The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach

In despair, Eleonore took to her sickbed. That she nevertheless granted audiences to visiting diplomats suggests her determination not to be sidelined.32 Unlike the wife of John George’s successor, she did not resort to the thermal springs in the Saxon town of Teplitz to encourage conception; probably her heart was no longer in it.33 Meanwhile, in a letter signed on 20 February 1693 by the imperial vice chancellor, Leopold von Königsegg und Rothenfels, the emperor had bestowed on Billa the title Countess of Rochlitz.34 Four months later, on 20 June, at the midpoint of Eleonore’s phantom pregnancy, the new countess had succeeded where Eleonore was to fail, and gave birth to John George’s child. The bastard girl was baptised Wilhelmina Maria Frederica.

Secretly, John George offered his mistress a written pledge: surviving documents include the marriage contract he presented to her.35 Publicly he extolled the pragmatism of bigamy. Stepney quoted claims that, among German princes, bigamy was more widespread than ever before, and that John George ‘va épouser formellement la comtesse de Rochlitz’ (will formally marry the Countess of Rochlitz). Already the Saxons were referring to the ‘young’ electress (Billa) ‘in opposition to the Old’ (Eleonore).36 Late in 1693, Stepney recorded ‘a report that apartments for the countess are being prepared at the court’.37 For Eleonore these were alarming developments: with good reason she mistrusted her husband’s intentions. Bigamy or divorce aside – and political considerations meant that John George dare not attempt the latter – Eleonore understood that her death alone could make good his promise to the countess. In an argument between husband and wife over John George’s gift to Billa of the valuable Pillnitz estate, only the presence of bystanders prevented the elector from stabbing Eleonore with the sword he drew on her.38

How much of her mother’s anxiety Caroline knew about or understood at this point is unclear. Aspects of adult life remain concealed from the most precocious and observant child. Even after Caroline and William Frederick’s return from Berlin, the requirements and formalities of court life separated Eleonore from her children for much of the time. It is possible that Caroline overheard gossip about John George’s behaviour, and probable that she noticed her stepfather’s frequent absences from the palace; she understood the extent of John George’s lack of interest in herself and her brother, and was surely aware of a febrile quality in the atmosphere at court, and her mother’s growing nervousness. At intervals Eleonore appears to have retreated to the safety of a house in Bayreuth with her lady-in-waiting, Madame du Mornay. When it suited him, and contrary to her intentions, John George followed her there.39

That she feared for her life, genuinely concerned that the Neitschütz faction intended to poison her, is not something Eleonore is likely to have shared with her nine-year-old daughter. To others she branded Die Generalin ‘a person guilty of black practices’.40 In explaining her decision finally to abandon the royal palace in favour of the estate, remote from Dresden, at Pretzsch on the banks of the Elbe, that had been settled on her at the time of her marriage, she doubtless happed upon a useful fiction. To the English authorities, Stepney explained that she intended to ‘spend the rest of her life [there] rather than be continually exposed to hard usage’.41 He had previously expressed concern that, in her own best interests, Eleonore should withdraw from court to the country.42 Even if he was unaware of the full extent of the threats to her, he clearly considered that, in Dresden, no good could come to Eleonore.

Once, smallpox had deprived Eleonore of a doting husband. Now the disease struck again. ‘Die Favoritin’, Billa von Neitschütz, succumbed first. ‘For fear her face should suffer’, her mother dispensed with doctors (such as they were) and concocted remedies of her own. The result was ‘agonyes speechless’. As death approached, ‘locked jaws prevent[ed] [Billa] from taking the sacrament’.43 A grief-stricken John George ordered deep mourning for the entire court.44 Weeks later, on 27 April 1694, smallpox claimed John George’s life too, the price this headstrong and intemperate prince paid for nursing his mistress himself.45 In the medieval church of St Sophia, the corpse of die Favoritin was placed on public view, her face alarmingly discoloured. An eyewitness account survives from 30 April, more than two weeks after Billa’s death.46 So, too, a scurrilous epitaph on John George’s foolish mistress and her scheming and ambitious mother.47

In 1692, George Stepney, then agent to the Brandenburg court, had correctly forecast a short life for the elector John George IV. His appointment the following year to the post of commissary and deputy to the court of Saxony offered Stepney ample opportunity for further observation. In the aftermath of John George’s death, he wrote an elegy to Eleonore, Pour la mort de SAE de Saxe à SAE Madame l’Electrice Eleonore. In it, he described the elector’s passion for Billa von Neitschütz as ‘unworthy’, their love ‘un indigne amour’.48 Finally free from the toxicity of mingled terror and humiliation, Eleonore’s only response was relief. In the witchcraft trial of Ursula von Neitschütz the following year she played no part.

