The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  Those who remained with Caroline shared with their mistress an unavoidable sense of diminishment. In a letter of 12 July 1718, Baroness von Gemmingen confided to Lady Cowper how much she missed her.23 But Caroline, according to a posthumous verdict, was able ‘to bear up with patience and resolution against undeserved calumny or reproach’; from the outset, there was nothing funereal in the atmosphere at Leicester House.24 Indeed she had determined to create a court glittering and vibrant and, restraints notwithstanding, at least enjoyed in this her own house a degree of independence she could not have exercised under George Louis’s roof. Like Sophia and Figuelotte, she meant to attract not only politicians and noblemen, but the leading minds of the day.

  She valued high spirits too; among the household installed at Leicester House in the spring of 1718 were a gaggle of Caroline’s maids of honour, including the court beauties Mary Lepell and Mary Bellenden, as well as woman of the bedchamber Henrietta Howard. A popular ballad claimed of the first that her charms ‘could warm an old monk in his cell’, and suggested that ‘Should Venus now rise from the ocean/And naked appear in her shell,/She would not cause half the emotion/That we feel from dear Molly Lepell.’25 Caroline’s relationship with the young women was of straightforward warmth, and was reciprocated in kind. Her maids of honour proved a lure for male visitors, including the poets whose tributes she craved. The young women’s enjoyment of their role in Caroline’s court says much for its vivacity, even at this low point. To Henrietta Howard, flighty Sophy Howe wrote of a visit to her parents in the country, ‘One thing I have got by the long time I have been here, which is the being more sensible than ever I was of my happiness in being maid of honour.’26 Walpole described Caroline’s ‘new court’ as made up of ‘the liveliest and prettiest of the young ladies’.27

  At Hampton Court in the summer of 1716, Lord Townshend had suspected Henrietta Howard of an influence over George Augustus that she did not possess, mistaking her for the prince’s mistress. Over the course of 1718, Townshend’s misapprehension became fact. Determinedly, George Augustus had endeavoured to press his attentions on Mary Bellenden, exploiting his knowledge of her straitened finances to cajole her into his bed. She resisted with vehemence. ‘The Prince’s gallantry was by no means delicate,’ commented Horace Walpole, who described him ostentatiously emptying his purse and counting gold coins in front of Mary; his indelicacies – and the contents of his purse – failed to impress. Physically she defended herself against him by folding her arms across her breasts at his approach. Making her feelings clear, she ‘told him [she] was not cold, but … liked to stand so’.28 George Augustus did not feign love. Lust – and a desire for an amorist’s reputation – prompted him. More convincing proof of where his true affections lay that spring was offered by Caroline’s latest pregnancy.

  To Mary Bellenden, with a characteristic lack of couthness, George Augustus had suggested possible financial rewards for sex. Still entirely dependent on her court appointment for security, and frightened by any prospect of a return to her husband’s bullying, Henrietta Howard accepted the challenge her younger colleague had rebuffed. Neither affection nor physical attraction played any part in her decision. A memorandum of 29 August 1716 details Henrietta’s views on her own marriage: Charles Howard’s brutishness, she concludes, has invalidated their marriage contract, and so ‘I must believe I am free’.29 Lord Hervey considered that Mary Bellenden’s rejection ‘left Mrs Howard, who had more steadiness and more perseverance, to try what she could make of a game which the other had found so tedious and unprofitable that she had no pleasure in playing it and saw little to be won by minding it’.30 The decision that her own marriage had been effectively terminated by mistreatment helped Henrietta to reconcile herself to what would be a lengthy liaison based on limited compatibility.

