The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  The power that Caroline exercised through this mummery was over her husband rather than the government of Britain. George Augustus ‘lived in dread of being supposed to be governed by her’, wrote Horace Walpole. ‘That silly parade was extended even to the most private moments of business with my father, who, whenever he entered, the Queen rose, curtsied and retired, or offered to retire – sometimes the King condescended to bid her to stay – on both occasions she and Sir Robert had previously settled the business to be discussed.’54 As it had in the reign of George Louis, real power belonged to Walpole. Caroline was as much a servant of Walpole’s premiership as its beneficiary. And she achieved her ends at a cost to her self-esteem, prostrating her greater intelligence before the husband she loved but could not respect intellectually. Hervey identified her ‘dominant passion’ as pride; he described ‘the darling pleasure of her soul’ as power. In his account, Caroline can realise the latter only by sacrificing the former, a painful barter: ‘She was forced to gratify the one and gain the other, as some people do health, by a strict and painful regime, which few besides herself could have had patience to support, or resolution to adhere to … She used to give [George Augustus] her opinion as jugglers do a card, by changing it imperceptibly, and making him believe he held the same with that he first pitched upon.’55 In doing so, she became ‘as great a slave to him thus ruled, as any wife could be to a man who ruled her’, an irony that would have appealed to Caroline’s detractors.

  Despite a lapse of four months since George Louis’s death, Frederick was absent from his parents’ coronation. On 9 September he had acted as principal mourner in his grandfather’s funeral procession in the Leineschloss. Obsequies satisfied, no communication from George Augustus or Caroline summoned him to London. Instead Frederick fronted coronation celebrations in Hanover, presiding over a feast in the palace attended by ‘all the people in the town who were cleanly dressed’.56 On the palace balcony he presented himself to crowds enjoying spit roasts and fountains of wine in the Holzmarkt below. Commemorative verses acclaimed him as ‘Prince Friedrich, our King’s son, he is our joy, he is Europe’s star of hope and our country’s son’.57 Meanwhile across the Channel, Lord Middlesex referred to Londoners ‘imag[ing] absent Frederic in our Mind’.58 Although Caroline had described Frederick to the Duchess of Wolfenbüttel as recently as June as the dearest of her children, no evidence points to the prince’s presence in his parents’ minds.59 ‘Fred’ric, distant from the British Coast,/Part of the Pomp was by thy Absence lost,’ an anonymous poet commented tactfully.60 It was not, apparently, Caroline or George Augustus’s view.

  The separation of parents and eldest child had come about at George Louis’s insistence. In 1714 Caroline’s unhappiness at their parting had been extreme. At intervals both husband and wife had petitioned in vain for their son’s return, including in 1718, at the height of the family rift. Caroline had begged visitors to Hanover for accounts of her Fritzchen, the minutiae of his days, his health, height, happiness. In 1716 she and George Augustus were privy to a scheme initiated by the lords chief justice, Thomas Parker and Peter King, to commission from royal librarian Richard Bentley new editions of the works of classical authors for Frederick’s education, a plan not realised for another decade.61 Portraits commissioned from Martin Maingaud either by Caroline and George Augustus or by George Louis had endeavoured to preserve the appearance of family unity, partnering Frederick with his sister Amelia. And until 1721 Frederick had remained the couple’s only son. Without consulting his parents, George Louis had planned his marriage to Wilhelmine of Prussia, the daughter of George Augustus’s sister Sophia Dorothea.

  Today no letters survive between Caroline and Frederick for the period of their separation, albeit this lasted fourteen years and both were naturally affectionate. The Dutch royal archives preserve remnants of a correspondence between Frederick and his nearest sister Anne, in which Frederick confides his sadness at George Louis’s death, his regret for the loss of the ‘most particular tenderness and friendship’ between monarch and grandson, and a ‘consolation in this sad affliction [in] the knowledge of my dear parents’ goodness’ that would prove misplaced.62 No equivalent exchange of letters between mother and son has yet been traced. The disappearance of both sides of such a correspondence makes possible an assumption that it never in fact existed.