Eleonore had endured the death of her first son. Sincerely she had mourned her first husband. With no option but to leave the palace in Ansbach, yet insufficiently provided for, she had spent almost six years lonely, unhappy and all but penniless in provincial retirement in Crailsheim. Velvet-gloved but iron-fisted cajolery on the part of her ‘friends’ had compelled her to marry again, this time a boor and a drunkard with a pronounced streak of mental cruelty. Either her second husband, or associates of her husband’s mistress, had threatened to poison her. John George himself had drawn his sword on her.

In Saxony, she was more fortunate than in Ansbach in her husband’s successor. John George’s heir, his brother Frederick Augustus, afterwards known as ‘Augustus the Strong’ on account of feats that included rolling up silver plates with his bare hands, ‘revel[led] and dance[d]’ at news of his death, then gave himself up to ‘frolicks and debauches’.49 In John George’s beautiful widow and her children he took a passing interest, as he would continue to do, and Eleonore’s life regained a semblance of normality. Among her surviving papers, for example, is the letter of recommendation – the equivalent of a reference – that she wrote in the summer of 1694 for a former page at Crailsheim.50 George Stepney reported in August that he had twice visited Eleonore since her widowhood, and that she permitted him to call on her frequently. On both occasions she had told him ‘old stories and some particulars of the disorders of the late reign which I should never have learn’d from anybody else’.51 The following summer, in company with Caroline, she revisited Dresden on her way to spas near Koblenz, and had supper with Stepney’s colleague Philip Plantamour.52 Her journey proved unhappy: ‘her wagons [were] plundered by snap-hawks [freebooters]’ and she was robbed of valuable plate and goods.53

Whatever the anticipated benefits of Eleonore’s Koblenz trip, the damage, it seemed, had been done. In the interval since John Frederick’s death, her health had deteriorated irreparably. On 9 September 1696, two years after her second husband, Eleonore died. She was thirty-four years old. Her daughter Caroline, just thirteen, found herself an orphan.

A letter changed Caroline’s life. It took the form of an invitation, and offered her a home – her fifth so far – and the security of guardianship. Its author was the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III – to date, as the tone of his letter implicitly acknowledged, an equivocal player in the life of Caroline’s family. With some warmth, Frederick wrote to her in the autumn of 1696, ‘I will never fail as your guardian, to espouse your interests, and to care for you as a loving father, and pray your Highness to have in me the same confidence as your mother always had, which I shall properly endeavour to deserve.’54 Events would prove his sincerity. Caroline had made her home in Berlin before, at Frederick’s glittering court, in the unsettled months preceding Eleonore’s disastrous remarriage. Now, insofar as the young Caroline could ever feel she dare anticipate stability, the shadow of unsettlement temporarily dispersed. Only her parting from her brother William Frederick increased her sorrow. He had returned to Ansbach as heir presumptive, following Christian Albert’s death in 1692 and the accession as margrave of the latter’s unmarried younger brother George Frederick.

Yet it was not the well-intentioned Frederick but his wife, Sophia Charlotte, a Hanoverian princess known to her family as ‘Figuelotte’, who would provide the guardianship that had the greatest impact on an impressionable young girl only fifteen years her junior. The elector was self-important, a little pompous, excessively absorbed by minutiae of etiquette and ceremony, a zealot for elaborate dress despite a spinal deformity and gout; in his own words one who possessed ‘all the attributes of kingliness and in greater measure than other kings’, alternatively one who ‘[went] out of his way to find more and more occasions for ceremony’.55 By contrast the electress disdained ‘the grandeurs and crowns of which people make so much here’;56 she described herself as well acquainted with ‘the infinitely little’.57 While Frederick was at pains to surround himself with a court as rigidly formal as Versailles, his wife – motivated ‘by the ardour that she had for the knowledge of the truth’ – preferred music, reading and ‘the charm of … philosophical conversations’.58 Court life, Figuelotte saw, threatened the truest friendships, the strongest bonds of love, however impassioned Frederick’s professed opposition to ‘Cabals and private Intrigues … [and] intermeddling in other People’s Business’.59 It offered, as the philosopher Leibniz noted, ‘everything that might dissipate the intellect’.60 She was impatient of Frederick’s hankering after royal gloire. And, until 1697, she had a powerful enemy in his close adviser and former tutor, Eberhard von Danckelmann. Studiedly detached from court politics, she occupied herself with less contentious pursuits.