  That George Augustus was highly sexed is clear from Caroline’s willingness during her pregnancies to countenance his wandering attentions. So it had been in the summer of 1716 at Hampton Court, and so it proved two years later. With careful self-control she reacted to this liaison she had expected for five years. A courtier’s claim that ‘tho’ [Henrietta Howard] was at that time very handsome, it gave her Majesty no jealousy or uneasiness’, is a tribute to Caroline’s public demeanour as much as an accurate reflection of her state of mind.31 Certainly Henrietta’s eventual recognition as George Augustus’s mistress appears to have caused Caroline discernible distress only intermittently. A handful of instances survive of her exploiting her superior rank to score points at her rival’s expense. Lord Hervey records the iciness of her response to discovering a love letter from George Augustus to his mistress, accidentally dropped from its hiding place in her bodice.32 He quotes Caroline’s tart dismissal of Henrietta: ‘For my part, I have always heard a great deal of her great sense from other people, but I never saw her in any material great occurrence in her life, take a sensible step.’33 Such comments, querying Henrietta’s intelligence, arose from the double nature of the women’s rivalry. Not only was Henrietta George Augustus’s mistress, she was Caroline’s cultural rival too, a friend of Pope and Swift and the prominent Tory satirist and creator of John Bull Dr John Arbuthnot, whom she entertained in her apartments in the royal palaces. Like Caroline, Henrietta aspired to a literary salon; like Caroline, she would commission artists and architects. ‘I intend to improve myself in terms of art, in order to keep pace with you this winter,’ a friend wrote to Henrietta in 1724, ‘otherwise I know I shall make but a scurvey figure in your room.’34 Such commendations aggravated Caroline’s jealousy.

  In her defence, and aside from her envy, Caroline shielded Henrietta from Charles Howard, firmly denying him access to his estranged wife. Throughout the royal quarrel she enabled Henrietta to remain a member of her household – and therefore George Augustus’s mistress – notwithstanding Charles’s place in George Louis’s employ. Initially George Louis acquiesced in this arrangement, an indication that his relationship with Caroline, however strained, was not consistently spiteful. In his later efforts to reclaim his wife Charles Howard would invoke the king’s approval.

  Aphoristically, Hervey summed up George Augustus as ‘a man incapable of being engaged by any charm but habit, or attached to any woman but his wife’.35 The prince’s relationship with Henrietta never lessened his dependence on Caroline. His emotional attachment to her was undiminished, as was his overwhelming physical attraction to her, which she reciprocated in full. Horace Walpole later confirmed the prince’s preference: ‘King George II has often, when Mrs Howard, his mistress, was dressing the Queen, come into the room and snatched the handkerchief off [Caroline’s shoulders while her hair was being dressed], and cried, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen’s!”’36

  By 1718, Caroline knew enough of discreet, unassertive Henrietta – acclaimed for her reasonableness by both Pope and her besotted admirer Lord Peterborough – to be certain she would never supplant her in George Augustus’s esteem. Undoubtedly she was gratified by something tepid in their relationship, grounds for Hervey’s mischievous suggestion later that George Augustus had never ‘entered into any commerce with [Henrietta], that he might not innocently have had with his daughter’.37 And she understood that it was George Augustus’s vanity that demanded the publicity of a mistress as much as he craved another woman’s sexual enticements. The previous summer, Caroline had chosen to ignore advice from Liselotte, based on her marriage to the Duke of Orléans – the older woman had described her relief when her husband had suggested separate sleeping arrangements.38 Caroline’s marriage was of a different complexion, her enjoyment of sex marked. She would fight to maintain George Augustus’s uxoriousness.

  At the end of May, Caroline miscarried. It was not as a result of anxiety at Henrietta’s elevation, or the news that George Augustus had awarded her a generous annual pension of £2,000: more highly than simple sexual fidelity, Caroline prized emotional dependence. Instead, a large elm tree felled close to h
er window by a violent storm had startled her. Her decision to dismiss peremptorily a nursemaid who claimed that George Augustus had ogled her was just as likely prompted by her sense of the girl’s impertinence as jealousy at her husband’s roving eye.39

