The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  For George Augustus, Richmond Park and its surrounds provided extensive hunting, of foxes as well as stags. Husband and wife canvassed a comic actor called William Pinkethman, who made his fortune performing short plays or ‘drolls’ at Bartholomew and Richmond Fairs, to erect a temporary theatre. As at Hampton Court, prince and princess took an interest in the local community. They called the house Richmond Lodge and, to one another, simply ‘the Lodge’. In December 1719 the Weekly Journal reported the rat-catcher John Humphries clearing the house of more than five hundred rats and taking them all ‘alive to Leicester House as a proof of his art’.66 On a practical level, their Richmond summers became for George Augustus and Caroline an opportunity for retrenchment, the prince targeting the royal table as a focus for economies. ‘His diet’, reported one unimpressed visitor, was ‘so plain and the quality of his roasts and dishes so little and the ingredients for dressing them so little’.67 One-off household expenses included ‘a Dutch Fire Engine’.68

  1718 was a year of rumours and denials. Claims of reconciliation were rapidly succeeded by counter-claims. On 10 February, The Criticks: Being papers upon the times interpreted Caroline’s appearance at a royal drawing room as proof of ‘the near prospect there is of a reconciliation between his Majesty and his Royal Highness. The Princess of Wales’s appearance at court can bode no less.’69 By contrast, in March, Liselotte wrote that the men’s quarrel ‘gets worse every day. I always thought [George Louis] harsh when he was in Germany, but English air has hardened him still more.’70 Despairingly she told a correspondent, ‘There is not a word of truth in the story that the King of England gave the Princess of Wales a present of lace. Unfortunately, everything is still in a very bad way.’71 So bad, in fact, that on 22 April George Augustus cancelled a visit to the Drury Lane Theatre to attend a performance of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor, after hearing that George Louis had threatened to dismiss every actor who performed in front of him. In May, the Earl of Oxford stated that ‘any persons that are turned out of doors at St James’s are sure to find entertainment at Leicester Fields, so that the happy reconciliation is as near as ever’.72 An attempted amnesty in the summer failed. Meanwhile, as part of his policy of eclipsing Leicester House socially, and also because he had conceived an instant liking for the house, George Louis set in motion plans for new state apartments at Kensington Palace.

  The prescriptiveness of George Louis’s terms for reconciliation points to his angry intolerance: ‘Provided the Prince would dismiss such of his servants as were disagreeable to the King, and that for the future he would take none but such as should be approved of by His Majesty. That he should give up his children and such a sum for their education as His Majesty should appoint. That he should neither see nor keep correspondence with any but such as His Majesty should approve of, and lastly that he should beg the Dukes of Roxburgh and Newcastle’s pardon.’73 George Augustus’s rejection was comprehensive; he refused to offer assurances of better conduct in the future. His response reflected a decision reached jointly by husband and wife.

  In supporting his continuing stand against his father, Caroline may have had reasons of her own. Liselotte wrote that George Louis had spread injurious rumours about his daughter-in-law, suggesting possible infidelity. ‘He will get laughed at by everybody for doing this,’ she wrote on 28 July, ‘for the Princess has a spotless reputation.’74 Poets including Nahum Tate acclaimed Caroline as ‘Cynthia’, an alternative name for Artemis, a goddess associated with chastity as well as wisdom. As the recipient of Caroline’s confidences, Liselotte was baffled by George Louis’s reported stance. She described Caroline as one who had ‘never done anything against him and has always honoured, respected and indeed loved him as if he were her own father’.75 The words may be Caroline’s own, parroted by the older woman. If so, they tell us the impression Caroline was determined to convey to the outside world.

  In May 1719, George Louis embarked on the visit to Hanover he had unwillingly abandoned two years earlier; among those who accompanied him were the composer Handel. So far were father and son from any restoration of normal relations that George Augustus was denied his former role of guardian and lieutenant of the realm. Instead the king drew up a Council of Regency: he excluded his son from its number. He did, however, formalise arrangements for increasing access to the royal children. On 4 May he instructed Lady Portland: ‘We do allow our … most Dearly beloved Son and our most Dearly beloved Daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales, to see our said Grandchildren as often as they shall think fit, provided it be only in the Apartment of our said Grandchildren, & that whenever our said Son and Daughter-in-law, or either of them, repair thither for that purpose, they bring with them none but their Servants of their Bedchamber actually attending in the course of Duty upon their Persons, & not any other Person or Persons who are forbid Our Royal Presence.’76 To Caroline he extended the opportunity of spending the summer with her daughters at Hampton Court. This concession did not apply to George Augustus, and Caroline declined.