To Agostino Steffani, her father’s director of court music in Hanover, Figuelotte described music as ‘a loyal friend that never leaves one and never deceives one, it never betrays one and has never been cruel. On the contrary all the charm and delight of heaven is there.’61 Within months of Caroline’s arrival, Figuelotte had enticed to Berlin as court composer the Italian organist and former composer to the Duke of Mantua, Attilio Ariosti. From 1702 she employed the composer Giovanni Bononcini. Both would later feature in the operatic life of London after Caroline’s marriage. Among Figuelotte’s costliest purchases was a harpsichord, commissioned from the court instrument-maker Michael Mietke, sumptuously decorated with panels simulating white Chinese lacquer; she also commissioned a folding harpsichord to take with her on journeys. Frederick meanwhile devoted his energies to worldly aggrandisement. In 1701, in exchange for military support for Habsburg ambitions in Spain, he won the emperor’s acquiescence in his elevation from Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia to ‘King in Prussia’. The previous year, in anticipation, he had given orders for a new suite of crown jewels. Like other mythomanes, at his coronation at Königsberg on 18 January, he placed the crown on his own head.

The interests of husband and wife were at variance. On closer observation the young Caroline recognised the astuteness of Figuelotte’s management of her pernickety and egotistical husband and the extent of Frederick’s admiration for his unconventional electress, a feeling unfettered by the acrid presence of his ambitious mistress, Katharina von Wartenburg. Over time Caroline understood that Figuelotte’s absorption in music and philosophy offered more than respite from the labyrinthine formalities of Brandenburg court etiquette and the falsity of ambitious courtiers. It was an antidote to worldliness and self-interest. It also represented one aspect of the role of consort, the soft power of cultural patronage, a division of royal influence typical of German courts in this period.

The scale of Figuelotte’s sway over the teenage Caroline was quickly apparent. In physical and verbal mannerisms, Caroline became her guardian’s mirror, Galatea to the electress’s inadvertent Pygmalion. Figuelotte was intelligent, uncompromising and beautiful. She was irreverent – a woman who took snuff in the middle of her coronation; and she was unconventional, accompanying the court orchestra in concert performances on her harpsichord. ‘She has big, gentle eyes, wonderfully thick black hair, eyebrows looking as if they had been drawn, a well-proportioned nose, incarnadine lips, very good teeth, and a lively complexion,’ runs one account.62 She also inclined to heaviness, the reason her mother had forbidden her to wear velvet prior to her marriage. A sequence of undistinguished portraits by the court painter Friedrich Wilhelm Weidemann indicates florid good looks and lugubrious stateliness. Caroline’s admiration, albeit she continued to mourn Eleonore, was wholehearted. Unreservedly she acclaimed her guardian’s wife as ‘incomparable’.63 But Figuelotte could not be fully satisfied with the decorative or reproductive roles typically assigned to royal spouses. The silliness of courtiers had killed her first two sons: a crown crammed on to the head of the elder at his christening, a gun salute fired too near the cradle of the second. After the birth of her third son, Frederick William, Figuelotte appeared unconcerned to provide her husband with additional heirs. By the time of Caroline’s arrival in Berlin, without any outward suggestion of a breach, husband and wife lived parallel lives. Figuelotte doted on Frederick William, an unappealing child given to violent tantrums, hair-pulling and kicking valets; she was ripe to form new attachments.

The palace of Lietzenburg, or Lützenburg, in open country less than five miles from the centre of Berlin, provided the setting for her independence. Building work had begun in 1695, to a workaday baroque design by architect Johann Arnold Nering. Four years later its first phase was complete, including Figuelotte’s own suite of rooms, hung with damask beneath ceilings of gilded plasterwork. Following her coronation as queen, she commissioned from court architect Eosander von Göthe a second, grander apartment aping the latest developments in French decoration. She added a sumptuously theatrical chapel and a glittering Porcelain Cabinet decorated with mirror glass and thousands of pieces of Chinese porcelain arranged on gilded brackets. Formal gardens were also French in taste, the work of Siméon Godeau, a pupil of Louis XIV’s garden designer André Le Nôtre: clipped box hedges, pristine lawns with gilded statues and, in emulation of her father’s summer palace, a man-made pond bobbing with real Venetian gondolas – ‘a paradise only without apples’.64 At Lützenburg, Caroline watched unfold a vision that was at the same time personal and political. Figuelotte’s palace expressed her own rarefied connoisseurship; it impressed visitors with a vision of Prussian wealth, refinement and cosmopolitanism. For Caroline it encapsulated all that was most remarkable and delightful in her guardian.

