The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach

To his father, the prince dispatched the tersest of notes. ‘I have just obeyed your Majesty’s orders, having left St James’s. The Princess goes along with me, and our Servants shall follow with all imaginable Expedition.’21 No response was requested or forthcoming.

‘I am so sorry for our dear Princess of Wales that I shed tears for her yesterday,’ her closest correspondent wrote.22 As a measure of his distress, George Augustus succumbed to a feverish ‘inflammatory distemper, with bumps in his face somewhat like a rash’. Doctors treated Caroline for fainting fits and violent throat pains.23 For all its brevity, her journey from familiar certainties, beginning with a walk in the dark, was a big one. Her life encompasses its share of new beginnings and abrupt severances.

PART ONE

Germany

I

Princess of Ansbach

‘Bred up in the softness of a Court’

In Wenceslaus Hollar, the old palace of Ansbach – towered, turreted and architecturally uninspiring – found its ideal chronographer. An etcher from Bohemia, born in 1607 and destined, surely unfairly, to die in poverty, Hollar worked in black and white for a fixed rate of fourpence an hour, creating topographical views as intricately wrought as Flemish lace.

First printed in the 1630s, Hollar’s view of the south German town of Ansbach has a congested spikiness. He delighted in inky shadows, details sharp as pinpricks, the awkward geometry of serried roofs. The tiny figures he scattered across his panorama – riding in a coach, chasing a stag across an empty field – are fragile as house spiders and likewise insignificant. Like spiders they thread the crooked streets. Their meagre limbs are gossamer alongside the solider outlines of steeples and town walls and the criss-cross fronts of timber-framed merchants’ houses. Hidden from view are Ansbach’s metalworkers and cloth-makers, whose workshops oozed woodsmoke and sweat. Out of earshot the ring of hammers and wooden tools, expletives, invective, laughter.

Instead, it is the old Renaissance palace that draws the eye in Hollar’s etching. Built in the third quarter of the sixteenth century by an architect from Swabia called Blasius Berwart, it is a tall building of four storeys, and its walls form the sides of a square. Hollar depicts it as a cat’s cradle of uprights and mullioned windows. From its corners, narrow towers rise, topped by spires. Gables frame shuttered dormers. A pennant – or possibly a weathervane – flutters stiffly from the spire of the largest, central, hexagonal tower. Above the steep-pitched roof, a chimneystack supports a bird’s nest complete with resident stork. Hollar’s scale is all wrong, and the stork, brought to life, would have been enormous, like an airborne dodo. At the start of our chronicle the bird is appropriate, associated with new beginnings, harbinger of new life.

In one version of Hollar’s etching the building is labelled ‘Furstlich Residents’, ‘princely seat’, in letters as big as the palace windows.1 The same print offers the viewer a key: the princely seat is sight ‘A’. Hollar’s contemporaries would have agreed with him that any viewer’s primary interest must be the home of Ansbach’s first family – not the taller Gothic churches of St Gumbertus and St John to the east, nor the palace’s formal garden within crenelated walls to the west, each flowerbed a filigree square. Buildings close to the palace are nondescript by comparison: regular as boxes, like the plastic houses on a Monopoly board, much as they remain.

In Berwart’s palace, in a room quite different from that later mocked up for tourists as ‘Queen Caroline’s apartment’, complete with rococo boiseries and Chinese porcelain, Caroline of Ansbach was born on 1 March 1683. Otherwise, save in Hollar’s etching, the old palace of Ansbach has been forgotten. It was remodelled and extended at the turn of the eighteenth century, after Caroline had already left it.

Today’s Residenz Ansbach – now the administrative seat of the government of Middle Franconia – is an exercise in baroque symmetry begun in 1705: routinely grand. Last whiffs of absolutism confer a bland sort of glamour. Externally, pilasters divide ribbons of tall windows; from the pediment statues gesture sturdily. Vanished is the dark, mysterious poetry invoked by Hollar, gone the mighty stork on its twiggy nest, long dead those spidery figures chasing a stag, jolting in their carriage, working iron or bronze in hidden forges. Nothing remains to recall the older palace at the heart of this cluster of timber-built houses and soaring churches and small-scale provincial aspirations set amid green meadows and distant wooded hills above the Rezat river.