  An undated letter to Charlotte Clayton, probably written in the first half of 1719, seems to demonstrate Caroline’s conviction that George Louis’s attitude was softening, with compromise increasingly a possibility. ‘The King himself is troubled,’ she wrote, ‘& these are his very words that He can’t forgive himself.’77 Whatever the accuracy of her assessment, it was for this reason, as much as a desire to maintain appearances, that Caroline later waited on George Louis to congratulate him on his safe return from the electorate. Wherever possible, and regardless of the truth of her feelings, she acted to sustain the fragile discourse between the warring households.

  In the meantime, and sensibly, she provided herself with diversions. At Leicester House the adoptive daughter of Figuelotte established the equivalent of a salon. ‘She loved a repartee; was happy in making one herself, and bearing it from others. And as this talent was rendered … amiable by the greatest good nature and chearfulness of disposition … she was (without respect to the dignity of her rank) the life of every company’ – useful qualities in a saloniste.78 Even Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, acidulated in her jealousy of Caroline, granted her such personal qualities that she would ‘never want a full court of the best sort of people that this country affords’.79

  Poets Thomas Tickell, John Gay and Joseph Addison paid court to her. She had met Addison, a Whig enthusiast, and Gay separately at Herrenhausen, and all three men had written poetry in celebration of the Hanoverian succession. Gay’s motives were pecuniary. Habitually cash-strapped, in 1724 he dedicated to Caroline his play The Captives. Her attendance at the first night, added to a financial gift, contributed to its £1,000 profit, proof of the value of royal endorsement. The following year Gay addressed a sequence of fables to her younger son, but no satisfactory court appointment was forthcoming, and acrimony supplanted partisanship.

  A handful of intermediaries may have led Caroline to Alexander Pope: candidates include Henrietta Howard, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the architect Earl of Burlington, whom Caroline had met in Hanover in 1714, and whose wife would become a lady-in-waiting. Later, Henrietta’s perseverance was a factor in persuading Jonathan Swift briefly to play his part in Caroline’s circle. (Swift himself would tell the Duchess of Queensberry that only after eleven invitations from Caroline did he finally ‘yield her a visit’.80) Swift’s attitude to Caroline was one of wariness. ‘I have no complaint to make of her Royal Highness,’ he wrote to Henrietta with rebarbative equivocation, ‘therefore I think I may let you tell her that every grain of virtue and good sense in one of her rank, considering their bad education among flatterers and adorers, is worth a dozen in inferior persons.’81 Swift gave Caroline a dress length of gold-threaded Irish silk; he composed throwaway lines on the subject of breakfast at Richmond Lodge. But Caroline’s attempt to introduce to early-eighteenth-century London the salon culture she had encountered in Berlin and Hanover yielded mixed results. Key players protested at the meretricious nature of roya
l patronage: ‘Her Majesty never shall be my exalter/And yet she would raise me, I know by – a halter,’ Swift wrote.82

  Pope’s ambivalence was undisguised. In The Dunciad he mocked what he considered Caroline’s lumbering intellectual pretensions. Following a misunderstanding over a broken promise about a present, Swift’s feelings proved similarly ambiguous. With heavy-handed irony he described Caroline as ‘a perfect goddess born and bred,/Appointed sovereign judge to sit/On learning, eloquence and wit’.83 Such bitter implications earned him Caroline’s lasting aversion. Aspersions on her intelligence provoked angry rejoinders, whatever Robert Molesworth’s claim of her combining ‘the Highest Wisdom with the least Pretences to it’. Caroline found fewer faults with versifying courtiers Lord Stanhope (from 1726 Lord Chesterfield) and Lord Peterborough, though a suspicion that the former had included her among objects of his ridicule, mimicking the thickness of her accent and certain gestures, earned a stinging rebuke: ‘You may have more wit, my lord, than I, but I have a bitter tongue, and always repay my debts with exorbitant interest.’84