In this rural escape, a private domain of her own making, Figuelotte surrounded herself with a youthful court. Here etiquette gave way to spirited misrule, like the lively amateur theatricals in which Caroline played her part alongside courtiers and visiting royals, and the birthday festivities for Frederick in 1699, when the electoral couple and their guests leaped over tables and benches.65 Contradicting the statement of her cousin Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans, that ‘it is not at all suitable for people of great quality to be very learned’, at Lützenburg Figuelotte pursued interests that were explicitly cerebral.66 From across Europe she welcomed men of intellect, regardless of the orthodoxy of their views; even visiting diplomats were subjected to ‘metaphysical discourses’.67 ‘She loves to see Strangers,’ wrote the English rationalist philosopher John Toland, who counted himself among their number, ‘and to inform herself of all that’s worthy or remarkable in their several Countries.’68 A letter from the summer of 1698 draws attention to evidence of Figuelotte’s anglophilia, too – Caroline’s first introduction to pro-British views.69

Chief among Figuelotte’s ‘Strangers’ was polymath philosopher, mathematician and historian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the inventor of the forerunner of modern computing, infinitesimal calculus. Her father’s librarian and court adviser since 1676, engaged in writing the history of Hanover’s ruling family, the Guelphs, and a trusted confidant to her mother, Leibniz became Figuelotte’s correspondent late in 1697. Their letters were mostly philosophical in bent, and on 1 September 1699 Figuelotte declared herself Leibniz’s disciple and avowed admirer, ‘one of those who esteems you and respects your merit’.70 For his part, Leibniz wooed her with treacle. ‘The charms of an admirable princess have in all matters more power than the strictest orders of the greatest prince in the world,’ he oozed.71 He sent her a fossilised mammoth tooth unearthed near Brunswick; his accompanying commentary attempted to whet her appetite for science. Then, in 1702, in response to Figuelotte’s questioning, he wrote a short essay, ‘On What is Independent of Sense and Matter’.72 In time a self-appointed unofficial go-between for the courts of Hanover and Berlin, journeying whenever possible to Lützenburg in his coffee-coloured carriage painted with roses, Leibniz took his place at the centre of Figuelotte’s coterie of rationalists, free-thinkers and metaphysicians. With familiarity his admiration deepened. ‘There may never have been a queen so accomplished and so philosophical at the same time,’ he wrote to Queen Anne’s favourite, Abigail Masham.73 A painted fan of the 1680s depicting a French scientific salon, with men and women engaged in eager dispute over globes, telescopes, maps and books, points to the existence of other like-minded patronesses across the Continent. None eclipsed Figuelotte’s sincerity.74 At her side, winningly eager to share all her interests, Leibniz also encountered Caroline.

Contemporaries characterised Figuelotte as interested in ‘the why of the why’, omnivorous in her curiosity. She had inherited from her mother Sophia, from 1698 dowager electress of Hanover, a taste for disputatiousness, and her philosophical deliberations were conducted in person and by letter. Unsurprisingly she amassed an extensive music library. With Frederick she increased the collections of the library in Berlin’s old City Palace.75 She assembled an important picture collection.76 She owned two theatres, one in Berlin, the other close to Lützenburg.77 And in 1700 she facilitated the founding of a Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, with Leibniz as president. Frederick encouraged his wife’s hobbyhorses while pursuing his own extensive building programme, aware that cultural pre-eminence among the courts of the Empire served his political aspirations well.

This symbiosis of divergent but sympathetic instincts on the parts of husband and wife was one Caroline would later have reason to remember. She too learned to relish ‘the why of the why’ and to value Leibniz’s guidance; in time she laid out fashionable gardens, collected books and treatises, commissioned the building of a new library. Like her guardians, she would exploit visual iconography for dynastic ends. In Ansbach and Dresden, as well as in Berlin, artistic riches had been features of the shifting stage sets of her childhood. Real awareness began under Figuelotte’s tutelage.

