Husband and wife understood too their opportunities as hosts for flattering or chastising members of the political classes admitted to the palace. At an early court of the reign, Caroline had taken the opportunity to inform Lord Orrery that he was ‘much grown since She had seen me’, a statement he recognised as a ‘Reproof … since it carries … Reprimand for not having been at Court before in many years’.149 Five years earlier, Orrery had been imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of Jacobite plotting, charges that had failed to stick. Caroline may have hoped to effect his conversion through personal contact. Alternatively – a less kindly impulse – she may have expected visible proof of his loyalty in the form of court attendance. To Lord Aberdour in January 1734, the Earl of Morton described the reception granted by the royal couple to a nobleman who had lately opposed Walpole and, in doing so, criticised Caroline: ‘I believe you’ll see in the prints that the Earl of Stair had waited on his Majesty and the Queen, but I am informed that neither the King nor Queen took notice of him, or spoke one word to him.’150
At other times, Caroline adopted a subtler approach. Hervey referred to her ‘strok[ing] while she hated’.151 The technique was surely learned from long exposure to the treacherous duplicity of courtly mores. King and queen were as capable of behaving with coolness as affability, each response deliberate and carefully calibrated. The warmth of Caroline’s treatment of her closest attendants is proof that she at least did not merit Hervey’s bitter claim that husband and wife ‘looked upon humankind as so many commodities in a market, which, without favour or affection, they considered only in the degree they were useful’.152 And Caroline was alert to George Augustus’s social shortcomings. In February 1732, Anne wrote to Charlotte Clayton on Caroline’s behalf about a measure she had conceived for smoothing ruffled feathers: ‘Papa not having spoke to Lord Shaftesbury yesterday, Mama orders me to let you know, that she would be very glad if Lord Lymington would bring him to the levy to day, that that omission might be retrieved.’153 It is an indication of Caroline’s vigilance and the importance she attached to the role of court events in maintaining loyalty and affection for the crown.
Despite the absence of cannon fire, Frederick’s birthday in 1729 was ‘kept in a most splendid Manner … [with] a very numerous Appearance of Nobility and Persons of Distinction at St James’s’.154 It included a recital of birthday verses composed and delivered by the poet laureate Laurence Eusden. Court attendance was typically at its highest at birthday celebrations for senior royal figures, as Mary Pendarves’s account of Caroline’s first birthday as queen indicates: ‘At night sure nothing but the Coronation could exceed the squeezing and crowding that was there, the ballroom was so excessive full that I could not see one dance.’ She likened attempting to cross the ballroom to ‘attempt[ing] to swim across the sea in a storm’.155 On these occasions the royal family set the tone for sumptuous dress. In his wife’s honour, George Augustus chose ‘blue velvet, with diamond buttons’ and a hat ‘buttoned up with prodigious fine diamonds’. Frederick appeared in ‘mouse-coloured velvet turned up with scarlet and very richly embroidered with silver’. Caroline’s own dress of black velvet was simple by comparison, Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal explaining ‘Kings and Queens [as] not dressing Grand on their own Birthdays’.156 Simplicity notwithstanding, Caroline’s inky velvet provided a dramatic foil for her pale complexion. Reporting on like occasions, the Gentleman’s Magazine dwelt salivatingly on her ‘pearls, diamonds, and other jewels’.157 Unlike Hervey, the magazine resisted commenting that ‘all the Birthdays are alike … a great crowd, bad music, trite compliments upon new garments and old faces in the morning; feasting and drinking all day; and a ball with execrable dancers at night’.158
Formality oscillated with informality: family breakfasts of sour cream, fruit and hot chocolate away from the public gaze; afternoon theatricals performed by the younger children, like the ‘comedy’ described by Jenkin Thomas Philipps, in which Mary and Louisa as shepherdesses and William as ‘a Racer’ performed alongside a ‘Lady cloathed in white as if she was a Priestess or a Ghost’; ‘the Diversion of Hunting the Stag in Windsor Forest’ reported in the Craftsman; evenings spent playing cards, walking in the palace gardens or, as the Norwich Gazette reported on 18 October 1729, at a private concert at Kensington, ‘when the Harpsichord was played by Mr Handell’.159 ‘In bed both after dinner & after supper,’ wrote Henrietta Howard, ‘both [Caroline] & the King always read.’160 Lady Bristol recorded Caroline’s pleasure in being read to aloud as she dressed.