  Less vexed was Caroline’s acquaintance with Ann Oldfield, a leading actress and the mistress of an illegitimate nephew of the Duke of Marlborough. ‘Engaging Oldfield, who, with grace and ease,/Could join the arts to ruin and to please’ had taken the part of Lady Jane Grey in Rowe’s tragedy of 1715.85 The Catalogue of All the English Plays in Her Royal Highnes’s [sic] Library, compiled in 1722 and extending to several hundred entries, indicates the scope of Caroline’s interest in the theatre.86 Her conversations with Antonio Conti, a Venetian philosopher-scientist who was a protégé of George Louis’s half-sister Sophia Charlotte, ranged farther afield: they discussed Newton, Plato and Descartes. Conti’s knowledge of theology, mathematics and medicine recalled those men of learning Caroline had encountered at Lützenburg and Herrenhausen, chief among them Leibniz.87 In his breadth of knowledge he offered Caroline an intellectual stimulus absent from her marriage – like another distinguished Leicester House visitor, the French philosopher Voltaire. In memory of their meetings in 1726, two years later Voltaire dedicated to Caroline his eulogy of the French king Henri IV, La Henriade. ‘It was the fate of Henry IV to be protected by an English Queen,’ he addressed Caroline. ‘He was assisted by the great Elizabeth, who was in her age the glory of her sex. By whom can this memory be so well protected as by her who resembles so much Elizabeth in her personal virtues?’88 It was neither the first nor the last time Caroline’s name was linked with Elizabeth I’s.

  Voltaire’s commendations aside, Caroline was fortunate that her interests extended beyond the brittle praise of poets and the syllabub froth of court gossip. In 1728, in his dedication to Newton’s posthumously published The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, John Conduitt wrote, ‘all Your hours of leisure are employed in cultivating in Your Self That Learning, which You so warmly patronize in Others’.89 One visitor to Leicester House described Caroline’s gatherings as ‘a strange picture of the motley character and manners of a queen and a learned woman … learned men and divines were intermixed with courtiers and ladies of the household; the conversation turned upon metaphysical subjects, blended with repartees, sallies of mirth and the tittle-tattle of a drawing room’.90 Formal receptions frequently included similarly ‘motley’ elements of new learning. Sir John Evelyn described demonstrations at Leicester House drawing rooms of a new sort of military device and a machine that produced colour printing.91

  From her arrival in Berlin Caroline had been exposed to extensive theological and philosophical debate. Left behind in Hanover, Leibniz remained among her correspondents after 1714. Influenced by Figuelotte and Sophia, as well as by memories of Eleonore’s strong faith, she maintained an active interest in religious discourse; as queen she would involve herself in Church patronage, even recommending a bishopric for her clerk of the closet, Joseph Butler, on her deathbed.92 ‘The tittle-tattle of a drawing room’ was never enough for Caroline. In her first week in waiting, Lady Cowper reported Caroline’s request of works by Jacobean philosopher and politician Francis Bacon; weeks later the princess read John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690.93 Bacon had championed scientific enquiry, a rational and sceptical mindset. He claimed that ‘the inquiry, knowledge and belief of truth is the sovereign good of human nature’, a view compatible with Locke’s argument that understanding is acquired through experience.

  A fortnight after embarking on her study of Bacon, the dispute-loving Caroline was visited at St James’s Palace for the first time by heterodox divine Dr Samuel Clarke.94 Clarke was rector of the nearby church of St James’s, Piccadilly. A controversial figure, his religious views engaged with, and in part endorsed, findings on natural philosophy published by Newton, whose Opticks he had translated into Latin. He presented Caroline with books he had written. Of his Demonstration of the being and attributes of God of 1705, he claimed his argument was ‘as near to Mathematical as the Nature of such a Discourse would allow’, a line of reasoning guaranteed to intrigue the book’s recipient. Clarke shared Newton’s qualified belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, and in 1712 had published The scripture-doctrine of the Trinity: wherein every text in the New Testament relating to that doctrine is distinctly considered. His own view celebrated God’s transcendence: ‘The Father alone is Self-Existent … Independent.’95 For the unorthodoxy of these views, Church authorities had compelled from him a promise that he cease publishing on the subject of the Trinity. No such constraints curtailed his private conversation.

