The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach

To the prospective father-in-law whom she had never met these were honeyed words. Equally accommodating was her willingness to fall in with George Louis’s requirement that Frederick remain in the dark, a circumstance that reveals something of Caroline’s own anxiety that the match come off. Not for the last time in their lives, Caroline’s measured diplomacy contrasted with the impulsiveness of her husband-to-be. George Augustus wrote to her on the eve of her departure for Hanover, ‘I desire nothing so much as to throw myself at my Princess’s feet and promise her eternal devotion,’ and there is puppyishness even in the copybook posturing. ‘You alone, Madam, can make me happy; but I shall not be entirely convinced of my happiness until I have the satisfaction of testifying to the excess of my fondness and love for you.’38 Undoubtedly Caroline reached her own estimate of this ‘fondness and love’ that was based on a single meeting. But with memories of her mother’s treatment at the hands of the elector John George still painful, she could only be reassured by such effusive auguries. Like Eleonore’s second marriage, Caroline’s marriage to George Augustus represented a step up the ladder; her response to von Eltz’s proposal indicates her assessment of the prize at stake. At twenty-two, ambitious and clear-sighted but with a genuine attachment to the electoral family based on her affection for Figuelotte and Sophia, she was still young enough to hope for love too.

Like Hollar’s etching of Ansbach, the view of Hanover by an unknown draftsman published by printmaker Christoph Riegel in 1689 depicts a Gothic town compact within its walls and dominated by church spires.39 At intervals along the city boundaries, fortified towers bristle above undulations of the Leine river. The only building identified in the key that is not a church is the Fürstlich haus, the home of Hanover’s ruling family called the Leineschloss. From its extensive but otherwise unremarkable façade long views unroll across the water. Behind it, hugger-mugger along busy streets cluster the tall houses of townsfolk, their steep roofs red-tiled and gabled, modest in their dimensions since Hanover’s nobles lived elsewhere, in castles and country manor houses. From Versailles Liselotte remembered the market square as overrun with street urchins and, at Christmas, its box trees decorated with candles.40

A windmill in the foreground denotes the proximity of farmland: British diplomat George Tilson described it as ‘flat Country … very full of fir and Corn; mostly rye’.41 It is grazed by sheep for the lucrative wool trade or set aside for hops. Out of sight, nearby forests are plentifully stocked with game. Within tranquil surrounds lies this small, unassuming town of no more than ten thousand inhabitants, ‘neither large nor handsome’ in the estimate of the well-travelled Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and lacking magnificence, rich only in ‘miserable’ taverns.42 The main gates were closed every night.

Despite its middling size, smaller and so much less impressive than the Dresden and Berlin of her childhood, the town that greeted Caroline at the end of her ten-day journey from Ansbach, undertaken in the company of her brother, offered intimations of a grandeur absent from many provincial capitals. Sophia’s late husband Ernest Augustus, the eldest of four brothers, had ultimately succeeded to the bulk of the brothers’ joint inheritance, united under his rule as the Duchy of Hanover. Ambition had prompted his campaign for electoral status, which was granted in 1692, six years before his death. Like his Brandenburg son-in-law Frederick, he had exploited cultural initiatives to support his political aspirations, to the benefit of his old-world capital. In addition to the masquerades, gondola festivals, illuminations and Venetian-style annual carnival that raised the court of Hanover above many of its neighbours for style and splendour, these included a theatre in which French comic actors performed nightly, and an opera house within the Leineschloss hung with cloth of gold and crimson velvet and capable of seating 1,300 spectators. Lady Mary rated the latter as ‘much finer than that of Vienna’.43 Its completion at breakneck speed within a single year stemmed from competitiveness with the neighbouring court of Wolfenbüttel, which had embarked on a similar endeavour at the same time.44 Ernest Augustus sealed his victory with an inaugural performance of Steffani’s opera Enrico Leone, a celebration of the dynasty’s superhero, Henry the Lion. Three years later the Leineschloss opera house staged ‘the finest operas and comedys that were ever seen … [including] the opera of Orlando Furioso’.45 Ernest Augustus also oversaw the embellishment of a palace begun by his father in 1665: Herrenhausen.

