George Augustus felt little of his father’s enthusiasm for the Prussian marriages. Ultimately the old king’s plan foundered on vigorous mutual antipathy on the parts of brothers-in-law George Augustus and Prussia’s King Frederick William, a contempt ‘as great as one man can have for another’.247 In both instances, husbands acted against the wishes of their wives. Left to Caroline and Sophia Dorothea, one or both marriages would have come about. As Caroline knew of old, hers was seldom the casting vote. There is no evidence to support the view of Frederick William’s daughter Wilhelmine that Caroline herself opposed Wilhelmine’s marriage to Frederick because she ‘strenuously desired to have him united to a female of no very prominent talent’ instead of ‘a princess of a great house’.248 In Wilhelmine’s misleading account, Caroline’s decision was made in consultation with Melusine von der Schulenburg and Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, ‘that they themselves might continue to govern’, despite Sophia Charlotte’s death in 1725 and Melusine’s withdrawal from court two years later on the death of George Louis.
For an anxious interlude George Augustus and Frederick William toyed with marital alliance as a means of point-scoring one against the other. A letter written by a British diplomat in December 1729 suggested that Frederick William had ‘forced’ Sophia Dorothea ‘to write an insolent letter of his dictating to our Queen [Caroline], insisting upon her speedy performance of the hopes she has given her of marrying Prince Frederick to her eldest daughter [Anne], and this before February next, and unconditionally, or else that she cannot hinder her husband from disposing of her to someone else’.249 In George Augustus, to whom Caroline was bound to show such a letter, such high-handedness inspired a predictable response. To-ing and fro-ing between the courts continued nevertheless for another two years, until Frederick William married Wilhelmine to the Margrave of Bayreuth in 1731. The collapse of George Louis’s plans was part of a larger fracturing of relations between Britain and Prussia. But failed engagements to their cousins did not diminish Frederick or Anne’s enthusiasm for marriage itself.
For Anne salvation would appear in an unexpected guise. Few boasts could be made for William IV of Orange. He was a prince without a throne, his sovereign power acknowledged in Friesland, Groningen and Gelderland but not in the United Provinces’ key territories of Zeeland and Holland. He was a bridegroom without romantic attractions. Hunchbacked, physically misshapen, ‘his body as bad as possible’ and teeth decayed to the point at which his breath was ‘more offensive than it is possible for those who have not been offended by it to imagine’, he appeared a poor match for the eldest daughter of Europe’s proudest Protestant king.250 With a choice ‘whether she would go to bed with this piece of deformity in Holland, or die an ancient maid immured in her royal convent at St James’s’, Anne ‘resolved … she would marry him’.251
No one was more aware than Caroline and George Augustus of William’s shortcomings. The couple’s offer to their daughter of this cut-price princeling contained no element of coercion. ‘I never said the least word to encourage her to this marriage or to dissuade her from it,’ Caroline explained, remembering events in 1704, when Figuelotte had allowed her to make up her own mind about Archduke Charles. ‘The King left her, too, absolutely at liberty to accept or reject it.’252 Hervey describes father and daughter ‘walking in the garden at Richmond tête à tête … a considerable time, her hand constantly in his, he speaking with great earnestness and seeming affection, and she listening with great emotion and attention, the tears falling so fast all the while that her other hand went every moment to her cheek to wipe them away’.253 Their conversation evidently decided Anne. ‘The ambitious girl replied, that she “would marry him if he were a baboon”. “Well, then,” replied the King, “there is baboon enough for you.”’254 Anne was rising twenty-four, scarred by smallpox, running to fat. For a decade she had been separated from both of her parents. For her father she felt impatience, for her brother loathing she was powerless to conceal. She knew the paucity of opportunities for escape. If she quailed at reports of William’s deformity, she mastered her misgivings.
Her marriage took place on 14 March 1734 in the French Chapel at St James’s Palace, against a backdrop of lavish decorations designed by Caroline’s favourite, William Kent. Handel had composed a new anthem, This is the Day that the Lord has made, a setting of words from psalms 45 and 118 compiled by Anne herself. ‘The Royal Maid consents with decent Pride/And crowns her Triumphs with the name of Bride,’ offered one poet blandly; popular feeling, however, was strongly in support of the match.255 Plans made by the royal household in advance stipulated each detail of the brief service, including Anne’s entry: ‘The Bride in Virgin habit with a Coronet conducted by the Lord Chamberlain and Vice Chamberlain, and supported by the Prince of Wales and Duke [William Augustus], both Bachelors.’256 Her eight bridesmaids included Lady Hertford’s daughter, Lady Betty Seymour. On 7 March Caroline asked the girl’s father for his formal consent; she instructed him that ‘all [bridesmaids] were to be dressed in white satin or damask, a stiff-bodied gown, the petticoat to be round and trimmed with a silver net, long locks, and jewels in her hair and upon her breast’.257
A dress of ‘stiff blue French silk, embroidered with silver thread and lavishly trimmed with ruffles of the finest lace and loops of diamonds’ struggled to flatter Anne’s portly figure. At Caroline’s insistence, the remainder of her trousseau – placed on display at Hampton Court – was of English manufacture.258 William gave her jewellery valued at £30,000, including a diamond necklace whose stones were so large that twenty-two were enough to circle the thickness of her neck. In Hervey’s account, her father offered her ‘a thousand kisses and a shower of tears but not one guinea’. He resisted pressure to celebrate the marriage in St Paul’s Cathedral in the interest of public visibility.259 Parliament voted the princess a generous dowry of £80,000.
