ Liselotte consoled her.137

In this process of preparation, Caroline acted independently. Sophia was thirty-five years older than Anne. For all she invoked a Dutch proverb about creaking wagons going far, her chances of surviving even so sickly an individual as Anne were slight. George Louis was a man of middle age, dogmatic, unenthusiastic about leaving Hanover. He shared Liselotte’s view that ‘what one is familiar with is always better than anything strange, and the fatherland always appears best to us Germans’, and perhaps also her sense of foreboding that, as king, he would ‘find more worry and trouble than pleasure in his regal condition, and … often say to himself, “If only I were still Elector, and in Hanover.”’138 As Caroline recognised, it was she and George Augustus who stood to profit most from imminent changes. Deliberately she set out to demonstrate a comprehensive embracing of all things British, establishing the pattern to which, in public, husband and wife adhered for the foreseeable future. In her own case this extended even to her name. While she signed her early correspondence with Leibniz, for example, ‘W. Caroline’, by 1710 she was simply ‘Caroline’, Wilhelmine abandoned, as it would remain. The English-sounding ‘Caroline’ allied her with earlier Stuarts. Caroline and Charles shared a common Latin root in ‘Carolus’: the coincidence of name was capable of suggesting continuity between dynasties. It seems likely that this double recommendation outweighed a similar link between Wilhelmine and William. Architect of the Hanoverian succession, champion of both Sophia and George Augustus, the Dutch-born William III lacked the native appeal of Charles II.

In her self-anglicisation Caroline was helped by increasing numbers of British travellers who made their way to Hanover. On 11 September 1710, Mademoiselle Schutz, niece of George Louis’s minister Baron Bernstorff, wrote to a friend in London that the electoral court contained quantities of English visitors.139 Others wrote to Caroline, like Edmund Gibson, chaplain to Archbishop Tenison, who in March 1714 sent her a copy of his Codex juris ecclesiastici Anglicani, on the government and discipline of the Church of England, accompanied by fulsome compliments.140

Caroline first tasted tea at her own request from English visitors to Herrenhausen. She employed a Miss Brandshagen to talk and read to her every day in English, unaware that the thickness of the latter’s German accent would leave her with a heavy Hanoverian burr for the remainder of her life. Her English was never perfect, although one commentator credited her with mastering the language ‘uncommonly well for one born outside England’, and in July 1712 Sophia claimed she had begun to speak the language very prettily, and was amusing herself reading everything she could lay hands on either in support of, or against, the Hanoverian succession.141 Alured Clarke’s claim that her ‘uncommon turn for conversation’ was ‘assisted by … her skill in several languages … [and] art of compounding words and phrases, that were more expressive of her ideas than any other’ suggests a distinctive patois of mixed origin, almost certainly including elements of English, French and German.142 At Herrenhausen she spoke English to the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, whose own written English survives as flawless, and in the summer of 1714 to the poet John Gay, whose relief at being spared speaking French as a result was tangible.143 Both women, Gay wrote, ‘subscrib’d to Pope’s Homer, and her Highness did me the honour to say, she did not doubt it would be well done, since I recommended it’.144 Caroline also requested from the poet a copy of his own recent verse, The Shepherd’s Week. Earlier, in another instance of her grasp of cultural developments, Caroline had asked a visiting diplomat to obtain for her in London the works of exiled French essayist Charles de Saint-Evremond, which had been published for the first time in 1705, following Saint-Evremond’s burial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Thanks in no small measure to Caroline, the spring after her marriage, Howe was able to report the enthusiasm of the electoral family for celebrating Queen Anne’s birthday. ‘The Electoral Prince and Princess … told me the night before that they would come and dance. Half an hour before the ball began, they brought me word that the Electress was also coming. The Electress gave the Queen’s health at supper, and stayed till two o’clock.’145

Anne’s response to such heavyweight flattery was muted. The value she attached to it can be judged from the silence with which she greeted news of the birth of Princess Amelia in 1711 and that of Princess Caroline in 1713. Her ‘perfect friendship’ proved, in appearances at least, decidedly variable. By contrast the Duke of Marlborough wrote to George Augustus following Amelia’s birth of ‘the joy that comes to mind from the increase of your illustrious house. It is a subject of rejoicing to all who have at heart the interests and satisfaction of Your Highness.’146 Meanwhile Caroline’s assiduous anglophilia looked beyond Anne’s lifespan. While her second daughter had been named for members of her German family Amelia Sophia Eleanor, her third daughter was christened Caroline Elizabeth. It was a clear indication of the direction of her parents’ thoughts.

In describing George Augustus as possessing ‘rather an unfeeling than a bad heart’, Lord Chesterfield expressed the opinion of his more generous contemporaries.147 The Jacobite Lord Strafford dismissed him as ‘passionate, proud and peevish’.148 The prince had inherited in some measure the ‘honest blockhead’ instincts of his father, ‘more properly dull than lazy’; he shared with his father and his wife the fixation, widespread at German courts, with ‘pedigrees that were of no more signification than Pantagruel’s in Rabelais’, familiar with the antecedents ‘of every reigning prince then in Europe’.149 George Augustus lacked the ‘penetrating eye’ Lord Egmont noted in Caroline, lacked too her penetrating mind.150 Yet husband and wife were affectionate and companionable. In different ways, each was devoted to their growing family. Unlike George Louis, both were straightforwardly ambitious about their British prospects. And Caroline’s good looks had mostly survived her brush with smallpox. At a court where the women were so heavily powdered that the custom of kissing on greeting had been abandoned, Caroline was naturally pale-skinned, with a pink-and-white glow captured in 1714 in a portrait miniature by Swiss artist Benjamin Arlaud.151 Her physical charms inspired in her highly sexed husband a giddy sort of libidinous infatuation, which would prove of long duration.

