And so anger played its part in Frederick’s summons to London. It was an unfortunate prelude to family reunion, this busybody prince mischievously meddling in the alliances of his mother’s family. Anger lay behind his hole-in-the-corner reception at St James’s Palace, scuttling unceremoniously up the back stairs to his mother’s apartments. Angrily the king and queen excused themselves from public brouhaha. It was necessary, they insisted, to restrict publicity to a minimum in order to protect the prince from besieging place-seekers. Their verbal shilly-shallying was as dishonest as Frederick’s secrecy over Margrave Charles’s marriage. After a separation of fourteen years, parents and child met in an atmosphere doused with mistrust. George Augustus was briefly distracted by novelty. ‘The King was pleased with him as a new thing,’ Hervey claimed, ‘and soon after his arrival, said [to Robert Walpole] with an air of contempt and satisfaction: “I think this is not a son I need be much afraid of.”’112 For Caroline, who set store by her prerogatives and whose family pride was potent, Frederick’s perfidy was a powerful antidote to maternal affection. Cleverer than her husband, she temporarily suspended judgement. Certainly she was unpersuaded by a poet’s description of Frederick as one ‘on whom every eye/With joy and admiration dwells’.113
The prince was short, slight, neat in appearance, graceful and lively in his movements. Mary Pendarves ascribed to him ‘a great deal of spirit’; she recorded the undignified manner in which he winked at servants as he gobbled up jelly, which was then considered an aphrodisiac.114 He shared his mother’s fair hair and pink-and-white colouring; he shared her intelligence too, in Peter Wentworth’s estimation – ‘very quick at good inventions’.115 From his father came the pale, bulging eyes that undermined claims to good looks.
As preserved in Croker’s coronation medal and portrait miniatures of similar date by Christian Frederick Zincke, Caroline in her mid-forties was a stately presence, with full cheeks and a comfortably double chin.116 Sculptor and miniaturist substituted solid majesty for youthful bloom. Strip away the layers of flattery and what is revealed is considerable weight gain, a woman ‘grown too stout’, as Saussure noted in coronation year.117 A miscarriage as recently as 1725 proved Caroline’s continuing attractiveness to George Augustus nonetheless. As the decade advanced, and much to her unhappiness, the corpulent Caroline would be forced to acknowledge the lessening of her sexual hold on her husband, a decisive development in the royal marriage. In the short term her worsening gout was more readily concealed from view than her mountainous silhouette.
To the son who scarcely remembered her, she presented an imposing figure, splendidly upholstered in the court dress known as a mantua: a fitted bodice extending into a bulky train draped to reveal a decorative petticoat stretched wide over whalebone hoops – or, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu pictured her, ‘Majesty with sweeping Train,/That does so many Yards contain,/Superior to her waiting Nymphs,/As Lobster to attendant Shrimps’.118 As at her coronation, Caroline enhanced an impression of regal magnificence with jewellery, her ‘stomacher … prodigiously adorn’d with diamonds … as broad as a shilling’.119
More altered than Caroline since their parting in 1714 was Frederick’s nearest sister Anne, ‘marked a good deal with the small pox’. Unrosily, Lord Hervey described ‘the faults of her person’ as ‘that of being very ill-made and a great propensity to fat’.120 She was a gifted musician. Like her sister Caroline, she enjoyed painting, though she confined her efforts to copying: the antiquarian George Vertue wrote that she ‘never … drew from the life at any time tho’ she had drawn & Coppyd many several copies in oyl painting’.121
Hervey’s bleak assessment of Amelia’s faults, her sharp, brusque, witty tongue ‘glad of any back to lash and the sorer it was the gladder she was to strike’, is out of kilter with Lady Pomfret’s account of the middle sister as ‘one of the oddest princesses that ever was known; she has her ears shut to flattery and her heart open to honesty. She has honour, justice, good nature, sense, wit, resolution, and more good qualities than I have time to tell.’122 There is truth in both appraisals – and in Horace Walpole’s verdict that by 1728 Amelia’s youthful bloom was rapidly vanishing.123 Her letters to her former governess suggest she spent a certain amount of time longing to escape London and court life. Of a visit made by Lady Portland to Bath, Amelia wrote that she envied her ‘the charming ball-nights and sweet mornings where everybody mett friendly and agreeably at the pumps. I can’t hinder my heart being there sometimes.’124
Only Caroline Elizabeth, ‘the loveliest and the best’ of the three elder princesses, can have struck her brother as happily changed from the baby he had forgotten.125 She ‘had the finest complexion and the finest bright brown hair that could be seen … She had affability without meanness, dignity without pride, cheerfulness without levity, and prudence without falsehood.’126 Like Anne, she too had inherited her mother’s girth. She suffered ‘severe rheumatic pains’ from an early age. Her family dismissed her complaints as hypochondria.