  Why Caroline should have adopted such a course in 1714 is unclear. Evidence does not indicate any prohibition by George Louis. Caroline was a prodigious letter-writer. That she failed to maintain any direct communication with her eldest child was certain to shape their relationship in the long term. Her own childhood had been marked by a series of painfully truncated relationships, including separation from her mother and, afterwards, the latter’s death, and from her adored brother William Frederick, as well as the unsettlement of a series of uprootings: Ansbach, Crailsheim, Dresden, Pretszch. In the event, for both parties the consequences of severance between mother and son proved astonishingly painful.

  Frederick played no part in the celebrations of 11 October 1727, the coronation procession on a raised walkway between Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey, witnessed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu among others: George Augustus and Caroline each beneath a glittering canopy of cloth of gold attended by courtiers, choristers, judges and heralds, the king’s herb woman, a drum major, spear-bearing yeomen of the guard and, for the eagle-eyed, the ‘Delightfull Spectacle’ of William III’s mistress Elizabeth, Countess of Orkney, ‘a mixture of Fat and Wrinkles, and … a considerable pair of Bubbys a good deal withered, a great Belly that preceeded her; … the inimitable roll of her Eyes, and her Grey Hair which by good Fortune stood directly upright’.63 For one observer it was Caroline’s finest hour, at which she demonstrated to the full her understanding of monarchy as public spectacle: ‘The queen never was so well liked … she walked gracefully and smiled on all as she passed … I could hardly see the King, for he walked so much under his canopy, that he was almost hid from me by the people that surrounded him; but though the Queen was also under a canopy, she walked so forward that she was distinguished by everybody.’64 Nor did Frederick’s parents recall him to London after the ceremony, when Caroline succumbed unmajestically to gout. Unquestionably Frederick was surprised by their continuing neglect, especially given the removal of obstacles following George Louis’s death. He would not discover an explanation for their silence for another year.

  Within days of receiving news of George Louis’s death, the new king and queen left Leicester House. Their destination was Kensington Palace, where Caroline would spend extended periods until 1736.

  Apartments for George Augustus and Caroline had first been prepared at Kensington more than a decade earlier, in the summer of 1716, despite reports describing areas of the palace exterior as ‘much Crakt and out of Repair’.65 On that occasion the unravelling of the couple’s relationship with George Louis prevented them from occupying the rooms made ready for them. Prince and princess instead subsequently evolved a calendar that saw them moving winter and summer between Leicester House and Richmond Lodge. With George Louis dead and George Augustus’s inheritance of Kensington, Hampton Court, Windsor Castle and St James’s Palace, these arrangements altered. At Richmond Lodge the new king was reminded of the frustrations of his lengthy apprenticeship, the long summers of idleness following the frigid détente with his father. His preference during Caroline’s lifetime was for Hampton Court. In 1727 he gave Richmond Lodge to her, although a letter written by Princess Amelia to Lady Portland indicates that Richmond remained a fixture in royal routine: ‘Papa and Mamma … are gone again to Richmond as the custom proves to be every Wednesday and Saturday. We stay them days comfortably at home [i.e. at Kensington Palace] and rest.’66 Beginning in 1728, Windsor provided excellent hunting at the end of the summer, though, like his father, George Augustus was reluctant to live there. Not sharing her husband’s enthusiasm, and grown too fat for riding, Caroline followed the chase, as Queen An
ne had done, in a horse-drawn four-wheeled chaise.

  Thomas Tickell celebrated the beauty of Kensington Palace’s setting, ‘midst greens and sweets’, and its greater salubriousness than St James’s Palace in summer, when the rising stench of the crowded city clogged the Tudor courtyards and ‘epidemical distempers’ flourished.67 In ‘Kensington Gardens’ he imagined Caroline and ‘the Dames of Britain’ walking in front of the palace, their frocks as bright as flowers: ‘Each walk, with robes of various dyes bespread,/Seems from afar a moving Tulip-bed,/Where rich Brocades and glossy Damasks glow,/And Chints.’68

  Caroline would develop a particular attachment to Kensington Palace. It lay within walking distance of St James’s, across Hyde Park along the road known as Rotten Row. This was the house in which Anne, Amelia and the younger Caroline had spent periods of the last decade. Altered, restored and redecorated by George Louis, who had also set in train the re-landscaping of the gardens by Henry Wise, it was a higgledy-piggledy structure of some elaboration. Externally it lacked grandeur. A dynastic propagandist brought up amid the Wünderkammern (rooms of curiosities) and portrait collections of German princely courts, Caroline personalised its interiors with her own distinctive picture hang. Her choices included a copy of Cornelis van Poelenburgh’s Seven Children of the King and Queen of Bohemia, which she acquired for her closet. Like her earlier purchase of Bartholomeus van Bassen’s King and Queen of Bohemia Dining in Public, it underlined George Augustus’s hereditary right to rule, one of numerous instances of Caroline decorating with political intent.69 And aided by Charles Bridgeman, she remodelled the palace’s immediate surrounds.

