Charlotte was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1703, the daughter of Johann Adolf, Baron von Kielmansegg. Baron von Kielmansegg was Master of the Horse at the Hanoverian court, and Charlotte spent her early years moving between the royal residence of Herrenhausen Palace and the Kielmansegg family home of Faintasie, well known for its exquisite décor and objets d’art. The baron was well liked by the Hanoverian royal family, but it was Charlotte’s mother, Sophia, who gave the Kielmanseggs their assured position as court favorites.
Sophia was the illegitimate half-sister of George Lewis, Prince-Elector of Hanover. She had been raised at court alongside her illustrious brother, and the two maintained a lifelong bond. Sophia was a vivacious, intelligent woman, but she could also be demanding and unstable. In the intense atmosphere of the royal family, she felt entitled to compete with George’s mistresses and other family members for his attention. It was a dangerous game. The subjects of the absolutist Kingdom of Hanover did not have the rights and liberties of an eighteenth-century Briton. A cautionary tale was the fate of the Princess of Celle, who married George Lewis in 1682. Despite her royal blood, the princess was incarcerated for life when she was caught in adultery twelve years later. Her lover, a man of no great rank, was certainly murdered, although his body was never found. The sad fate of the young princess rippled throughout Europe, but it did not deter Sophia from courting the favor of her heartless and unscrupulous half-brother.
For anyone with ambitions, George Lewis had a great deal to give; not only was he Prince-Elector of Hanover, he also stood in line to become the king of Great Britain. In 1701, the British Parliament passed an act declaring the Protestant House of Hanover to be the successors should the House of Stuart fail to produce Protestant heirs. When the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, died childless in 1714, George Lewis ascended the throne of Britain, becoming King George I, the first of the Hanoverian Georgian monarchs.
The right of George Lewis to rule was quickly challenged by Anne’s half-brother James, the Catholic Stuart claimant to the Crown. The Jacobite standard was raised at Braemar in Scotland the following year. The “Fifteen,” as it was called—the Jacobite rising of 1715—was crushed, but the Jacobite threat to the British Crown would remain a fact of political life for many decades to come.
Yet King George I was securely on the throne, and young Charlotte von Kielmansegg, at the age of eleven, crossed the English Channel with her parents and four siblings to join his court. In London, the von Kielmansegg family took up residence in a suite of rooms at St. James’s Palace, where Charlotte watched her mother carry on competing with the other leading ladies of the royal household. Sophia threw lively parties, inviting English wits and authors such as the poet Alexander Pope. Pope characteristically made fun of his pretentious hostess with her aristocratic German accent, calling her “Artemisia,” who “talks, by Fits, Of Councils, Classicks, Fathers, Wits,” but Sophia hardly cared, for she achieved her objective: The English courtiers preferred her salon to the dull society of her brother’s mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg, a German-speaking woman of noble blood who was nicknamed “the Maypole” for her tall, skinny figure. There was nonetheless a recklessness in such rivalry, arousing as it did resentment in powerful quarters, most ominously with Princess Caroline, wife of Sophia’s nephew, the future George II.3