For Caroline, as for Sophia before her, Herrenhausen would become the glory of Hanover. Two miles outside the city walls, it occupied three sides of a large courtyard, a sprawling two-storey expanse designed in its first phase by Venetian architect Lorenzo Bedoghi and completed by his countryman Hieronymo Sartorio ten years later. Where Lützenburg aimed to delight and to showcase the refinements of its savant princess, the purpose of Herrenhausen was magnificence. Its stables accommodated six hundred horses. An outdoor theatre, overseen for Ernest Augustus by Steffani, suggested an Italian opera house. Here in 1702 George Louis and Figuelotte took part in a dramatic performance based on Petronius’s account of Trimalchio’s banquet in the Satyricon, written for the occasion by Leibniz. As at the Leineschloss the palace exterior was unassuming. Within, Gobelins tapestries, damask-lined walls and coffered ceilings painted and gilded conjured the heavyweight majesty of divinely ordained princely rule.

Beyond lay the gardens. South of the palace was the Great Garden, bordered by poker-straight avenues of trees, and on three sides by an artificial canal on which gondolas floated under the watchful eye of a Venetian gondolier, Pierre Madonetto. Largely Sophia’s creation, it was laid out from 1683 in conscious emulation of the baroque formal gardens she remembered from her childhood in the Dutch Republic. In 120 acres, melons grew under Murano glass cloches, a mulberry plantation fed silkworms, pomegranate and fig trees, date palms, apricot and peach trees defied a changeable climate, and hothouses warmed by tiled stoves nurtured the orange, lemon and pineapple trees which so astonished Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visiting in the chill of December in 1717.

At the garden’s heart lay the Great Parterre, created by court gardener Henry Perronet to designs by Sartorio. It featured swirling arabesques of low box hedging, gravel paths and classically inspired statues by Dutch sculptor Pieter van Empthusen carved from white Deister sandstone from nearby Barsinghausen. Imported from Paris were twenty-three busts of Roman emperors. There was a grotto and a cascade, a maze, hedges and screens of hornbeam and, in time, an allée of more than 1,300 lime trees. A wooden temple, filled with doves, occupied the centre of a labyrinth. Additional designs devised by Sophia’s gardener Martin Charbonnier, a Huguenot exile, extended the parterre’s doily-like geometry. Like Siméon Godeau, whom Figuelotte had employed at Lützenburg, Charbonnier was a pupil of the great Le Nôtre. However powerful Sophia’s attachment to the gardens of The Hague, the influence of Versailles was all-pervasive. Fountains animated circular pools – Leibniz had advised on the necessary hydraulic mechanisms. Afterwards George Louis consulted English architect and politician William Benson to create ever more spectacular jets and falls, ‘great and noble’ waterworks of the sort commended during his visit of 1701 by John Toland. The result was a fountain thirty-six metres high whose installation cost George Louis the enormous sum of £40,000.

In her widowhood Sophia occupied one wing of the palace. Daily she made a lengthy circuit of the gardens she described as her life, ‘perfectly tiring all those of her Court who attend[ed] in that exercise’, a promenade of two or three hours which one English visitor considered the sole ‘gaiety and diversion of the court’.46 Herrenhausen was not, as her niece Liselotte assumed, Sophia’s dower house. In 1699 she had made over to George Louis the income willed to her by Ernest Augustus for its upkeep, and the palace continued to serve as the court’s summer residence from May to October.47 In the year of Caroline’s marriage, George Louis embarked on an extensive refurbishment. Under Sophia’s influence furniture, tapestries and objets d’art were commissioned from the Dutch Republic. For the large building in the garden called the Galerie, a little-known Venetian painter, Tommaso Giusti, created a fresco cycle depicting the story of Aeneas, that epic tale of filial piety and the foundation of an empire.48

In Dresden and Berlin, Caroline had learned to recognise visual culture as a conduit for princely agendas. The Saxon Kunstkammer, with its collection of dynastic portraits, and the marvels of the Green Vault, had first stirred in her an aesthetic awakening continued by Frederick and Figuelotte. Sophia’s collection of paintings in Hanover rivalled her daughter’s. Her cabinet of curiosities was rich in jewels and gemstones, and her garden was the foremost in Germany. Compared with that of his father, George Louis’s court lacked panache, peopled by ‘such leather-headed things that the stupidity of them is not to be conceived’.49 The court opera was closed, and celebrations, including that of Caroline’s marriage, missed the flourish prized by Ernest Augustus and Frederick. Court routine was dully repetitive: ‘We have not much variety of Diversions, what we did yesterday & to day we shall do tomorrow’; the daily ‘drawing room’, or formal reception, did not daily delight.50 Even Sophia’s gatherings of learned and distinguished men, albeit they included after 1710 the composer George Frederick Handel, employed as George Louis’s Kapellmeister or master of court music, wanted the sparkle of Figuelotte’s effervescent sodality. After the dowdiness of Berwart’s shadow-filled palace in Ansbach, Herrenhausen and the Leineschloss were splendid enough.

