From now on, her polished flattery of her new countrymen was achieved at the expense of the king, who withheld such niceties. While the older man appeared assertively German, despite the trickle of Stuart blood he inherited from Sophia, Caroline and her husband – whose claims were correspondingly less (and in Caroline’s case non-existent) – posed as would-be Britons. This was more than sham. Caroline’s absorption in February 1716 in Sir John Germaine’s collection of ‘rarities, consisting of seals and reliefs’ was an early indication of her fascination with Tudor history. This would later see her acquire biographies of all five Tudor monarchs, as well as their portraits, beginning with a copy of Anthonis Mor van Dashort’s strikingly austere image of Mary I, which was identified in Caroline’s collection by 1724.142 Unable to view his whole collection in a single sitting, she invited Sir John to return the following day. ‘Amongst other Things,’ reported Lady Cowper, ‘he showed us the Dagger of King Henry VIII, which he always wore and is pictured with.’143
Undoubtedly these fragments of Tudor posterity appealed all the more since Caroline herself had recently been associated with sixteenth-century politics. In 1715, against the backdrop of Jacobite dissent, dramatist Nicholas Rowe dedicated to Caroline his final play, The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray [sic]. A Whig supporter of the new regime, Rowe presented Jane Grey as a Protestant martyr, ‘the Noblest Subject … a Heroine, a Martyr, and a Queen’. In Rowe’s hands she becomes a mouthpiece for feminine virtue: ‘No wandring Glance one wanton Thought confess’d,/No guilty Wish inflam’d her spotless Breast:/The only Love that warm’d her blooming Youth,/Was Husband, England, Liberty and Truth.’144 It was a neat piece of theatrical propaganda, uniting at a stroke Protestantism, chastity and the benefits of the Hanoverian succession embodied by Caroline. Ironically, given later characterisations of Caroline as domineering, John Gay wrote to Pope’s friend John Caryll, ‘Mr Rowe’s Jane Gray is to be play’d in Easter Week when Mrs Oldfield [the actress Ann Oldfield] is to personate a Character directly opposite to female nature, for what Woman ever despised Soveraignty.’145
Caroline had surely played her part in shaping the sentiments with which George Augustus stunned a dinner party of mixed British and Hanoverian courtiers in March 1716. ‘Mrs Clayton in Raptures at all the kind Things the Prince had been saying of the English, – that he thought them the best, the handsomest, the best shaped, the best natured, and lovingest People in the World, and that if Anybody would make their Court to him, it must be by telling him he was like an Englishman.’146 The result was ‘the violentest, silliest, ill-mannered Invective against the English that ever was heard’ on the part of the disgruntled Germans present.147 Unsurprisingly, Lord Hervey recorded, ‘everybody imagined this Prince loved England and hated Germany’.148 No one could attribute similar feelings to George Louis. Versions of George Augustus’s conversation, inevitably reported to his father, did little to check the two men’s escalating dislike. But it was the son who had more accurately taken the measure of their new subjects. ‘I do not think there is a people more prejudiced in its own favour than the British people,’ wrote Swiss traveller César de Saussure in February 1727. ‘They look on foreigners in general with contempt, and think nothing is as well done elsewhere as in their own country.’149 To ignore such prejudice was foolhardy. While George Augustus’s feelings towards the British would change, eventually resembling those of his father, Caroline consistently behaved in a manner that suggests a correct estimate of her adopted countrymen.
In 1715, while disaffected Scots dismissed George Louis as a ‘turnip-hoer’ and George Augustus as Königsmarck’s bastard, a group of Welshmen living in London established a charitable foundation to provide poor relief for the capital’s exigent Welsh and to demonstrate their ‘uncommon zeal’ for the Hanoverian settlement.150 The inclusion of ‘loyal’ in the name of the Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons deliberately contrasted the peaceable Welsh with Jacobite Scots. George Augustus accepted an invitation to be the society’s president. ‘After this the Society waited upon her Royal Highness the Princess … [who] received them very graciously; and declared, That the Society was very acceptable to her. And as such gave them the Honour to kiss her Hand.’151 Caroline’s graciousness on that occasion evidently hit the mark. The society’s chronicler, Thomas Jones, acclaimed her just as she intended: ‘How lovely is her Mien, her Temper sweet,/Majestick, but serene, and humbly great.’152 Later she appointed two Welsh maids of honour, Margaret and Anne Williams.