The parties at the palace came to an end with the death of Baron von Kielmansegg in 1717. His widow and five children moved to a house near Hanover Square. Sophia’s popularity declined as rumors of affairs sullied her reputation. Her distress at being the subject of gossip was evident in court circles; she put on weight and earned the nickname “the Elephant,” a caricature that has been preserved for posterity by English diarist Horace Walpole, whose childhood impression of her was of “two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck.” She was careless with money, and financial difficulties set in. The bestowal of two lifetime peerages—Countess of Leinster and of Darlington—by her indulgent brother the king did not make amends.4 As a sign of her shifting fortunes, Sophia was obliged to appeal to Princess Caroline for assistance. Confessing herself to be “perpetually alone,” she requested a small allowance from Her Royal Highness so that she could hire a companion. The request was denied.5
Charlotte had been in her early teens when she witnessed the rapid and humiliating decline of her mother’s popularity. Perhaps it was partly to remove herself from such scenes that she accepted an offer of marriage to Scrope Lord Howe in 1719, when she was not yet sixteen. Charlotte’s nature was very different from that of her gregarious mother: dignified rather than vivacious, cautious rather than impulsive. Her marriage to an Englishman showed an independent mind, for she was the only one of her Hanoverian siblings who made England her permanent home; her brothers and sister returned to Hanover after Sophia von Kielmansegg died lonely and unhappy in 1725.6
Through her marriage, Charlotte was entering a life away from the glamour of the court, in the world of Georgian England’s rural aristocracy. Her bridegroom came from a family that had a precarious foothold in the ranks of titled nobility. Scrope Howe’s title was Baron Glenawly and Viscount Howe, which sounds grand, but in fact his was only an Irish peerage. This meant that he did not have a seat in the British House of Lords, and if he wanted to enter Parliament, he would have to get himself elected to the House of Commons—a violent, vulgar process in eighteenth-century England, and an expensive one. Scrope’s estate of ten thousand acres in Langar, Nottinghamshire, was modest by the standards of the aristocracy.7
Yet the Howes were an ambitious family from Gloucestershire. Since the mid-seventeenth century, using well-tried means, they had climbed steadily into the highest ranks of English society. Caroline’s great-grandfather, John Grobham Howe, had projected himself into the exclusive county society of Nottinghamshire through his marriage to an illegitimate daughter of Emanuel Lord Scrope, Earl of Sunderland.8 His eldest son, named Scrope in honor of the family’s new blue-blood connections, sat in Parliament, married well, and in 1701 became Baron Glenawly and 1st Viscount Howe.9 When he died in 1713, he had a great many debts and one son, fourteen-year-old Scrope, to carry on the family project of elevating the Howe dynasty. Young Scrope’s marriage six years later to Charlotte von Kielmansegg gratified the family’s ambition, for she brought both royal connections and much-needed income in the form of a royal pension.
What were the young Lady Howe’s first thoughts when she stepped from her carriage before her new home of Langar Hall? She had lurched over a hundred miles of unpaved roads, from bustling, modern London to rural Nottinghamshire, whose rusticity was its chief claim to charm. Langar Hall was a fortified mansion house, glamorized locally as a castle, whose three centuries showed in its crumbling stonework. Scrope’s grandfather had tried to improve it with the addition of a small park.10 But this was nothing to a young woman who had grown up within the grounds of Hanover’s spectacular Herrenhausen, famous throughout Europe for its orangeries, fountains and gardens, canals complete with gondolas, and avenues lined with hundreds of linden trees.11 The castle court and pleasure gardens of Langar Hall covered a mere two acres; medieval moats had to serve in the place of fountains. The smell of a swineyard with well over a hundred hogs was offset by the scent of adjacent meadows full of wild grasses and native flowers, daisies, buttercups, campion, yarrow, clover, and meadowsweet.12 Langar Hall, with its fields and farmsteads, belonged to the English countryside.