  In November 1714 there was nothing accidental in Clarke’s visit to Caroline at St James’s Palace. In a letter to Caroline written earlier that year Leibniz had attributed a decline in religious belief in England to the writings of Isaac Newton. Newton, who considered his work as bolstering belief in God despite his private reservations about the Trinity, called on Clarke as go-between once he learned of the accusations against him. In refuting Leibniz on Newton’s behalf, Clarke could count on support from several of Caroline’s new household, including the Low Churchwomen Mary Cowper and Charlotte Clayton.

  Caroline read Clarke’s books virtually at once, evidence of the extent of her interest. Not only read but approved. To the Countess of Nottingham, who dismissed Clarke as a heretic, she described him on 19 November as ‘one of my favourites’, his writings ‘the finest things in the world’.96 Yet neither Clarke’s treatises nor the intervention of her ladies played a persuasive part in the debate between Leibniz and Newton, in which both men embroiled a willing Caroline. The philosopher-scientists’ disagreement was only superficially theological. Its roots lay in a contest of longer standing concerning the invention of differential calculus. Newton dated his discovery to 1666, though he did not publish his findings until 1693. Leibniz also claimed the breakthrough, having published his own account in 1684.

  For two years Caroline arbitrated in an epistolary debate in which Clarke took Newton’s part and letters passed nominally between Clarke and Leibniz, seen by Caroline. Her own first sympathies lay with Leibniz, a valued link to Figuelotte. It was he who in 1704 had been present at Caroline’s discussions with Father Orban and who had written her formal rejection of Archduke Charles’s suit. Shortly after her arrival in London, Caroline proved her attachment in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade George Louis to offer Leibniz a position as British royal historiographer. Now, however, with increasing exposure to Newton’s views, her position altered. This was partly attributable to the charisma of the man himself. Aged and infirm, carried by chair the short distance from his house in nearby St Martin’s Street to Leicester House, Newton was nevertheless a giant, compelling presence in Caroline’s drawing room. She ‘frequently desired to see him, and always expressed great satisfaction in his conversation’, wrote a relation of Newton’s by marriage; in February 1716, accompanied by Clarke, he made an afternoon visit to St James’s Palace to explain his ‘system of philosophy’ to her.97 Caroline’s shifting allegiance recognised Newton’s emin
ence in British life. Consistent with so much of her public behaviour, she understood the impossibility of championing Leibniz at the expense of his British counterpart.

  Certainly Leibniz’s disdain for his rival was unremitting. On 10 May 1715 he decried Newton’s position to Caroline by drawing an analogy between the eucharist and gravity and concluding that, in relation to the former, Newtonian science undermined Lutheran doctrine. Caroline was unpersuaded by what sounds like sophistry. Such was the gulf between the men that Clarke refused to translate into English Leibniz’s Theodicy, although Leibniz intended to dedicate the translation to Caroline, and Clarke could have anticipated disappointment on her part at his refusal. In the event Caroline did not react amiss – Lady Cowper’s diary indicates that, far from a rift with Clarke, the princess’s household consulted him as scientist as much as divine. On the night of 6 March 1716, Lady Cowper records Clarke explaining the phenomenon of ‘an extraordinary light’ so irregular it inspired terror in the men carrying her sedan chair.98 According to Clarke’s first biographer ‘seldom a week passed’ in which, when in London, Caroline did not see him or read material he sent her.99 She ‘used frequently to pit Dr Samuel Clarke … on subjects of literature’ against the scholar and royal librarian Richard Bentley, despite Bentley’s aversion to such exchanges, and in allowing Clarke to publish his correspondence with Leibniz, she endorsed a dedication to herself and the accompanying statement that the letters had been written at her instruction.100 Her affection for the clergyman is indicated by later acts of charity. ‘If you see Dr Clarke,’ she wrote to Charlotte Clayton in 1718, ‘pray tell him in my name that I design 100 guineas per annum for his chair hire, & it shall begin at Christmas & pass through your hands.’101 That she discussed her encounters with all three men with her eldest daughter Anne is apparently indicated in a letter written in 1738 by the future Frederick the Great to Voltaire: ‘I spoke at length with the Princess about Newton; from Newton we moved on to Leibniz and from Leibniz to the late Queen of England [Caroline].’102