The society merged celebration of Caroline’s birthday, on 1 March, with the festival of St David, Wales’s patron saint, which fell on the same day. Prince and princess returned the compliment, marking St David’s Day at court by wearing leeks. Not everyone was as beguiled by the coincidence as Caroline or the society’s founders. Lady Cowper’s daughter Sarah dismissed it as political humbug: ‘it is a superstitious Conceit of some Whigs who say it did portend that she shou’d Become princess of Wales’.153 In 1717, Nehemiah Griffiths’s ‘The Leek. A Poem on St David’s Day’ was ‘most humbly inscrib’d to the honourable society of Antient Britons, establish’d in honour of Her Royal Highness’s birthday, and the principality of Wales’. Encouraged by her sturdy Protestantism, her winning manner and examples of her charity – like the donation she had made in January 1716 for the relief of Thames boatmen suffering as a result of the river’s two-month freeze, with their consequent loss of livelihood – Griffiths acclaimed Caroline as a ‘Princess of superior grace’.154 An unnamed poet asserted on the society’s behalf, ‘Tho on her Vertues I should ever dwell,/Fame cannot all her numerous Vertues tell.’155
In the following decade Caroline was also the dedicatee of Orpheus Caledonius; or, a Collection of the best Scotch Songs, including seven songs attributed to David Rizzio, private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots.156 No mention was made of George Louis or George Augustus. It was Caroline, regarded as an archetype of feminine virtues, apolitical and devout in her religion, who attracted praise from such diverse quarters. Notwithstanding the partial inaccuracy of this view, she became in this way a means of extending support for the dynasty into Wales and even Scotland: ‘Ev’n Tongues disloyal learn her Praise’.157 It was the role Whig poet Thomas Tickell identified for Caroline in his poem ‘Kensington Gardens’, in which Caroline is presented as winning support for George Louis’s regime through her appearance and her manner: ‘Form’d to gain hearts that Brunswick’s cause denied,/And charm a people to her father’s side’. She did it without ever leaving the capital.
Her marriage to George Augustus in 1705 had come about with George Louis’s support. George Louis had even guided George Augustus towards ‘choosing’ the Ansbach princess, and closely supervised formal prosecution of his suit. His purpose does not appear to have been his son’s happiness. Rather he considered the advantages to the electorate of an alliance prominent on account of Caroline’s well-publicised rejection of Archduke Charles, as well as her suitability as a future British consort, given the Act of Settlement’s assertive Protestantism; to his mother he commended the strength of her convictions. Subsequent expressions of admiration for Caroline on George Louis’s part were notable for his punctiliousness in distinguishing between admiration and liking. He described her as ‘cette diablesse, madame la princesse’, a diabolical woman, a she-devil or a fury.158 But he was not immune to her ample physical allure, and Liselotte reported a rumour ‘that the King is himself in love with the Princess’, which she discounted in the same breath on the grounds that George Louis was incapable of love. ‘I consider that the King has in no ways a lover-like nature; he only loves himself … he never had any consideration for the mother who loved him so tenderly.’159 Caroline’s pink and white amplitude contrasted with the stringier charms of Madame Schulenburg. George Louis’s exasperation at the daughter-in-law he failed to cow mostly included a grudging sort of praise. The view of her contemporaries was that ‘he never cordially loved her’.160
On the s
urface their relationship was sufficiently cordial for Lady Cowper to attribute her own flattering treatment by the king in December 1714 to her place in Caroline’s household: ‘I was sure,’ she reported herself as telling Caroline, ‘it must be from my having the Honour to be about her Person that I had received such a Favour.’161 She does not record Caroline’s response. That Caroline felt able openly to rebuke George Louis demonstrates at least a degree of candour in their relationship. In February 1716, irritated by a growing popular view that the king was the puppet of a junta consisting of his Hanoverian advisers and the leading Whig ministers Stanhope, Sunderland, Walpole and Townshend, Caroline ‘chid the King … and told him he was grown lazy. He laughed, and said he was busy from Morning to Night. She said, “Sir, I tell you they say the Ministry does Everything, and you Nothing.” He smiled, and said, “This is all the Thanks I get for all the Pains I take.”’162 The blandness of George Louis’s reply precluded discussion. It suggests his unwillingness openly to disagree with Caroline. And realising the dependence she and George Augustus shared on George Louis’s goodwill, Caroline was careful to maintain a semblance of harmony. More than once George Louis entertained his companions at the supper table with anecdotes about Versailles, taken from Liselotte’s letters to Caroline, proof of an ongoing dialogue between them.163 Correctly Caroline considered Liselotte’s garrulous buoyancy safely neutral territory.