In Lord Hervey’s partisan account the felicity of all or any of these activities lay in George Augustus’s hands, his testiness a pall that spared neither spouse nor attendants. ‘His Majesty’s brusqueries to everybody by turns, whoever came near him, his never bestowing anything from favour, and often even disobliging those on whom he conferred benefits, made him so disagreeable to all his servants, that people could not stand the ridicule even of affecting to love him for fear of being thought his dupes.’161 Famously Hervey depicts a family breakfast soured by George Augustus’s exactions. He ‘snubbed the Queen who was drinking chocolate for being always stuffing, the Princess Emily [Amelia] for not hearing him, the Princess Caroline for having grown fat, the Duke [William Augustus] for standing awkwardly … and then carried the Queen to walk and be resnubbed in the garden’.162 Hervey’s writing habitually subordinates truthfulness to dramatic effect or rhetorical flourish, but is supported in this instance by Mary Wortley Montagu’s description of George Augustus in middle age as regarding ‘all the men and women he saw as creatures he might kick or kiss for his diversion’.163 Despite his affection for her, Caroline was frequently first in line for kicks as well as kisses: his irritation ‘used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, on her’.164 She had developed strategies for managing princely pique and her own equilibrium.
Letters written in the summer of 1729 by Peter Wentworth, one of Caroline’s grooms of the chamber, testify to her passion for walking. That year she ordered the building of the Queen’s Pavilion at Richmond Lodge, surrounded by trees, a woodland resting place during lengthy strolls, handsomely fitted out with an elaborate chimneypiece designed by William Kent. Sometimes musicians accompanied the royal perambulations. On 20 August, Wentworth reported, ‘Her Majesty sent us word that she was going “to walk in the garden” … We walked till candlelight, being entertained with very fine French horns.’165 Loyally Wentworth described his pleasure in a ‘good long limping walk’ with his mistress.166 Caroline’s taste for walking even shaped the routine of court days. Wentworth recorded ‘go[ing] to dinner at three and start[ing] from table a little after five in order to walk with the Queen’.167
With vicious amusement, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough recorded an unscripted encounter during one of Caroline’s morning walks from Kensington Palace to St James’s. ‘Two or three days ago, Her Sacred Majesty was in great danger of being ravished. She was walking from Kensington to London early in the morning and, having a vast desire to appear more able in everything than other people, she walked so fast as to get before my Lord Chamberlain and the two princesses, quite out of sight … Lord Grantham meeting a country clown asked him if he had met any person and how far they were off? To which he answered he had met a jolly crummy woman with whom he had been fighting some time to kiss her. (I am surprised at the man’s fancy!) And my Lord Grantham was so frightened that he screamed out and said it was the Queen. Upon which the country fellow was out of his wits, fell upon his knees, cried and earnestly begged of my Lord Grantham to speak for him, for he was sure he should be hanged for what he had done. But he did not explain further what it was. And Her Majesty does not own more than that he struggled with her, but that she got the better of him.’168
Peter Wentworth’s letters dwell on less vexed diversions: an early-morning carriage ride from Kensington to Richmond so that Caroline and her daughters could breakfast on cherries they had picked themselves;
a ‘very pritty entertainment’ at Richmond Lodge, in the form of an outdoor play arranged by Frederick for his mother and sisters. In the latter case, a specially written prologue explained an indisposition on Caroline’s part as caused by sadness at her separation from her husband. Given George Augustus’s irascibility, it was a barbed pleasantry.
On 14 May 1729 George Augustus had departed for Hanover. His absence lasted four months. In Caroline’s lifetime he would make four visits to the electorate, crossing the Channel again in 1732, 1735 and 1736. Each time he took with him neither wife nor mistress. Instead he vested full powers of regency in Caroline and set out for Germany in the combined roles of conscientious Landesvater, bellicose prince of the Empire and footloose, lusty lothario. Only the previous year Caroline had been commended by John Conduitt for her ‘steady attachment to true Religion … Liberality, Beneficence, and all those amiable Virtues, which increase and heighten the Felicities of a Throne, at the same time that they bless All around it’.169 Her vain, exacting, irritable, goatish husband esteemed as well as loved her.