Palpable among all three sisters was the strain in their relationship with their father, in part a legacy of their upbringing at George Louis’s court. On his accession George Augustus had created Anne princess royal. This accolade did not diminish her detachment from him, which included signs of contempt: ‘She was glad of opportunities to point out his faults and wherever these were small enough to admit of it, she would magnify them and deepen the colours without caution.’127 There was an uneasy, brittle quality to the exchanges between father and daughter, while Caroline’s relationship with Anne as an adult appears to have lacked easy expressions of affection. All the sisters had also inherited their parents’ hauteur. Nothing, Lady Pomfret wrote, made Amelia ‘forget the King of England’s daughter’. Lady Cowper had noted Anne’s ‘most ambitious temper’ at the age of five. As an adult, Anne told Caroline that she would gladly die to be queen even for a single day; Hervey described her as ‘the proudest of all her proud family’.128 All three attached to points of ceremony an exaggerated concern inherited from their parents, although a letter written by John Arbuthnot in July 1728 suggests that Anne at least had acquired more positive qualities from Caroline: ‘Her highness charms everybody by her affable and courteous behaviour.’129
Frederick’s youngest siblings, William, Mary and the enchantingly pretty Louisa, whom he had never seen before, basked in their mother’s approbation, childishly unaware of the currents and eddies. ‘Grandissime comédienne’ Caroline drew on all her resources to master conflicting emotions that December evening. Frederick too needed his wits about him. Wisely he set out to charm.
In some quarters he succeeded. Lady Bristol rated him ‘the most agreeable young man it is possible to imagine’. She noted ‘a liveliness in his eyes that is indescribable, and the most obliging address that can be conceived; but the crown of all his perfections is that just duty and regard he pays to the King and Queen, with such a mixture of affection as if obliging them were the greatest pleasure of his life’. She concluded that his parents received these good intentions ‘with the utmost joy and satisfaction’; but evidence contradicts her.130 Pettiness was George Augustus’s watchword in his behaviour towards his eldest son; Caroline did not oppose him. She did not challenge his proposals for Frederick’s living arrangements at St James’s Palace, without a separate establishment of his own, although she had recently acquired for his eldest sisters, in order to afford them a degree of independence when the court was at Richmond, a ninety-nine-year lease on the house today known as Kew Palace. She would shortly purchase from the widowed Lady Eyre a neighbouring house for William Augustus.131 She did not query her husband’s decision to restrict Frederick’s allowance to £2,000 a month, supplemented by the £9,000 annual revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, in contrast to the £100,000 a year he himself had enjoyed as heir to the throne. Although popular pressure played its part in Frederick’s introduction to the House of Lords and George Augustus’s bestowal on him of the title of Prince of Wales so
on after his first ‘British’ birthday in January 1729, Caroline did not countermand the decision that his birthday celebrations exclude the usual firing of guns in St James’s Park. Signs are scant of any stirring of maternal softness towards Frederick.