By 1715, however, it was evident that George Augustus could expect little from his father. The robustness of the older man’s health added to the son’s despondency. After a year in London the prospects of his inheritance felt no closer than a decade previously. Ambitious and strong-willed, Caroline shared her husband’s restlessness. It was no surprise that George Augustus concluded, as Lord Hervey reported, that ‘his father had always hated him and used him ill’.164 Affection between ruler and heir was decidedly at a premium.
In the summer of 1716, despite the protests of his ministers and continuing Jacobite dissent, George Louis returned to Hanover. On 5 July, in a letter addressed to his ‘Dearest Son’, he appointed George Augustus ‘guardian and lieutenant of the realm’ in his absence. The arrangement took into account the younger man’s inexperience; it granted George Augustus responsibility for minor aspects of government, with bigger questions referred to Hanover. The prince’s powers included presiding at cabinet meetings; he was prevented from making senior cabinet or military appointments. Predictably, George Augustus inferred a slight in his father’s withholding the title of regent. There was worse to come. Of his ‘dearest son’ George Louis demanded a concession: he must dispense with the Duke of Argyll as his groom of the stole, or forfeit the guardianship to his uncle Ernest Augustus, Prince Bishop of Osnabrück. Both monarch and ministry had been troubled by Argyll’s anger at being passed over for Cadogan after the battle of Sheriffmuir. In the king’s absence they mistrusted his influence on George Augustus.
With no alternative and ‘in an Agony’, George Augustus concurred and dismissed his friend. Diplomatically he had announced himself ‘resolved to sacrifice Everything to please and live well with the King’, a statement that in itself points to the extent of ill feeling between father and son.165 He acted with a bad grace, after consulting Caroline. Caroline’s own reaction was scarcely so moderate. Argyll’s removal left her ‘all in a flame’. She did not scruple to disguise her feelings from courtiers and intimates, and Lady Cowper, reading her mood, decided Caroline would ‘hardly forgive what is past’.166 As an indication of Caroline’s response to opposition it offers unrosy insights into her character, something more than strength of purpose. Fiery outbursts of temper intermittently rocked her self-control; her memory for slights was sharp. Jointly Caroline and George Augustus decided not to join the king at Kensington Palace, west of Piccadilly, where apartments had been prepared for them.
In the interests of public harmony George Louis attended Caroline’s drawing room at St James’s Palace the evening before his departure. The following morning, similarly prompted, George Augustus accompanied his father as far as the royal yacht at Gravesend for a public leave-taking. And in recognition of the prominence George Louis’s absence granted them, prince and princess sat for portraitist Sir Godfrey Kneller. Over a lavishly embroidered silk gown, Caroline wore ermine-trimmed robes of state.167 A consort’s crown stands at her elbow, a chair of throne-like proportions behind her. Similarly regal is George Augustus’s likeness. Both were images of aspiration, heavy with intent.
In the New Year of 1716, Caroline fell pregnant. In April she confided to her ladies, ‘it [was] twelve Weeks … since she reckon[ed] herself with child’.168 The discovery delighted her. She could not accustom herself to her separation from Frederick. ‘The Princess sent for me in private and asked me a thousand questions about her little Frederick,’ Lord Polwarth wrote that year, after Caroline learned of his visit to Hanover. Polwarth’s description of ‘the finest young prince in the world’ both reassured and unsettled his anguished mother.169
A new baby offered Caroline distraction from her longing for her son. She was frequently in the company of her three daughters. Their daily routine – ‘prayer, coiffe, and breakfast’ at seven, walking in St James’s Park until nine, lessons before and after a plain midday dinner of unspiced meat, music lessons for Anne with Handel, in time drawing lessons with artist Philippe Mercier – culminated in an hour spent with Caroline in needlework or ‘talk[ing] of sensible things’.170 At Caroline’s instigation ‘sensible things’ included Frederick, although only Anne among the three princesses was old enough to remember the brother they had left behind.