  The late king’s garden plans had included a menagerie. On the site of Queen Anne’s hunting ground lived three tigers and a pair of civet cats in iron enclosures. Introductions of ‘outlandish’ and ‘East Indian’ birds were planned at the time of his death, so too a snailery in imitation of Caroline’s at Richmond Lodge. In its semi-rural outlook and absence of architectural bombast, Kensington had reminded George Louis of Herrenhausen; as at Herrenhausen he invested its garden with spectacle and theatre. Caroline’s garden plans, by contrast, targeted a contrived naturalness. She was encouraged by praise for her gardens at Richmond Lodge. The future Lord Egmont reported a conversation in 1727 in which ‘Sir John Rushout [told] her that we owe our best taste in gardening to her’. According to Egmont, Caroline replied, ‘Yes indeed I think I may say that I have introduced that in helping nature, not losing it in art.’70

  She relocated the big cats to the royal menagerie at the Tower of London. She purchased additional land to the north of the palace. Bridgeman constructed the Broad Walk, called the ‘Grand Walk’; he laid down paths and created uninterrupted views across the new Serpentine Lake.71 ‘Well judg’d Vistos meet th’admiring Eyes:/A river there waves thro’ the happy Land,/And ebbs and flows, at Caroline’s Command.’72 More prosaically there were ‘Feeding Houses for Fowls’ within reach of the kitchens, to fatten poultry for the royal table, and broad beds producing ‘great parcels of flowers’.73 In place of George Louis’s tigers were the giant tortoises presented to Caroline by the Doge of Venice, and a great many squirrels.

  On completion, observers unfamiliar with the elaborate gardens of Herrenhausen or Göhrde identified in Caroline’s vision at Kensington a metaphor for the Hanoverian regime: nature harnessed and celebrated rather than tortured into patterns and devices. A poem published in the Gentleman’s Magazine contrasted Bridgeman’s designs, ‘all noble … and all plain’, with a French-style formality associated with absolutism: ‘No costly Fountains, with proud Vigour rise,/Nor with their foaming Waters lash the Skies;/To such false Pride, be none but Louis prone/… Here nothing is profuse, nor nothing vain.’ At her favourite palace, Caroline would create for her contemporaries a new Eden. The poet went further. She herself, he suggested, might have averted Eve’s first sin: ‘Had she [Eve] such Constancy of mind [as Caroline] possesst,/She had not fell, but we had still been blest.’ It was a formidable claim for this fallible but mostly well-meaning woman. During the royal family’s absences, the gardens were open to the public free of charge.

  Within the palace, William Kent had replaced the costlier serjeant painter Sir James Thornhill as royal decorator, and created for George Louis a handful of rooms that were the nearest the first Georges came to palace-building. The painted decoration of the King’s Staircase depicted members of George Louis’s court, including Peter the wild boy and the Turkish servants Mohammed and Mustapha. Beyond the staircase Kent designed a series of handsome if modestly scaled spaces that provided a backdrop for court entertaining until Caroline’s death: the Presence Chamber, Privy Chamber, Cupola Room, King’s Drawing Room and King’s Gallery. With painted ceilings and wall paintings, extensive gilding and woven silk wall hangings that acquired a velvety richness in the flickering illumination of silver candle sconces and giltwood chandeliers, Kent’s schemes conjured an aura of majesty every bit as impressive as Caroline’s borrowed coronation finery.

  It was here and at St James’s Palace that husband and wife established their court. St James’s was the official setting for the winter season, beginning with George Augustus’s birthday ball in late October and closing with the parliamentary recess in April. At Kensington, which both regarded in a more domestic light, George Augustus occupied apartments on the first floor overlooking the gardens. Caroline was less picturesquely settled in rooms without views on the floor above, at a distance from the state apartments. With them came their respective households.