Instead, visual sources indicate the resilience of Caroline’s preference for her younger son. That year, Charles Jervas completed a new portrait of Caroline. Apparently unaged since Kneller’s official image of 1716, she wore the regal robes of state of her coronation portrait. Between Caroline and her crown, her hand on his shoulder, stood eight-year-old William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Precocious in ermine and velvet, in his hands a dagger and a coronet, he appears every inch a king in waiting. The following year an unknown artist completed a second version of this portrait, today in the collection of Orleans House, Twickenham. In this second image, a stout and sturdy Caroline holds William by the right hand. With her left hand she gestures towards the golden-haired boy beside her, a smile playing about her heavy features. Above a thickening waist, her enormous bosom is scarcely contained by ermine-trimmed velvet heavily loaded with jewels.
In 1729, Caroline finalised plans for the second stage of William’s education. Lessons in constitutional history and law, military tactics, procedure, shipbuilding and architecture supplemented his varied timetable. It was schooling fit for a prince … schooling for kingship. No mention was made of Gay’s Fables, with their cautions against flattery and the deceits of a court. And six years later, Caroline sat for a third similar portrait. A Neapolitan artist called Jacopo Amigoni painted ‘a large picture of the Queen and the Duke standing by her; several attributes of honour and sciences; the whole … of fine glowing colours’.132 The painter was already known to Caroline. In 1732 he had completed a picture begun by Kneller of the queen with her three eldest daughters. Such ‘family’ images constructed a visible iconography of royal motherhood, a key facet of Caroline’s role as consort. But no double portrait survives of Caroline with Frederick, and in Frederick’s likeness by Amigoni the prince is pictured alone.
At first, however, Frederick was easily absorbed into the buoyant pattern of court life that Caroline had established on George Augustus’s accession. George Louis had held drawing rooms on Sunday afternoons and weekday evenings. Beginning at ten o’clock, the evening drawing room remained the focus of court entertaining in the new reign, at its best a glittering, lively scrimmage of the great, the good and the determinedly aspirant. Tracing the fate of that sumptuous silk and gold brocaded French cloth that Caroline had declined on grounds of cost in May 1727, César de Saussure wrote, ‘the wife of a wealthy brewer, alderman of the City, … purchased the cloth, had it made into a gown, and wore it at the next drawing-room or Court circle’.133 So lavish a frock would certainly not have been out of place. An Italian visitor to St James’s in 1731 wore two dozen large diamonds on his coat in place of buttons. And the royal drawing room was a ceremonial affair, albeit no invitations were issued and entry was open to anyone appropriately dressed. A procession heralded George Augustus and Caroline’s entry: yeomen of the guard armed with polished halberds; the lord chamberlain and the master of the household with white wands of office; a pair of sergeants-at-arms; a favoured courtier carrying the jewel-encrusted sword of state. The royal children frequently accompanied their parents. At the family’s entry, ‘everyone [made] a profound reverence or bow as the King went by’.134 The evening’s social success rested mainly with Caroline. Her ready chatter balanced what Lord Chesterfield described as ‘the sterility of [George Augustus’s] conversation’.135
In 1728 the king and queen resumed the habit of weekly dining in public that once before, in that giddy summer of 1716, they had embraced with rebellious verve. It was as contrivedly theatrical a ritual as the drawing-room procession, and appealed alike to Caroline’s conviction of rank. The royal table was ‘plac’d in the midst of [the] hall, surrounded with benches to the very ceiling … fill’d with an infinite number’ of spectators.136 With balletic precision – and at some effort – courtiers served king, queen, princes and princesses on bended knee, ‘a very terrible fatigue to the Lady in waiting, who takes the covers off the dishes, carves for both their Majestys, the Prince and three Princesses, besides giving the Queen drink and tasting upon the knee’.137 An incident in July successfully punctured the formality of this stately tableau as well as proving its popularity. ‘There was such a resort to Hampton Court last Sunday to see their Majesties dine that the rail surrounding the table broke, and causing some to fall, made a diverting scramble for hats and wigs, at which their Majesties laughed heartily.’138
Given the attachment of husband and wife to points of etiquette, these flashes of spontaneity were rare. A letter that summer from the Countess of Berkshire to Charlotte Clayton demonstrates that Caroline’s reputation for affability was not enough to allay anxiety over how properly to treat her: ‘[I] desire you will … let me wait upon you to be informed in what manner I am to receive the Queen; for I should be extremely concerned to omit the smallest particular of showing that duty I ought to pay to her Majesty. And … I am sensible I am quite ignorant of the behaviour that is due to Majesty.’139 A similarly ‘anguished’ Countess of Orkney, disappointed by her servants’ treatment of Caroline in July 1729, praised ‘the [great] goodness in the Queen to be so very easy’ under the circumstances. Despite her own anxiety, Lady Orkney concluded that ‘it was impossible to see [Caroline] and not love her’.140
George Augustus held daily levées. Around her own ritualised dressing Caroline constructed similar routines, holding mixed gatherings of courtiers, clergy and men of letters in her apartments. It was another instance of her behaviour mirroring her awareness of status, and in time Frederick would follow his mother’s lead in copying the king.141 In Caroline’s case, prayers were read aloud in an adjoining room at the same time – Lord Hervey suggests with limited attention on Caroline’s part. On one occasion the future Bishop of Worcester protested at reading prayers on a makeshift altar beneath a painting of a naked Venus.