They were not, however, equals in temperament, intellect or outlook. George Augustus was described as ‘of a small understanding’, while Caroline possessed ‘a quickness of apprehension, seconded by a great judiciousness of observation’.152 Her love of reading, which extended to rereading favourite texts like Leibniz’s Theodicy, based on conversations between the philosopher and Figuelotte, stirred her husband to boorish spite. He dismissed her instincts as those of a schoolmistress, ‘often rebuked her for dabbling in all that lettered nonsense (as he termed it), called her a pedant’ – but on the evidence of her plan, in November 1715, to have Theodicy translated into English, failed to sway her mind.153 He was quick to pique, crimson-faced in his fury. His tantrums exploded and receded like August thunder, and accounts of him venting his anger by kicking his wig around the room like a football inevitably suggest Rumpelstiltskin. By contrast one gushing newspaper labelled Caroline of ‘majestic mien … extraordinary sense … greatness of soul’.154 Her self-control points to a nature more moderate or more calculating, either the ‘low cunning’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu disliked in her or the ‘softness of behaviour and … command of herself’ applauded elsewhere.155 As we will see, there are strong grounds for challenging Lady Mary’s view that Caroline’s ‘extravagant fondness’ for George Augustus was ‘counterfeited’; and if we accept her statement that ‘his pleasures … [Caroline] often told him were the rule of all her thoughts and actions’, the grounds for such behaviour are easy enough to identify in the sexual politics of the period, as the history of Sophia Dorothea amply demonstrates.156 George Augustus had the vanity of a royal first-born, a double entitlement of sex and status. Caroline was spouse, orphan, poor relation, as conscious of her disadvantages as of her strengths.

Leibniz wrote that he ‘admired the equability and honour, the kindness and moderation, which this princess maintains amidst such great prosperity’.157 There were gaps within the couple’s marriage. Caroline combined clear-sightedness about her husband’s limitations with emotional warmth commended by George Ridpath, editor of the Flying Post, as ‘exemplary’.158 George Augustus himself said that ‘her sweetness of temper … check[ed] and assuage[d] his own hastiness and resentment’.159 Her later behaviour would indicate her pride in his sexual thraldom. She did not forget that she owed her ‘great prosperity’ to him.

We should not be surprised that George Augustus took mistresses, nor that the woman he ultimately chose for this role was modest and self-effacing and, like Caroline, sufficiently sensible to shield him from exposure to his own shortcomings. He did not love her, and her sexual allure never eclipsed Caroline’s. Like heroics on the battlefield at Oudenaarde, George Augustus’s acquisition of a mistress was another facet of princely gloire, ‘a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince [more] than an addition to his pleasures as a man’ – important twice over in the case of this posturing, insecure prince-in-waiting, whose father denied him purpose or employment.160 Horace Walpole suggested he was motivated by the ‘egregious folly of fancying that inconstancy proved that he was not governed [by his wife]’ and that he, not Caroline, had the upper hand in their relationship.161 If so, as we shall see, he failed.

Henrietta Hobart was a woman of good family, good-looking without beauty and forced by the early deaths of her parents to hasten into marriage, which she did, aged seventeen, in March 1706. Unlike Caroline in a similar position, she badly miscalculated. ‘Wrong-headed, ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, extravagant, brutal’, Charles Howard was an impoverished good-for-nothing despite aristocratic connections. He swiftly reduced his teenage wife to penurious misery and, in his cups, a state of near-constant fear for her own safety.162

Like Caroline, however, Henrietta Howard was resourceful and courageous; she was serious-minded and intelligent, ‘a complete treatise on subjects moral, instructive and entertaining … [her] reasoning clear & strong’.163 Adversity had schooled her in compliance and made her cynical too. Seven years of humiliating marriage had reduced her to the cunning of an adventuress. In 1713 she conceived a plan to escape the disastrous financial straits to which her husband’s profligacy had reduced them. For a year in dreary London lodgings she scrimped and saved; she sold the last of their possessions, including even their bedding; she received from a maker of periwigs an offer of eighteen guineas for her ‘extremely fair, and remarkably fine’ hair; and with heroic self-sacrifice, she entrusted to the care of relations her adored seven-year-old son, Henry.164 Then husband and wife, bound together only by need and intense mutual dislike, crossed the North Sea from England to Hanover. Their intention was to salvage their fortunes by securing paid employment with Britain’s future rulers.

Henrietta’s target was the dowager electress Sophia, heiress to the throne. Her introduction, easily procurable for a well-born Englishwoman, was a success. Henrietta’s natural emollience, pleasing appearance and, most of all, her knowledge and reading, commended her rapidly. Her visit to Herrenhausen was repeated, then repeated again. She met Caroline. Henrietta’s professed admiration for Leibniz, possibly a careful deceit, impressed both princesses. Caroline offered her a position as dame du palais, or lady-in-waiting, beginning immediately; Sophia extended the promise of a greater prize, an appointment as bedchamber woman in the event of her accession to the British throne, with a salary of £300. More surprisingly, the unprepossessing Charles Howard – ‘a most unamiable man, sour, dull and sullen’ – secured a promise of equivalent employment from George Louis, as groom of the bedchamber.165

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