Several of Berwart’s interiors survived the remodelling. There is little today save a handful of portraits that would be recognisable to the blonde-haired princess baptised into the Lutheran faith in the spring of 1683 as Wilhelmine Karoline. In the event, circumstances throughout her life would discourage her from looking back. First family tragedy, later political expediency, forced her to fix her gaze on the present and the future. Her contemporaries discounted her early years. British printmakers even confused her baptismal names: Edward Cooper called her ‘Wilhelmina Charlotta’, Thomas Bowles ‘Wilhelmina Charlotte’.2 It seems likely that she was known first as ‘Wilhelmine’. The switch to ‘Caroline’ coincided with the prospect of a life in Britain, following her marriage into the reigning house of Hanover. ‘Caroline’ was easier for the British to pronounce.

Begun in the year of Caroline’s marriage, Ansbach’s new palace is an exercise in regal conformity: a cumbrous assertion of majesty inspired, like so much German palace-building, by Louis XIV’s Versailles. Her own later life would share this concern with successfully projecting authority. Like the building she never knew, her future career encompassed baroque bombast and a focus on order, reason and measure more typical of the Enlightenment. All that lay ahead.

In March 1683, her birth was of no importance. No poets hymned her tiny limbs, no kerfuffle ruffled diplomats’ dispatches. Only love could justify John Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, beginning a second family after the death of his wife Joanna Elizabeth of Baden-Durlach. The three surviving children of his first marriage, Christian Albert, Dorothea Frederica and George Frederick – seven, six and four respectively – already filled his turreted palace with noise and the surety of another generation. By 1683, Ansbach required from its ruling prince no more sons or daughters. Caroline was a baby without purpose or promise. Save in a mother’s heart, few aspirations can have been nurtured for her. Yet there is no reason to doubt her parents’ happiness at her birth. Given the existence already of two male heirs to the Ansbach patrimony, even her sex cannot have disappointed.

John Frederick was a man of imagination and culture. He wrote fiction, in the manner of contemporary French authors, published under the pseudonym Isidorus Fidelis (‘Faithful Isidore’), and expanded and reorganised the court library; he loved music, especially opera. He employed the composer Johann Wolfgang Franck as director of court music at the outset of his career; he was a patron of composer and well-known castrato singer Antonio Pistocchi. Franck wrote two new operas during his six years in Ansbach, including a version of the story of Perseus and Andromeda: chivalry overcoming tyranny.3 Pistocchi meanwhile would first teach Caroline to sing.4 And John Frederick commissioned for his palace a double portrait of himself and his new wife. She was Eleonore Erdmuthe Louise, elder of the two daughters of John George I, Duke of Saxe-Eisenach. The home she left behind her lay 150 miles to the north, on the north-west edge of the Thuringian forest, an enclave every bit as insignificant as tiny Ansbach.

An uxorious image, John Frederick’s marriage portrait suggests a man happy with his spouse. The sturdy German margrave leans towards his charming consort, seven years his junior, and proudly clasps her hand. Like many another princess, she was acclaimed by poets as the loveliest alive; a shrewder observer noted her mildness of temper, compliance, good sense.5 Her double chin, plump forearms and breasts as deliciously rounded as the peaches in the basket she cradles, indicate her conformity to prevailing notions of beauty. Visual metaphors of fecundity are easily unravelled. Less so her auburn hair, possibly a wig, a tottering confection of marshmallow curls. Corkscrew ringlets foam about her pale shoulders. She wears a necklace of pearls and bulky, square-cut jewels glimmer on her bodice. John Frederick wears a brown wig of a style that had changed little since the middle of the century.

The couple’s pale eyebrows suggest that their colouring was naturally fair – as it appears in Samuel Blesendorff’s engraving of the painting, as well as mezzotints of an earlier portrait of John Frederick attributed to Willem Wissing, in breastplate and chivalric orders.6 A contemporary engraving of John Frederick by Mark Anton Gufer shows that Caroline inherited from her father her distinctively rounded face, with pointed chin and long, straight, pointed nose; her brother William Frederick resembled her closely.7 From her mother Caroline would inherit her quantities of pale blonde hair and, as time would show, considerable strength of character. Her father bequeathed her in addition bibliophilia, a relish for poetry and music, his manipulation of cultural patronage as a medium for communicating power. Although she lacked Eleonore’s uncontested beauty, Caroline would share her ‘expressive countenance’.8 Inviting curves and a splendid embonpoint – a plenitude of milk-white fleshiness and snowy bosom – were also gifts of Eleonore’s. A possibly apocryphal story has a youthful Caroline being followed through Ansbach’s narrow streets by a crowd of gawping admirers. Like Eleonore, she would inspire devotion in her future spouse. Like both her parents, she would make an essentially arranged marriage successful and rewarding.