His decision to appoint her regent in his absence was expected. At least one coronation effusion had recognised Caroline’s intelligence: ‘If thy outward Form can thus surprize,/Oh what a noble Pleasure would they [the people] find,/Could they but view the Picture of thy Mind!’170 Since 1705 the partnership of husband and wife had been unusually close. On repeated occasions, most spectacularly at their coronation, they had indicated that theirs was a shared vision, a joint approach to eminence, and for twenty-one years since Oudenaarde they had scarcely been apart. George Augustus’s opening speech to Parliament, at the end of June 1727, was delivered to a House of Lords swollen by the presence – unprecedented on such an occasion – of peers’ wives. The new king was accompanied by his three eldest daughters and by Caroline, a symbolic assertion that the ‘wifeless’ George Louis had been replaced by a king and a queen, the former a man who was also husband and father.171 There were recent precedents for a queen regent too. In the early 1690s Mary II had stood as regent no fewer than six times for her husband William III. The Regency Act of 1690 had granted her power in his absence to act in both monarchs’ names. Critically, it permitted William authority to override her decisions; it stipulated the reversion of regal power to him on his return.172 Eager as he was to deny uxoriousness, in 1729 George Augustus made a far more wholehearted statement of confidence in Caroline than William had in Mary. At his instigation, decisions on policy made during his absence were entrusted ‘entirely to the Queen with the advice of the Lords of the Council’.173
Caroline repaid the trust he placed in her. She was careful in her exercise of powers she greatly coveted, with the result that his confidence in her grew. A letter dating from her third regency, written by the Earl of Harrington, secretary of state for the Northern Department (forerunner of the home office), expresses the extent of George Augustus’s regard for her good sense and her ability to seek out sound advice. With British ships poised to resist a Spanish naval attack, Harrington informed his colleague, ‘as Her Majesty will be able to have at all times the opinion of those versed in sea affairs, His Majesty orders me to acquaint you that he leaves it entirely to the Queen to send such orders as Her Majesty shall find necessary’.174 There can be little doubt of Caroline’s pleasure in such an endorsement, nor for this ambitious princess in the realisation that she had exceeded Mary’s remit.
Like his father before him, George Augustus preferred to bypass his heir. Saccharine addresses at the time of the coronation had informed Frederick, ‘Some Day shall see the Royal Sceptre thine;/… Glad be that day, but late before it shine.’175 For all his disdain for poetry, George Augustus was in full agreement. The king’s promotion of his wife over his son would contribute little to long-term family harmony. In the short term, courtiers – and Frederick – noted Caroline’s relaxation in George Augustus’s absence.
For the time being fissures in the relationship of mother and son remained unacknowledged, and at his father’s removal, family tensions diminished. At Kensington Palace, at her first council meeting after George Augustus’s departure, it was Frederick who first kissed Caroline’s hand in token of his loyalty. Caroline took advantage of George Augustus’s absence to undertake a number of visits – to the Earl and Countess of Orkney at Cliveden; to Claremont to dine with the Duke of Newcastle, prominent but not again to be trusted after events in 1717; to Walpole at his house in Chelsea, where with her children she ‘breakfasted; after which [she] took Water at the Stairs adjoining to his Garden, and came down the River to Somerset House, and viewed the Royal Apartments there, and return’d to Sir Robert Walpole’s’.176 There were sojourns at Richmond Lodge and Windsor Castle.
On each occasion Frederick accompanied his mother, apparently content in her company. Together, he and Caroline invited themselves to the Duke of Grafton’s hunting box at Richmond, much against the duke’s will. Of dinner at Claremont, Peter Wentworth wrote on 21 August, ‘The Prince of Wales came to us as soon as his, and our, dinner was over, and drank a bumper of rack-punch to the Queen’s health, which you may be sure I devotedly pledged, and he was going on with another, but her Majesty sent us word that she was going to walk in the garden, so that broke up the company.’177 With Anne, William, Mary and Louisa, Frederick hunted in Windsor Forest, dressed like them in a special ‘hunting suit of … blue, trimmed with gold, and faced and lined with red’, in which all the royal children ‘looked charming pretty’.178 Caroline followed in a chaise. In company with his sisters Anne and Amelia, he danced country dances. He shared with Caroline and his sister Anne jokes at the expense of the doggedly solicitous Wentworth. In Wentworth’s epistolary hagiography, nothing ruffled the even tenor of family life.