The largeness of Caroline and George Augustus’s family, with seven unmarried children, increased the number of formal celebrations, making for nine royal birthdays in addition to anniversaries, including that of the king’s accession. The birthdays were occasions of particular note, with a large attendance at court and, at some expense to all involved, their best new finery for guests; Hervey suggests London’s luxury goods trade suffered when birthdays were under-attended.142 ‘The Court is almost universally got into a French dress, which I am sorry for,’ lady of the bedchamber Frances, Countess of Hertford, had lamented in 1724; elaborate French fashions extended to hair-dressing and fabric choices.143 With Liselotte’s death in 1722 ended her letters’ sporadic commentary on French royal fashions. Instead, five years later, Caroline received from Lady Lansdowne in Paris a French fashion doll, ‘a little young lady dressed in the court dress … She was dressed by the person that dresses all the princesses here.’144
For their pains, well-dressed courtiers were singled out for royal note. Mary Pendarves was a skilled amateur botanical artist who designed embroidered stomacher panels and petticoats for her own and her friends’ court dress. On her first visit to the new court in 1728, Caroline praised her skill: ‘I dressed myself in all my best array, borrowed my Lady Sunderland’s jewels, and made a tearing show. I went with my Lady Carteret and her two daughters. There was a vast Court, and my Lady Carteret got with some difficulty to the circle [the line-up of guests in place to catch a royal eye], and after she had made her curtsey made me stand before her. The Queen came up to her, and thanked her for bringing me forward, and she told me she was obliged to me for my pretty clothes, and admired my Lady Carteret’s extremely; she told the Queen that they were my fancy and that I drew the pattern. Her Majesty said she had heard I could draw very well (I can’t think who could tell her such a story).’145 Her ‘tearing show’ – a dress of flower-patterned ‘dark grass green’ brocade, with pink
and silver ribbons – had cost the widowed Mrs Pendarves £17.
After a lifetime of compliments given and received, Caroline may have been improvising in singling out the widow’s draughtsmanship. Similar anecdotes, like her surprising Lord Egmont with her knowledge of his print collection, suggest she took trouble to apprise herself of details that indicated to those she encountered the extent of her interest, blandishments so ‘very gracious that they confounded’.146 Like George Augustus, Caroline understood the usefulness of court functions as a means of winning support for the regime through personal contact. In her much-publicised affability, her sense of humour and relish for risqué anecdotes, she enjoyed an advantage over her husband, whose ‘want of conversation’, according to Lady Hertford, showed less talent in that direction ‘than anybody I ever knew who was to do the honors of a court’.147 The story Caroline told to listeners in June 1732 of a Mr Spence, ‘fond of frequent bathing’, gives a flavour of her jockeying gossip. A visitor arrived while Spence was in his bath and swiftly made to withdraw. Punctilious in his courtesy, Spence ‘leapt up, and naked as he was, waited on [his visitor] to the very street door’. ‘Mr Spence,’ commented Caroline to Lord Peterborough, ‘was a man of extraordinary breeding to acknowledge the favour of a common visit in his birthday clothes.’148
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