At the outset she was born to high-ranking obscurity, cut off from the common herd in Berwart’s palace with its garden concealed between high walls, her destiny at best marriage into a court like her father’s. Seventeenth-century Ansbach was part of the Holy Roman Empire. This confederation of around three hundred more-or-less autonomous territories extended across modern-day Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and beyond; its Habsburg overlord was chosen by a handful of the Empire’s leading princes, whose role in the process earned them the title ‘elector’ along with covetable sinecures.9 Situated between Nuremberg to the north-east and Munich further south, Ansbach lies in present-day Bavaria; its outlook focused on its German neighbours. Since the fifteenth century its governing family had been kinsmen of the Hohenzollerns, rulers of the much larger north German territory of Brandenburg, in one eighteenth-century estimate ‘one of the most ancient and illustrious families in Europe’.10 As their title suggests, the margraves of Brandenburg-Ansbach had connections. They had money too, from silver mines in the Harz Mountains, close to the Brandenburg border. John Frederick matched imagination with initiative, promoting traditional local manufactures, including weaving and metal-smithing. But his power was finite, confined like his sphere of influence to an area smaller than an English county, and his family history was middling. Caroline would be the first of Ansbach’s princesses to marry a crown.

If Caroline remembered anything of her early childhood, a period entrusted to the care of nurses and waiting women, her memories of her mother would have been of Eleonore’s near-continuous pregnancies. In January 1685 she gave birth to a son, christened Frederick Augustus, who died three weeks later. Within a year, a second son, William Frederick, was born. Then darkness fell. Two months after William Frederick’s birth, John Frederick died of smallpox. He was thirty-one years old. His remains were interred in the margraves’ vault in nearby St Gumbertus church. Caroline grew up with no memories of the father who died when she was three years old.

Eleonore became a widow at the age of twenty-three; she had been married four years. Six months later her father died in a hunting accident. For the grieving mother of two the darkness of Hollar’s townscape became a reality. John Frederick was succeeded by the elder surviving son of his first marriage, ten-year-old Christian Albert, who felt little warmth for the stepmother who could almost have been his sister, or for the stepsister whom he regarded as a baby. His minority left no role for Eleonore. Instead Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg acted as guardian to Ansbach’s underage margrave. He also provided a temporary home in Berlin for Caroline and William Frederick, in company with his gangly daughter Louise Dorothea and, from 1688, an ungovernable son, Frederick William. Alone, Eleonore retreated the short distance to a dower house in Crailsheim, south-west of Ansbach, a small medieval town of no distinction. Forced upon her by the terms of her marriage settlement and Christian Albert’s indifference, her withdrawal was a species of defeat. The uncertainty that was to be the keynote of Caroline’s peripatetic childhood began early.

At Crailsheim, Eleonore struggled for money. Unhappy and distracted, in the intervals when mother and daughter were reunited she neglected Caroline’s education. Penury made her fretful, threatened to overwhelm her. ‘She is a princess of great virtue and piety,’ noted the English diplomatist George Stepney, discussing Eleonore’s Lutheranism: her circumstances demanded the full resources of her faith. Stepney described her as ‘one who passes for a bigot in that persuasion’.11 Exigency is a hard taskmaster. Driven by anxiety, Eleonore was rumoured to have overcome her Lutheran bigotry to the extent of considering conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Maximilian II, elector of Bavaria, whose capital at Munich ‘excel[led] and out-dazzled[d] [all] for her elegant cleanliness’.12 Since the elector was married already, albeit to the fragile Habsburg archduchess Maria Antonia, who shortly died, this rumour – if it has any basis in truth – indicates the pitch of desperation Eleonore had reached. Understandably, her thoughts during the Crailsheim years were of escape by any means.