Caroline’s married life began in Hanover itself. At the Leineschloss Sophia formally welcomed her, on 2 September 1705, ‘with all the expressions of kindness and respect that could be desired’.51 Her wedding took place the same evening, in the palace chapel, in a service notable for its simplicity. Caroline wore a dress of coloured silks. There was a ball and a French play, the former accompanied by modest quantities of alcohol, Caroline’s introduction to the abstemiousness that was a feature of Hanoverian court life.52 George Augustus slept through the wedding sermon, provoking predictably ribald comment. ‘What good news for the bride that he should be well rested,’ Liselotte wrote, the sort of quip that, a century later, earned her the epithet of the ‘most improper Letter-writer in Europe’.53 From England Queen Anne wrote too, letters of congratulation to Sophia and her family. Days later Sophia still remembered the faces of the congregation as ‘wreathed in smiles when we looked at the young couple’.54 George Louis was almost certainly the exception. Acrimony and impatience dominated his feelings towards his only son, and would colour aspects of his relationship with Caroline. He acknowledged her good looks but as yet made no further approaches to intimacy.

It is also possible that Caroline’s smiles lacked conviction. Both she and George Augustus had anticipated from the elector a more generous wedding present. She ‘really could not help taking notice’, wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘that the presents made to her on her wedding were not worthy of [George Augustus’s] bride, and at least she ought to have had all his mother’s jewels’.55 With a degree of subtlety, Caroline’s complaint was not on her own account. She protested at the suggestion of any slight to George Augustus.

A living ghost shared with Caroline and George Augustus the quarters allocated to them in Hanover’s town palace. She was the prince’s mother, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, and though very much alive, dead to the court and the electoral family, by whom her name was never mentioned. Not for the first time in our chronicle, her story is one of conflicted emotions, double standards and novelettish melodrama that nevertheless impacts on events to come.

Sophia Dorothea was George Louis’s first cousin. Her father was Ernest Augustus’s younger brother, George William, Duke of Celle. Her mother, Eléonore d’Olbreuse, was a Huguenot noblewoman of striking good looks, whose commoner blood earned from Liselotte the pithy dismissal of ‘mouse droppings in the pepper’.56 Neither love nor romance played its part in forging the cousins’ disastrous union. At the time of their marriage in November 1682, Sophia Dorothea was sixteen; spoilt, self-willed, preoccupied with dress and luxuries, but notably pretty in the curvaceous, pale-skinned manner of the times, and, if an early portrait by Jacob Ferdinand Voet can be trusted, lacking in confidence and anxious to please.57 George Louis was twenty-two. By the terms of their marriage contract, kept secret from Sophia Dorothea, he received straight away her entire dowry; at her parents’ death, their revenues and property became his too. It was an arrangement guaranteed to deny George Louis’s bride the possibility of financial independence.

Opportunities for acquaintance had recurred throughout the cousins’ childhoods; decided antipathy predated their marriage. Although G.K. Chesterton exaggerated in describing George Louis in 1917 as ‘the barbarian from beyond the Rhine’, his preoccupations were strenuously masculine.58 Off the battlefield he enjoyed hunting. ‘Low of stature, of features coarse, of aspect dull and placid’, he inherited few of his mother’s rarefied interests, only walking and music, and no aptitude at all for the role of romantic swain.59 Like many German princelings, including his lecherous father, he began as a busy fornicator, though his momentum would slow with increasing responsibility. He was otherwise undemonstrative and emotionally costive. He was sixteen when Figuelotte’s under-governess fell pregnant with his first child: Sophia castigated him as a ‘progenitor of bastards’.60 His first full-time mistress shortly afterwards was Maria Katharine von Meysenburg, the sister of his father’s redoubtable mistress Countess von Platen. With no eye to psychological complexities, this curious arrangement had been brokered by Ernest Augustus himself.61 His mother insisted that George Louis would ‘marry a cripple if he could serve the house’, but in the event this was not required of him.62 Instead, despite rumours that Sophia’s English family wished him to marry Princess Anne of York, the future Queen Anne, and, in 1680, an inconclusive trip to London apparently to that end, his father chose for George Louis his pretty young cousin in neighbouring Celle.