  Caroline’s success in creating at Leicester House any sort of alternative to George Louis’s court at St James’s, Kensington or Hampton Court points to her decided strength of character, as well as wide-ranging social, cultural and intellectual interests. The interdiction on so many courtiers, added to the constraints of the prince and princess’s income – the latter exacerbated by George Augustus’s parsimony – made the competition between the two courts potentially a one-sided affair. While Caroline embraced the challenge energetically, George Louis – saturnine and retiring – triumphed through deliberate open-handedness. Lady Hertford described to her mother the lavish picturesqueness of his birthday celebrations in June: ‘The ball was in the greenhouse, … the way to it being through a garden of orange, lemon and bergamot trees … There was a great deal of new clothes and most of them as fine as the season would allow of.’40 Each evening that summer he entertained fifty to sixty guests to dinner, with balls held twice weekly.41 Such was royal hospitality at a ball at St James’s in the winter that the king’s vice chamberlain described ‘the room where the Side Board was kept’ as so ‘stained with claret [that] it was necessary to provide Sayl cloth against another ball to prevent like damage’.42

  Locked into a competition for courtiers’ allegiance with George Louis that she could not win, cut off from her children and friends and publicly stripped of many of the trappings of her rank, Caroline found the period 1717 to 1720 one of considerable strain. Those who encountered her noticed her distraction. In April 1718, Archbishop Wake referred to an oversight on her part towards a struggling writer. ‘I shall … wait upon the Princess tomorrow, and will put her in mind of this charity, if her present trouble has made her forget it,’ he wrote.43 The couple lacked money. Caroline’s income of £18,000 a year was less than that of leading courtiers. Her grounds for not acquiring a set of Dutch tapestries that had previously belonged to Charles I – the sort of purchase that appealed to her sense of historical continuity – were almost certainly financial.44

  Caroline’s thoughts were frequently occupied with her own more immediate problems. In the face of protests from within his family and hostile public opinion, George Louis remained determined to retain control over his grandchildren. In January 1718 he instituted legal proceedings described by the lord chancellor as deciding ‘whether the Education, and Care of the Persons of His Majesty’s Grandchildren, and ordering the Place of their Abode, & appointing their Governors, Governesses and other Instructors, Attendants and servants, and the Care and Approbation of their Marriages when grown up, belong of right to His Majesty, as King of this Realm, or not?’45 Unsurprisingly, a majority of the judges consulted concluded that they did. Equally unsurprising is Caroline’s tearful reflection to Lady Cowper, inspired by longing for Frederick, Anne, Amelia, Caroline and the unfortunate George William: ‘I can say, since the Hour I was born, that I have not lived a Day without Suffering.’46

  At first too proud to accept the king’s offer of limited access to her children, and determined to make good her stand at George Augustus’s side, Caroline relied on intermediaries. Chief among them until her replacement by Lady Portland was the Countess of Bückeburg, whom George Louis allowed to visit Caroline every evening to deliver a daily report.47 No want of affection prompted Caroline’s decision not to visit her children in person. Several years later, an illness of Amelia’s left her frequently overwhelmed by worry; as it survives in her correspondence, her response is typical of her attitude to her daughters. ‘You cannot believe the anxiety I am in,’ she wrote. Her anguish brought on ‘a sore throat which hinders me from goeing today [to see Amelia] & … a little touch of feavour & a cold’, and her frustration at what she regarded as doctors’ incompetence provoked vigorous flashes of temper. Appalled by George Louis’s choice of physician and the latter’s ineptitude, she wrote disgustedly, ‘I believe I could … have pull’d out his eys.’48

  As the eldest of the princesses, albeit only eight at the time of their separation, Anne took upon herself the task of writing to her parents. From Kensington she sent George Augustus a basket of cherries with assurances of all three girls’ affection: ‘their hearts, souls and thoughts were with their dear parents always’.49 To Liselotte, Caroline reported George Augustus’s tearful receipt of this gift. But there was no comfort for Caroline when Anne protested at the lovelessness of the princesses’ lives under their grandfather’s roof: ‘we have a good father and a good mother, and yet we are like charity children’.50

  Anne’s brief notes to her mother were continual pinpricks, like the plaintive ‘j’espere … que vous seres en etat de venir se soir ce qui nous fera beaucoup de plaisir’ (I hope that you can come this evening, which will give us much pleasure).51 For all Caroline’s deliberate ‘Englishness’, parents and children communicated in French, which both parents found easier. Caroline’s letters were directed ‘pour ma chère fille Anne’, and written with a studied brightness that cost her dear.52 ‘You know too well how much I love you,’ she told her eldest daughter when illness prevented her from visiting.53 Parents’ and daughters’ notes reveal a craving on both sides for a close and loving family life, as does Lord Hervey’s claim that towards Lady Portland, who had usurped their place in the princesses’ lives, Caroline and George Augustus nurtured ‘a most irreconcilable hatred’.54