Through precocity, boredom or curiosity, Caroline took matters into her own hands and set about teaching herself to write.13 For the rest of her life, her sprawling, forward-tilting handwriting with its bold loops and lopsided incontinence betrayed the struggle it had cost her. She wrote ‘like a cat’, her husband protested, and could never spell in any language: ‘Choresbury’ for Shrewsbury, ‘Hamthuncour’ for Hampton Court, ‘Lady Bomffrit’ for Lady Pomfret – even the name of her closest lady-in-waiting was variously rendered as ‘Clayton’, ‘Claiton’ and ‘Klethen’.14 Her punctuation was erratic or non-existent, an oversight in the cat-like torrents. From the inky tangle emerges a vigorous quality to her character as well as the sharpness of her intelligence. It would not be reasonable, a Church of England bishop would comment later, ‘to measure the extent of her Royal Highnesses abilities by the common standard’.15 If handwriting is a guide, Caroline was determined, quick-witted, vehement, expressive.

Happily for Caroline’s future choices, Eleonore did not change her religion. When it happened, the remarriage of the widowed margravine served only to jeopardise her family’s wellbeing.

In November 1691, five years after John Frederick’s death, Eleonore travelled to Berlin at the invitation of Frederick III. On the eve of her thirtieth birthday she retained her good looks – ‘[a] beautiful person, the admiration of all who saw her’;16 unmistakeably she bore the imprint of grief, money worries and separation from her children. ‘She is handsome, well shaped but too lean,’ Stepney recorded.17 Weight loss won few plaudits at the end of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Stepney’s admiration can be inferred from the poem written in French that, despite their differences of rank, he subsequently addressed to Eleonore, and his assiduity in undertaking errands on her behalf.18 Eleonore appears poised and strikingly attractive in a portrait of the early 1690s, sumptuously swathed in ermine and heavy silks, every inch the baroque consort. But the outline of her face is less rounded than in John Frederick’s marriage portrait; ditto the fullness of that lovely décolletage.

Frederick III’s purpose in summoning his widowed kinswoman was Eleonore’s remarriage. His motive was neither altruistic nor prompted by affection. Improved relations between the mutually mistrustful electorates of Brandenburg and Saxony had recently been sealed symbolically by the inauguration by their rulers of a shared chivalric order, the Order of Sincerity. Frederick intended to consolidate diplomatic amity with a marriage between Eleonore and his Saxon counterpart, Elector John George IV. Her friendship with Frederick and his wife Sophie Charlotte of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and distant relationship, through her father, to the Saxon electoral family, ideally positioned Eleonore for the role of bridal pawn. In practice it proved a marriage of emotional barrenness and unusual acrimony, and spectacularly failed to benefit any of its key players.

The man who became the nine-year-old Caroline’s stepfather, in a service conducted with unceremonious haste at Leipzig on 17 April 1692, following a formal exchange of treaties on 10 February, was ‘round shouldered, of a sullen look, which … does not belie his humour … [and] of a saturnine temper’. He spoke little, ‘offer[ed] no jest himself and [was] not pleased when others [did] it’; his killjoy obstinacy was marked.19 So, too, his variable health, though he was six years younger than the bride who, by April, had seen enough to disabuse her of every romantic illusion. George Stepney described him as incapacitated by the smallest debauchery, but unable to resist the heavy drinking endemic in German courts; his kidney problems were well known. ‘I look upon him as a man that will not be long-lived,’ Stepney noted. Had Eleonore but known of it, this last observation would have constituted her single slender thread of hope in the nightmarish years to come. In the meantime, in Leipzig, ahead of the couple’s formal entry into the city of Torgau, their marriage was ‘consummated with such an air of debauchery’ that courtiers muttered their misgivings. Having ‘bedded his bride in her own apartments’, the sated but loveless John George abandoned her rooms for his own, returning to complete his night’s rest alone at five o’clock in the morning.20

The emotions of Eleonore’s second husband could not have been more different from those of her first. John Frederick had delighted in his comely bride; John George’s affections were already engaged elsewhere and, in Stepney’s assessment, ‘his humour … quite contrary’.21 Stepney drew attention to the family’s poor record of marital fidelity, stretching back ‘two generations at least’.22 In John George’s case, he embarked on marriage under duress. Courtier and captious memoirist Baron von Pöllnitz described Eleonore in Saxony as ‘a Princess, whose excellent accomplishments gain’d a great veneration’.23 Not on the part of her new husband. John George’s intentions towards Eleonore extended no further than fulfilment of his conjugal duties. Stepney described her position unenviably as ‘not unlike Penelope or good queen Catherine [of Braganza] in the reign of Charles II’, a combination of abandonment and clutching after crumbs of affection.24

How much the elector was master of his limited faculties his contemporaries were willing to debate. There were those in Saxony – including members of his closest camarilla – who considered their master a victim of witchcraft.