If Langar was different from what Charlotte had known, so was her new family. By the standards of the time, the Howe household was a young family, with unusually harmonious relationships between the sexes. The Howe patriarchs of the previous generation—the fathers and masters who were the conventional domestic authority figures—were gone. Two of Scrope’s uncles were dead or dying by the time of his marriage.13 The last surviving member of his father’s generation was eccentric religious recluse Charles Howe, who occasionally passed through Langar when he was not composing spiritual lit
erature.14
But Scrope had three sisters still at home, all single and in their teens. The oldest, Mary, would one day become Lady Pembroke, and would supplant her brother as manager of the dynastic fortunes. For now, however, she, Juliana, and Anne lived under the protection of Scrope, who was himself a very young head of household.15 At Langar Hall they had only their widowed mother, Juliana Alington Howe, to act as a check on their youthful exuberance. Law and custom gave men the right to demand feminine submission within their households, but in practice family power structures were negotiated through the day-to-day interactions of the personalities in the home.16 Scrope and his three sisters had a friendly, companionable relationship, illustrated by a rare surviving letter written while he was abroad: “I expect a Letter at Least writ 2 sides & all ye tittle tattle of ye Town in it,” Scrope teased middle sister Juliana, saying her last had been too brief; “I know you are very full of yr. jokes.” Scrope played the flute, and he and eldest sister Mary shared a love of music. He begged Mary to send him the overture to Camilla—probably the opera by Giovanni Bononcini, then popular in London.17
Charlotte’s new home was a far cry from the atmosphere of a royal court. She found herself with a husband and three sisters-in-law who were close to her in age, close to one another, and fun-loving. The Howe sisters were preoccupied, as she had only recently been, with the business of finding husbands and the excitement of courtship.
Scrope and Charlotte’s first duty as husband and wife was to be fruitful and multiply, but the fruit needed to be male. It was a condition of the dynastic title that only boys descended directly from Viscount Howe could inherit. Male cousins or nephews were disqualified. Scrope had no brothers, so he was the sole slender thread upon which his father’s viscountcy hung.
But for the newlyweds, this fundamental duty proved easy. On September 20, 1720, just a year and a month after her marriage, seventeen-year-old Lady Howe gave birth to George Scrope. The baptism was a grand affair at St. James’s Palace in London, with the Bishop of Bangor performing the sacrament. Lady Howe’s royal half-uncle, King George I, was the godfather.18 Splendor, rank, every high connection the proud parents could muster was assembled for this momentous christening.
A year and a half later, a second healthy child arrived, a daughter named Caroline. This time there was no grand celebration. Little Caroline was christened at the parish church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.19 As a girl, she could neither sustain the family title nor enter Parliament, nor take up lucrative posts at court or in the service of her country. Yet equally with her brother Scrope, Caroline was born into the most important role of her life, as eldest sister to a vital generation of Howes. While her brothers would travel the world in pursuit of their careers, Caroline’s life would show that, in the service of an aristocratic family, a woman could be drawn deep into the world of male power.
Lady Howe was delivering babies approximately every year and a half. By the time Caroline reached the age of twelve, there were eight more: a second girl, Charlotte, in August 1723, was followed a year later by George Augustus, who would win fame in Britain and America for his military exploits. Richard, the future naval hero, was born in March 1726.20 A son John who died in infancy most likely arrived between Richard and William, for there is a three-year gap in the record.21 William—who would be commander-in-chief of the British army in America during the War of Independence—was born in August 1729.22 Nineteen months later, the youngest of the brothers, Thomas, was baptized at Langar. Two sisters, Juliana and Mary, would follow within the next four years.23
In an age when the business of getting a family could be fraught with heartbreak at each stage, from conception and delivery through the tribulations of childhood illnesses, Lady Howe was a fortunate mother. But she could not have felt so when her firstborn, Scrope, destined to be the 3rd Viscount Howe, died at the age of eight.24 The parents gave mute testimony to their fondness for the child by forgoing the rather heartless tradition of recycling the dynastic names of dead children, still common at this time.25 The name of Scrope—a badge of honor in the family annals—disappeared from that generation.
Scrope’s death transformed Caroline into the oldest in her sibling set. She would become the leader in play for her brothers and sisters alike. In a period when boys learned at a very early age to be dismissive of feminine authority, Caroline’s brothers were content to follow their clever, tomboyish older sister.