Evidence, even at this stage, suggests something inconsistent in Caroline’s attitude to her eldest child. Between 1718 and 1721 the artist Martin Maingaud painted three portraits of the royal children, including, in 1720, a double portrait of Frederick with his middle sister Amelia.171 If these commissions originated with Caroline and George Augustus rather than George Louis, it is possible to interpret them as proof of the royal parents’ determination to maintain family unity despite enforced separation. In truth, Frederick and Amelia were strangers to one another after a six-year parting – the portrait was an affectionate fiction, an exercise in wish fulfilment. But Caroline does not appear to have written to Frederick, though he was a precocious child and capable of sustaining a correspondence with his mother. How much solace she can have derived either from misleading portraiture or conversations with daughters who did not remember their brother is questionable. Nevertheless, evidence suggests she resisted nearer approaches to contact, and it was left to intermediaries like Liselotte to obtain and forward regular bulletins concerning Frederick’s health as a means of giving ‘his poor mother that much comfort’.172 Later the relationship of mother and son broke down irretrievably. Seeds for future dislike were sown in the first years of their parting.
In her unhappiness, Caroline may have drawn some comfort from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s report of a conversation with Frederick in Hanover in November 1716, if the Countess of Bristol, Lady Mary’s correspondent, passed on her account. ‘I am extreamly pleas’d that I can tell you without either flattery or partiality that our young Prince has all the Accomplishments that tis possible to have at his age, with an Air of Sprightlynesse and understanding, and something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour, that he needs not the advantage of his rank to appear charming. I had the honour of a long conversation with him last night before the King came in. His Governour retir’d on purpose … that I might make some judgement of his Genius by hearing him speak without constraint, and I was surprised at the quicknesse and politenesse that appear’d in every thing he said, joyn’d to a person perfectly agreable and the fine fair Hair of the Princesse.’173
Despite Frederick’s absence and George Augustus’s worsening relationship with George Louis, during the king’s return to Hanover it was as a royal ‘family’ that the Prince and Princess of Wales and the infant princesses impressed themselves on the
British public. The straightforwardness of this youthful family unit contrasted starkly with George Louis’s scabrous-seeming inner circle, which was described by Mary Wortley Montagu as his ‘German ministers and playfellows male and female’, and by Horace Walpole as ‘so uncommon a seraglio’: the king’s Hanoverian advisers; the beanpole Madame Schulenburg, ‘by no means an inviting object’ with her enamelled make-up and unconvincing wig; Mustapha and Mohammed the Turks; and George Louis’s elephantine half-sister Baroness von Kielmansegg, ‘altogether inclined to work evil … vicious, intriguing’, whom many suspected of being his second mistress and whom Pope, in ‘Artemisia’, accused of rancid personal hygiene: ‘’Twere well if she would pare her Nails,/And wear a cleaner smock’.174 Following his father’s departure, George Augustus moved his court, including his children, to Hampton Court for the remainder of the summer. Londoners saw their royal family-in-waiting in barges rowed by liveried oarsmen; they saw them in carriages or walking; those with a mind to it saw them together in playful holiday amity.
Henry VIII’s leviathan palace lies on the banks of the Thames at a remove from central London. Extended and remodelled by William and Mary, in the summer of 1716 it stood within large gardens refashioned in the previous reign by Henry Wise for Queen Anne. In place of box trees, whose scent Anne had hated, were rows of clipped yews; as at Herrenhausen, the garden included extensive formal areas – within a wilderness stood a hornbeam maze. Beyond the parterres and artificial waterways, outside its walled perimeter, unfurled the open and wooded spaces of Home Park and Bushy Park. Through copses and spinneys sliced twenty miles of rides, cut to enable the hunting enthusiast Anne to drive her two-wheeled chaise in pursuit of hounds and quarry. In St James’s Park, Anne had introduced a herd of the ‘finest coloured deer’; here, in an area still rural, game abounded, including partridge for shooting. Within the garden itself, around an oval bowling green, stood a quartet of square pavilions ideal for small-scale entertaining.
The First Iron Lady Page 16