The source of the rot was the mistress of John George’s father, Ursula von Neitschütz, the wife of a compliant army officer. Die Generalin, as the obliging colonel’s wife was known, possessed boundless rapacity and the valuable asset of a beautiful but unintelligent daughter, Magdalena Sibylla, called ‘Billa’. Deprived of princely handouts at her lover’s death in 1691, Ursula von Neitschütz conceived a plan to prolong the good times by promoting her daughter to the role she herself had previously occupied. The possibility that the late elector was Billa’s father, making her John George’s half-sister, did not apparently trouble her mother. ‘Stories of filters [philtres] and incantations’, shortly circulating in the Saxon court, suggested she had resorted to spells and magic potions to sway John George’s emotions.25 Given the latter’s lack of imagination, and other instances in German courts of a single family providing royal mistresses over several generations, the real explanation is possibly less sensational. Nevertheless, in October 1695 Die Generalin would find herself on trial for her life, accused of being a witch. That her jurors were drawn from the law faculty of the University of Leipzig indicates the seriousness of both charge and proceedings.26

Eleonore was fully apprised of her new husband’s entanglement before the marriage contracts were signed. Under pressure from Frederick III, realistic in her measure of the precariousness of her position, brought up to understand that royal women’s purpose lay in dynastic diplomacy and with an eye to her own and her children’s security, she hesitated to muster objections. For appearance’s sake, Billa had been temporarily removed from John George’s entourage. On 25 April 1692, when, as part of their formal entry to the electoral capital, John George and Eleonore travelled by gondola along the River Elbe, the night sky illuminated with fireworks marking out the letters of their linked monograms, Billa was included among guests at the elector’s table for the banquet that followed. Eleonore’s feelings are easily imagined. In Stepney’s eyes she was sufficiently sensible ‘to dissemble her grievance’.27 Characteristically, John George did not stoop to dissimulation. On Eleonore’s side, the marriage was an exercise in good behaviour from the outset. She paid a high price for financial stability and the outward lustre of the electress title. Her powerlessness – how well she knew it – was simply in the nature of things.

With Frederick III’s departure from Torgau on 29 April, and Caroline and William Frederick still in Berlin, Eleonore found herself, less than a fortnight into her marriage, as much alone as she had been at Crailsheim. At least the splendour of Dresden, called ‘the Florence on the Elbe’, and the magnificent royal palace – contemporary with the old palace in Ansbach – put paid to recent memories of poverty. Behind iron shutters beyond a single door in the elector’s apartments lay the Secret Repository, known as the Green Vault, built in the previous century by the elector Maurice as a treasure chamber. Its glittering collections – priceless trinkets of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, amber and precious stones – dazzled even Peter the Great, visiting six years later. Artefacts prized for the technical virtuosity of their craftsmanship inspired admiration for the electors’ connoisseurship; rarefied materials suggested the wonder of the natural world.28 In the short term Eleonore could derive some satisfaction from the discovery that she was pregnant. While John George flaunted his infatuation for Billa von Neitschütz to the extent of lobbying the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, to grant her an imperial title, appearances were seemingly maintained by such obvious evidence of married relations.

Eleonore’s pleasure proved short-lived. In August she miscarried. A second miscarriage followed in February 1693. In late October she was described as ‘far gone with child’, and prayers for her safe delivery were said in churches across Saxony.29 Perhaps indicative of her state of mind, it proved a phantom pregnancy – as sympathetic bystanders were quick to discern, a victory for her enemies.30 Laconically, Stepney commented, ‘it seems a little wind could not find passage, and all the while we have mistook a fart for an heir to the Electorate’.31