It was an arranged royal marriage like others before and since, and compatibility between the partners was an afterthought. Ernest Augustus’s plan was twofold: to bring together the disparate territorial possessions of his family, and to ensure their long-term security by introducing primogeniture in the next generation. George Louis’s marriage enabled Ernest Augustus to knit together Calenburg, Celle and Hanover. In time both George Louis and his eldest son would inherit outright the contiguous raggle-taggle of all three duchies, as well as the fourth segment in the patrimonial jigsaw, the prince-bishopric of Osnabrück.

It was unfortunate that George Louis’s response to the prospect of marrying Sophia Dorothea combined delight in her good looks with ‘repugnance’ at aspects of her character, and that her own reaction was something akin: of such was the stuff of political necessity.63 The glister of Sophia Dorothea’s inheritance outweighed her temperamental and emotional unsuitability to play the parts of George Louis’s wife and Hanover’s electress, outweighed even the £40,000 dowry of Princess Anne, with additional annual promises of £10,000. A portrait of the mid-1680s by Henri Gascar depicts the married Sophia Dorothea with flowers in her curly hair. Her dress of richly woven fabric slips alluringly from her shoulder. A garland of flowers in her hand represents fertility and the promise of springtime, but nothing in this seductively decorative image suggests gravity.

As the marriage approached, Sophia wrote tactfully to the bride’s father that she had never imagined George Louis capable of so violent a passion.64 Three of his four younger brothers were similarly smitten, with Frederick Augustus serenading his sister-in-law as ‘bellissime’, ‘most beautiful’. For her part Sophia Dorothea hurled a diamond-set miniature of George Louis against the wall. But the couple’s first child and only son, George Augustus, was born a year after their wedding. At the outset, irrespective of bridal aversion, youthful sexual excitement contributed its precarious bond.

Even taking into account George Louis’s repeated absences during the first years of his marriage, on campaign with the imperial army fighting the Turks, the interval between Sophia Dorothea’s two pregnancies – in 1683 and 1688 – tells its own tale of marital harmony unravelling. In 1689, the year after she gave birth to a daughter named after her, Sophia Dorothea met the man who three years later became her lover, Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck. Their relationship tracked a familiar course: acquaintances, correspondents, bedfellows. The pretty electress’s infatuation was stoked by boredom, a comprehensive rejection of every aspect of her married life from Hanoverian court etiquette to behaviour on George Louis’s part that encompassed neglect, overt hostility and even acts of frightening physical violence, described in some accounts as close to attempted strangling. Above all she was jealous.

Infidelity was a prerogative of princes. Sophia tolerated Countess von Platen, Figuelotte mostly overlooked Madame von Wartenburg; Ernest Augustus indicated to his daughter-in-law that she must make similar concessions. In 1690, George Louis had acquired the mistress to whom he would remain faithful for life, tall, thin, plain Melusine von der Schulenburg, whom his mother disparaged as a ‘malkin’, a picturesque noun applied equally to scarecrows and slatterns.65 Within three years Madame Schulenburg had two daughters, referred to as her nieces, and, like the elector John George IV in his affair with Billa von Neitschütz, George Louis all but lived with her. Sophia Dorothea’s retaliation had a tit-for-tat quality, but husband and wife inhabited a world in which men and women were not judged as equals, and women’s faithlessness, with its danger of pregnancy and illegitimacy, threatened the integrity of royal succession. ‘Does the young duchess not know that a woman’s honour consists of having commerce with no one but her husband, and that for a man it is not shameful to have mistresses but shameful indeed to be a cuckold?’ Liselotte asked rhetorically.66

A predictably tight-lipped nineteenth-century verdict casts Königsmarck as a ‘handsome, wicked, worthless reprobate’; his sister judged him ‘an equal mixture of Mars and Adonis’.67 To Sophia Dorothea, the raffish Swedish mercenary provided an exhilarating contrast to George Louis, with his brusque neglect, eruptions of physical violence and, when it suited him, perfunctory love-making. In suggestive French, in letters written in code in invisible ink, Königsmarck wooed his princess. He called her his ‘divine beauty’, he signed his name in blood. He courted her lady-in-waiting, Eleonore von dem Knesebeck, who acted as go-between for the lovers, concealing Sophia Dorothea’s replies to his letters in hats and gloves and stitching his own letters into curtain linings safely out of sight. He also cultivated the good opinions of Sophia and Ernest Augustus. In 1692 Stepney reported Königsmarck directing ‘splendid ballets … all in maskeradings’ in the Leineschloss opera house.68