  Fleetingly, Caroline was distracted by the acquisition of a house in the country, an escape from the heat and stench of London summers. ‘Very neat, very pretty’, the former Ormonde Lodge stood in parkland that had once surrounded the old Richmond Palace near Kew, a pedimented classical box rebuilt in the last reign. It had previously belonged to the Duke of Ormonde, a prominent Jacobite. For his well-known political sympathies the duke had forfeited his estates and hastily escaped to France. In his midnight flit he left behind a house fully furnished even down to the large Delft flowerpot in the dining-room fireplace, a ‘Yellow Damask bed compleat’ and, in the closet within the Yellow Dressing Room, ‘a Fine Turkey work carpet’ valued at £4.55 A contemporary verdict found ‘everything in it and about it answerable to the grandeur and magnificence of its great master’ – boon indeed for the couple who had been prevented from removing a single piece of furniture from George Louis’s palace.56

  At a remove from the capital and bordered by the Thames, the house offered Caroline and George Augustus reminders of happier times at Hampton Court. Its setting resembled that of Pope’s villa at nearby Twickenham: ‘Our River glitters beneath an unclouded Sun … Our Gardens are offering their first Nosegays; our Trees, like new Acquaintances brought happily together, are stretching their arms to meet each other … The Birds are paying their thanksgiving Songs.’57 The duke’s garden, however, offered a vision of nature perfected, ornamented with trees in wooden planters: pomegranates and orange trees as at Herrenhausen; myrtle, bay and nut trees. In his Journey through England of 1714, John Macky judged it ‘a most delicious habitation’.58

  George Louis was predictably displeased with the couple’s discovery. In a letter of July 1719 the Countess of Bristol referred to the ‘no small pains’ he had taken to ‘disappoint’ them in their hopes of ownership, and their friends’ happiness at the frustration of those pains. ‘Everyone,’ she noted, ‘took part in the Prince and Princess’s pleasure in having this place secured to them when they almost despaired of it.’59 For £6,000, George Augustus bought the house and its extensive gardens; for its contents, including fire shovels, blankets and a barn still stocked with peas, rye and wheat, he paid a further £709.1s.2d.60 Renovations were undertaken, and Caroline would set about constructing a sizeable library wing north of the main house. Up-to-the-minute sanitary arrangements are indicated by subsequent yearly payments to one John Bell for cleaning the ‘bathi
ng copper’ and pipes.61

  In early September 1719, in line with current thinking that ‘there is some sort of pleasure in shewing one’s own fancy upon one’s own Ground’, Caroline invited gardeners and garden-makers, including royal gardener Henry Wise, Charles Bridgeman and Pope, to discuss plans.62 Bridgeman won the royal imprimatur. He planted a series of avenues lined with trees, dug a rectangular duckpond, constructed viewing mounts, one overlooking the river, built an amphitheatre within an elm copse. In line with emerging theories of ‘natural’ design, he dotted about ‘morsels of a forest like appearance’; he created wildernesses and a snailery. A riverside terrace planted with elms stretched as far as the village of Kew. ‘The beauties of the most stately Garden or Palace lie in a narrow Compass, the Imagination immediately runs over them and requires something else to gratify her,’ Joseph Addison had written in the Spectator in 1712. He contrasted such ‘stateliness’ with ‘the wide Fields of Nature [where] the Sight wanders up and down without confinement and is fed with an infinite variety of Images, without any Stint or Number’.63 In Richmond, for the first time Caroline put into practice these emerging theories. Extended, altered and set in modishly remodelled gardens, the house became the setting for the couple’s summers until the king’s death, a rural idyll shorn of the formalities of Hampton Court.64 Smaller than any existing royal residence, it required Caroline to build a terrace of four houses on Richmond Green to accommodate the overflow of her household.65