  Testament to the desirability of court appointments, as well as Caroline’s virtues as mistress, her own household as queen included many of those who had previously served her as Princess of Wales. Ladies Bristol, Hertford, Pomfret and Albemarle, and Sarah, Duchess of Richmond, remained as ladies of the bedchamber, while Elizabeth, Duchess of Dorset’s place as groom of the stole was formalised on 16 July. In line with her status as consort, Caroline appointed two extra ladies of the bedchamber, the Countesses of Pembroke and Burlington – the latter, according to Lord Hervey, in her manner like ‘a cringing House-Maid’; three gentlemen ushers of the privy chamber, four equerries and three pages of honour.74 A fortnight after the coronation, she also nominated an additional chaplaincy – John Harris, who had served George Augustus as dean of the chapel, as her clerk of the closet. He remained with her until his promotion to the bishopric of Llandaff two years later, when he was replaced by Isaac Maddox, afterwards Bishop of St Asaph. Harris and Maddox were two of more than twenty royal chaplains to receive bishoprics during George Augustus’s reign.75 In both cases, Caroline’s role in their promotion was key.

  Caroline’s decision to appoint a full roster of attendants is characteristic of her sense of rank. It also expresses the partnership between husband and wife that had been a feature of their marriage from the outset, with her own household balancing that of George Augustus. The opportunities for court employment offered by this sizeable household served to affiliate quantities of the social elite to George Augustus and Caroline’s regime. By force of numbers, the court would occupy a significant place in London’s social life. Sheer expense maintained its exclusivity. Lord Hervey suggested that only the wealthiest families could manage the ‘necessary expenses incurred in dangling after a court’. The annual cost of clothes for the royal birthdays alone was estimated at £200 a year, equivalent to the entire salary of the lowest-paid court officials.76 Few of these precious costumes could be worn twice.

  As maids of honour the new queen retained Mary Meadows, Bridget Carteret, Penelope Dive, Mary Fitzwilliam, Anna Maria Mordaunt and Anne Vane. Spikily, Horace Walpole labelled Miss Vane ‘a maid of honour who was willing to cease to be so – at the first opportunity’, as events would shortly prove; John Perceval called her ‘a fat ill-shaped dwarf’.77 Miss Mordaunt, like Caroline, had the big ‘breasts of an overgrown wet nurse’.78 Like Mary Bellenden before her she attracted, but resisted, George Augustus’s blunt advances. Though t
hey disliked one another heartily, Charlotte Clayton and Henrietta Howard stayed on as two of Caroline’s six women of the bedchamber. Henrietta’s feelings were mixed; Charlotte Clayton’s absorption in Caroline was wholehearted. At some point she stumbled on the secret of Caroline’s umbilical rupture. The discovery further cemented the bond between mistress and attendant, albeit Caroline would have preferred to avoid such a disclosure, even to Mrs Clayton.

  Henrietta remained in harness as George Augustus’s mistress, though neither partner evidenced obvious pleasure in their arrangement. So bitter was George Augustus’s upbraiding of Henrietta one evening after his accession that she wrote to him, ‘with the utmost respect … from your Majesty’s behaviour to me, it is impossible not to think my removal from your presence must be most agreeable to your inclinations’.79 In that instance the king’s foot-stamping ill humour dispersed. For monarch and mistress, theirs would remain an uneven coupling. ‘The sun has not darted one beam on you a great while,’ Lady Hervey wrote to Henrietta in July 1729. ‘You may freeze in the dog-days, for all the warmth you will find from our Sol.’80 Henrietta might have frozen in her Kensington apartments too: despite five fireplaces, her basement rooms were damp enough to produce ‘a constant crop of mushrooms’.81 And thanks to Caroline, she found herself intermittently alone there. Lord Chesterfield, who disliked Caroline, claimed that in her jealousy she suspected Henrietta of acting as a magnet for dissidents, especially Walpole’s political opponents. ‘Representing [Henrietta’s apartments] as the seat of a political faction’, she prevented George Augustus from visiting his mistress for three or four days at a stretch, and so sought to contain her rival’s influence.82