Caroline applied herself with diligence to the limited political concerns of her first solitary summer. A full regency council existed for her guidance: its members included the Archbishop of Canterbury. In practice a smaller ‘sub-council’, the ‘Select Lords’, met more often, at Kensington Palace, usually on days when post arrived from Hanover. The lord chancellor Peter King, lord privy seal Lord Trevor, the Duke of Grafton as lord chamberlain and master of the horse the Earl of Scarborough, both senior court appointments, joined Walpole among the ‘Select Lords’.179 Until the king’s return their role was not to formulate policy but to assess unfolding events in line with existing policy. Foreign affairs formed the government’s principal concern in the summer of Caroline’s first regency. That a number of foreign ambassadors accredited to George’s court followed him to Hanover for the duration of his stay lessened her workload and the extent of her responsibilities.
Husband and wife had been separated only once before. As from the Flemish battlefield, George Augustus often wrote to Caroline daily. He addressed her twice over, as temporary co-ruler and as husband, with the emphasis, Walpole claimed, on the second role. Diligently George Augustus refamiliarised himself with his homeland. There were diversions too along the way, as Lord Chesterfield reported to Henrietta Howard, and his letters to Caroline dwelt ‘particularly [on] his amours, what women he admired and used’. In Chesterfield’s account, Caroline’s response was cynically self-serving: ‘The Queen, to continue him in a disposition to do what she desired, returned as long letters, and approved even of his amours, and of the women he used.’180 Her letters could as easily be interpreted as pragmatic, and there is no reason to discount hurt or anxiety on the part of this pursy but ambitious middle-aged woman whose vanishing hold on her difficult husband had always been grounded in cupidity. It is hard to imagine how else she could have reacted, or why she would have responded with any aim but to please. For a decade she had humoured George Augustus’s liaison with Henrietta Howard. In doing so, she had won from him an unspoken gratitude and concessions she valued more highly than straightforward fidelity. In the summer of 1729 she did not concern herself unduly with what she dismissed as his fleeting ‘guenipes’ (loose women).
The ‘Select
Lords’ spent the quiet months finalising terms of the Treaty of Seville, which concluded recent Anglo–Spanish hostilities and tactfully omitted mention of ownership of Gibraltar. In June, Caroline intervened with the Portuguese ambassador following his country’s embargo on a British ship in the River Tagus. In this period of febrile chauvinism, it was the sort of skirmish of high words and braggadocio that might easily have escalated. Caroline’s intervention overturned the embargo. ‘Destruction from her presence flies’, the author of ‘An Ode for Two Voices, for the Birth-Day of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales’ had claimed, and so, in this instance, it proved.181 From Hanover Townshend reported that ‘the King likes extremely what Her Majesty said to the Portuguese envoy’.182 The following month she offered Louis XV a homely diplomatic compliment in the form of ‘a present of a dozen hogsheads of perry and cider’.183 Predictably, it failed to stem the tide of worsening Anglo–French relations. For her part, Caroline found herself the recipient of an unusual gift from Britain’s American colonies. ‘I presume to present you with a young beaver alive, which I have not heard has yet been seen in England,’ wrote the governor of New England, William Burnet, on 7 July. ‘As this is a famous animal for its industry and policy, and, I think, peculiar to America, I hope it will not be unworthy of your acceptance.’184 Caroline’s response has been lost.
All summer long Caroline behaved with circumspection. As regent her conduct carefully denied George Augustus grounds for irritation. She established her court at Kensington to reassure him of the modesty of her ambitions, in contrast to the couple’s flaunting grandeur of 1716 when, at Hampton Court, they had deliberately set out to eclipse George Louis’s dull record. A quartet of quadrille tables, with fine leather covers and gold-laced edging, was delivered to the palace for evening card games – the game was a particular favourite of Caroline’s, but not of George Augustus. In June, at a packed court at St James’s Palace, she celebrated his accession day with appropriate fanfare. Letters ensured George Augustus’s knowledge; his replies expressed his approval. In the warmth of his approbation, Hervey claimed, he resisted suggestions by Townshend that Caroline’s powers be curtailed. Understanding of George Augustus’s character – his vanity and self-importance – shaped Caroline’s behaviour: her success laid foundations for her future regencies.
The First Iron Lady Page 29