As a very young child, Caroline had shadowed her all-important older brother Scrope, sensitive to the enhanced adult interest showered upon the next lord of the manor, and it was probably from him that she acquired her conspicuous liking for what were considered to be male activities. She was a keen rider of horses, an activity that as a child permitted her the freedom of wearing a riding habit—much less cumbersome than the women’s clothes of the period—and she took part in the outdoor activities of the neighborhood, such as angling and blackberrying.26 The love of competitive activities—chess, cards, and games—that distinguished her as an adult began with her early upbringing. All her life, by her own admission, she would blend a dose of rivalry with her affection for others.
Yet Caroline was the dominant personality with her sisters as much as her brothers. Juliana and Mary were more than ten years younger than Caroline, reinforcing her position as leader. Caroline’s affinity for children as an adult, her knack with crying babies when not a mother herself, all suggest an active participation in the care of the youngest Howes when she was a girl. Alongside her sisters, she duly learned the rules of deportment that were a fixture of a genteel lady’s education. She partook of purely feminine pursuits such as needlework and the trimming of gowns and hair. It seems certain that Caroline took over some of the mothering, as Lady Howe was so often pregnant or recovering from childbirth.
Caroline’s generation of Howes was notable for its ability to mix with people of all levels and backgrounds and put them at ease. One likely reason for this was that Langar Hall, unlike the fashionable new establishments of the Georgian rich shut up in secluded parkland, was very close to the village.27 The children had only to walk out of its gates, past the thirteenth-century parish church of St. Andrew’s and its red brick vicarage, to find themselves on the main street of Langar, a tiny hamlet with a typical array of cottages, a public house, blacksmith’s shop, wheelwright, and duck pond.28
The novelist Samuel Butler, one of Langar’s famous sons, recalled a century later in his semiautobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, that there were few genteel families within easy visiting range. Yet the Howe family was popular in that rustic neighborhood.29 Probably the Howe brood played with the children of the farmers and laborers from the village and the estate. Tenants’ children and the children of the local lord would mix to make up teams for cricket matches, a sport played by all levels of English society during that century, and one which George was particularly keen on. The round of seasonal activities beloved of country children all formed a part of the upbringing of the children of Langar Hall.
Horses, of course, were an integral part of country life, but one that did not come cheap. Lord Howe kept a racehorse, Captain Frisky, that competed at the Nottingham Races, and then there was the gentleman’s sport of foxhunting.30 The Howes belonged to the Belvoir Hunt, whose enormous entourage of sportsmen, hounds, horses, whippers-in, and hunt-servants moved about throughout the hunting season of November to April.31 The Howe children grew up accustomed to the crowds, the mixed society, and the blare of horns, hounds, horses, and excited huntsmen that characterized the country sport. Eighteenth-century foxhunting enforced a rough-and-ready disdain for comfort, its followers rising at dawn and covering a wide territory in conditions that could be both dangerous and primitive.
Caroline, nevertheless, kept pace with her brothers. As a young woman, she was notable for riding a fox-chase, and her choice of sport shows her ease with male companionship. Girls of her class were routinely taught to ride, and sometimes to rid
e to hounds, but Caroline was a keener horsewoman than most. This did not mean that she loved blood sports; there is no evidence that Caroline could shoot, as some daring females did. A friend of her younger days, Mary Warde of Norfolk, who also rode with the hunt, observed that “a pack of Hounds” was just a pretense for socializing.32
Lady Howe, so often taken up with childbearing, could not join her daughter in such ferocious activity, but it would be a mistake to conclude that her influence was nonexistent. Mothers of the era were closely involved in the education of young children, and Caroline as an adult was conspicuous for her love of learning. Her lifelong uninhibited quest for knowledge reflects the legacy of her mother’s early education at the court of Hanover, where aristocratic women engaged with ideas.33 Once in London, Lady Howe’s mother, Sophia von Kielmansegg, had entertained English intellectuals and authors at her popular salon; and the von Kielmansegg children were exposed to the cutting edge of the baroque music of the period in the compositions of George Frideric Handel, whose career had been cultivated by the von Kielmansegg family in Hanover and in Britain.34
The Howe Dynasty Page 2