To date, Caroline’s education had been patchy. Her immersion in Berlin’s dynamic court life, with its combination of baroque spectacle and intellectual speculation, proved a watershed, reinforcing the cultural exposure she had been too young to absorb fully at John George’s court. At Lützenburg, Figuelotte – and also her mother Sophia, a regular correspondent and occasional visitor – exemplified for the teenage princess the possibilities of life as princely spouse. Her experience of her Brandenburg guardians challenged Caroline’s memories of Eleonore’s suffering at the hands of John George, her helplessness and loneliness during the lean years at Crailsheim. In this surprising but benign environment, by turns extrovert, urbane and precious, the orphan princess was able to dispel misgivings about past, present and, especially, the future. For Caroline, Lützenburg provided stability, inspiration and a catalyst; it exposed her to female companionship at its most rewarding. When the time came, she would prove herself a consort in Figuelotte’s mould. Like her mentor, she even took snuff.

On 7 June 1696, Duke Frederick II of Saxe-Gotha married Magdalena Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst. The couple were first cousins and, in a markedly successful marriage, went on to have nineteen children, including Caroline’s future daughter-in-law, Augusta.

A century after the event, Horace Walpole reported an over-familiar Duke of Grafton teasing Caroline that, as a young woman, she had fallen in love with Duke Frederick.78 That Frederick’s marriage took place when Caroline was thirteen and living with her mother in out-of-the-way Pretzsch seems grounds enough to query Walpole’s claim. Instead the marriage of Frederick and his duchess illustrates the kind of union Caroline could reasonably have anticipated for herself.

Frederick was seven years older than Caroline. He had inherited his small duchy at the age of fifteen, and would devote a long reign to territorial and financial advancement. His stepmother, Christine of Baden-Durlach, had previously married, as his third wife, Caroline’s Ansbach grandfather, Albert II. Among Frederick’s forebears was John Frederick of Saxony, a Reformation hero who rebelled against the Catholicism of the Holy Roman Emperor and for his pains forfeited his elector’s title.79 In its ties of consanguinity, focus on localised concerns and commitment to Protestantism, the marriage was typical of those contracted among lesser German royalties throughout the period. (The marriage of Caroline’s half-sister Dorothea Frederica to the heir to the tiny territory of Hanau-Lichtenberg was another such, ditto her brother’s marriage to Christiane Charlotte of Württemberg-Winnental.) That Caroline’s life pursued a different trajectory was thanks to the sponsorship of Frederick and Figuelotte.

She can never have doubted that a single choice – to marry or not to marry – governed her future, a paucity of opportunity not restricted to princesses. Furthermore, that her ‘choice’ in the matter was circumscribed to an extreme degree. Too well she understood the hazards of the world into which she had been born. Spinsterhood was a fruitless existence for royal women. Royal marriage was contractual, an arrangement based on policy, unmarried princesses commodities in a calculation of barter and exchange. Husbands took into account strategic considerations; they expected generous dowries. Caroline knew the modesty of her inheritance. Her only trump card – save good looks, which other princesses shared – was the prestige of her Brandenburg guardians, bound to her by honour but few obligations.

Time would show, however, that Caroline was not her mother. In 1692, destitute and miserable, Eleonore had allowed herself to be coerced into marrying a man who offended her on every level. She had exposed herself to humiliation, bullying and even threats of murder in a court dominated by the septic divisiveness of a possibly incestuous affair. When Caroline’s turn came, she would prove less compliant.

Happily for us, circumstances propelled her beyond the reach of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha and his ilk. Frederick III’s father, Frederick William, known as the Great Elector, had transformed the status of the Brandenburg electorate. A standing army, military victories, trading posts on Africa’s Gold Coast, coffers swollen with revenues from new excise duties and a princely building programme had magnified Brandenburg’s prestige and the newsworthiness of its court. Long before Frederick dreamt of his crown, his father had made claims that were altogether more swaggering for the north German state: an Alabastersaal in the palace in Berlin, furnished with twelve full-length statues of Hohenzollern electors confronting the likenesses, in ghostly marble, of a clutch of Roman emperors; a Porcelain Cabinet in the palace of Oranienburg, nodding to Dutch influences and aligning Brandenburg within an international trading network.80 Figuelotte’s peripatetic cadre of thinkers and musicians further broadcast the charms and achievements of Lützenburg; Frederick’s stimulus to the manufacture of home-grown luxury goods including tapestry, lace and mirrors – much of it the work of Huguenot exiles – suggested affluence and sophistication. Brandenburg’s lustre inevitably enhanced Caroline’s marriageability. In addition, her presence in Berlin brought her to the attention of Figuelotte’s redoubtable mother Sophia. It would prove a critical connection.