‘Maskeradings’ on the electoral stage were an apt metaphor. Princess and count progressed from artless dalliance to desperate longing, fuelled in part by their shared talent for self-dramatisation. In their letters and dizzy assignations they slipped between the worlds of fairy tale and melodrama, their emotions heroic in intensity, in daring, in urgency. Königsmarck labelled himself ‘a poor butterfly burnt by the flame’; he confided to Sophia Dorothea a terrifying but prophetic dream in which his actions were punished by execution; he was exaggeratedly jealous of George Louis’s continuing conjugal rights and begged God to kill him if Sophia Dorothea failed him.69 Neither lover accepted responsibility for behaviour they knew to be perilous. But Sophia Dorothea’s posturing included a measure of genuine unhappiness.

That she crossed the Rubicon from flirtation to infatuation was plainly ill-advised. That she disdained discretion or concealment was still more injudicious. Sophia and Figuelotte were among those who counselled against the dangers of transgression. Determined to divorce George Louis and marry Königsmarck, she ignored their warnings. Unaware of the impossibility of her financial position, she fixated on the idea of elopement. ‘Let us love one another all our lives and find comfort in one another for all the unhappiness brought on us,’ she pleaded.70

Four years after their first exchange of letters, desperate measures brought to an end the romance of Sophia Dorothea and her dashing Swede. On the eve of his departure for Dresden to take up a position as major general in the Saxon army, Königsmarck was murdered en route to his mistress’s apartments in the Leineschloss. Orders for his killing probably originated with Ernest Augustus or, on his behalf, Countess von Platen. A particularly gruesome version of events has a vengeful and incensed countess grinding his face beneath her high-heeled shoe. George Louis was absent on a visit to Figuelotte in Berlin.71 The deed itself, on 1 July 1694, was the work of a quartet of Hanoverian loyalists, including von Eltz and an architect called Nicolò Montalbano, who shortly received from Ernest Augustus an enormous one-off payment of 150,000 thalers.72 Königsmarck was stabbed over and again. His body was concealed in a weighted sack and thrown into the Leine river, where it settled into muddy wastes alongside general debris and the drowned carcasses of cattle. Sophia Dorothea knew nothing of this squalid butchery. With mounting apprehension, she continued to await her lover.

In her ignorance she was not alone. The best the ever-vigilant George Stepney could manage was to describe the circumstances of Königsmarck’s disappearance as ‘doubtfull’ and, with a degree of accuracy, point to the probability of ‘daggers and poyson’ in Hanover.73 But the nature of the count’s infraction was widely understood: ‘I believe his amours made that court too hot for him,’ Stepney wrote during one of Königsmarck’s regular absences the month before Montalbano’s blow.74

Sophia Dorothea retreated to Celle and her parents; she refused to return to George Louis. Anxious about the effect of such a scandal on Hanover’s standing in the Empire, Ernest Augustus took refuge in cod legalities. In a punitive divorce settlement finalised in December, Sophia Dorothea alone was accounted culpable. Cresset reported that ‘the sentence was pronounc’d upon malicious desertion’.75 The Englishman considered the elector guilty of sharp practice: ‘Hannover has made a pretty good hande of this match. She brought ’em in land of purchas’d estate 50,000 crowns, besides jewels which they are now takeing from her and she is pack’d off with about £800 a year in bad rents.’76

Sophia Dorothea was banished to the castle of Ahlden, a timbered and moated manor house in Celle, more than thirty miles from the town of Hanover. She spent the remainder of her life as a prisoner there, writing ‘most patheticall letters’ to her mother, who visited sporadically, but denied any contact with her children or the possibility of marrying again.77 To preserve an illusion that the newly styled ‘Duchess of Ahlden’ had retired voluntarily after forsaking her marriage, she was provided with an annual income of eight thousand thalers and a roster of servants appropriate to her rank as former electress: ladies-in-waiting, two pages and gentlemen-in-waiting, two valets, a butler, three cooks, a confectioner, a head groom, a coachman, fourteen footmen, twelve maids and a garrison of forty infantry- and cavalrymen to ensure her confinement.78 A handful of visitors were closely supervised.