Given the success of her own sex life, Caroline undoubtedly felt compunction on Anne’s behalf. Reflecting on her daughter’s wedding night, she asked Lord Hervey, ‘N’aviez-vous pas bien pitié de la pauvre Anne?’(‘Did you not pity poor Anne?’)260 She wrote to her daughter on the day of her departure, ‘my sadness is indescribable. I never had any sorrows over you, Anne, this is the first, a cruel one. Caroline behaves so well, but our conversations always finish on the same sad note. The King, who sends you affectionate greetings, is worse than us all … Love me always as tenderly as the most affectionate mother flatters herself that you do.’261 Caroline addressed her daughter as ‘dear heart’. From her own experience she knew the unlikelihood of ever seeing Anne again. Instead, bar a single visit, the relationship of mother and daughter was confined henceforth to their letters, full of advice on Caroline’s part, larded with complaints on Anne’s. Caroline’s tone was consistently affectionate: characteristically she did not allow emotion to cloud political considerations. When Anne suggested returning to London during a pregnancy, her mother rebuffed her: ‘You are now William’s wife, God has given you skill and judgement, you are no longer a child.’262 Hervey’s statement that Caroline ‘never ceased crying for three days’ after Anne’s departure, but forgot her within three weeks, is more effective rhetorically than as a record of fact.263
Adroitly, those with a grievance against Walpole or George Augustus encouraged Frederick’s irritation at his sister’s marriage ahead of his own. ‘So very uneasy’ had he become, after six years under his parents’ roof, ‘that to everybody his looks told he was so, and to many his words’.264 ‘One of his wise quarrels with the Princess Royal was her “daring to be married before him”, and consenting to take a portion from the Parliament, and an establishment from her father, before those honours and favours were conferred upon him.’265 But two years would pass before Frederick’s engagement.
The popular rejoicing inspired by Anne’s marriage was timely. A year earlier, a diplomat from Genoa had reported the threat of ‘una generale rivoluzione’ in London.266 The cause of the unhappi
ness was a proposal by Walpole to impose a duty on wine and tobacco.
Walpole’s Tobacco Excise Bill was intended to compensate for a loss in government revenue following his decision in 1732 to reduce the Land Tax paid by many among the political classes. It was also meant to discourage smuggling. In outlining the measure’s potential for increasing civil list revenues, Walpole won George Augustus and Caroline’s approval. Caroline further approved the scheme as likely to broaden support for the regime to include that of Tory landowners. Neither monarchs nor minister anticipated widespread opposition.
But Walpole had miscalculated badly. Within and outside Parliament, his political opponents moved swiftly. The Bill, they suggested, was a preliminary to escalating government intervention on several fronts. Darkly they hinted that tobacco and wine were only the first goods to attract indirect taxation; Walpole had been heard to let slip the words ‘general excise’. Anxiously king and queen watched the Bill’s uncertain progress. They demanded from Lord Hervey updates on key Commons debates. In answer to a request for information about the popular mood from the master of the horse, the Earl of Scarborough, Caroline was told, ‘Madam, I will answer for my regiment against the Pretender [the Jacobite claimant to George Augustus’s throne, James Francis Edward Stuart], but not against the excise.’267 Caroline gave audience to the Earl of Stair, who berated her at length on the measure’s folly. He told her that Walpole was the most hated man in the country, and that she shared in his unpopularity; he told her that the power Walpole exercised over her was universally acknowledged. With studied calmness, Caroline upbraided the blustering Scotsman for lack of principle; she made clear her contempt for his motives. He mistook her calmness for acquiescence. Her support for scheme and minister did not waver, nor that of George Augustus. Convinced of the connection between excise and the civil list, the king dismissed opposition as anti-monarchical, encouraged in this view by Walpole and Caroline.268 Tension at court became palpable.
The decision to drop the Bill was Walpole’s, on 11 April, in the face of overwhelming opposition and escalating threats of popular unrest. Excise had proved the strength of his royal support; it had exposed lack of support even within his own party. At court in its aftermath retribution for opposition peers who held household appointments was rapid. Lords of the bedchamber Lords Clinton and Burlington lost their places; after eighteen years’ service Lord Chesterfield, whose mockery of Caroline was well known, forfeited the lord stewardship. The fall from grace of the Earl of Stair was inevitable. Chesterfield’s revenge took the form of toadying to Frederick, Prince of Wales.
After dark, bonfires raged through London; the city erupted in celebration. At Charing Cross two figures were burnt in effigy. One represented Robert Walpole. The other was crudely shaped into the semblance of a fat woman, Caroline herself. From the dizzy heights of coronation day, Caroline’s popularity had plummeted. Against a backdrop of howls and jeers, flames consumed the rough-hewn likeness. The emptiness of poets’ florid claims lay vividly exposed, hollow the acclamations that likened her to classical deities, personifications of wisdom, prudence, charity, arbitress of springtime. For a moment in April 1733, in her self-appointed role as populariser of the Hanoverian regime, Caroline had failed. Opposition pamphlets trumpeted examples from history of ‘an Unpopular Queen who supported a detested first minister’.269
Habitually ‘mistress of her passions’, a shaken Caroline gave vent to indignation. Angrily she protested ‘against assertors of the people’s rights … call[ed] the King … the humble servant of the Parliament, the pensioner of his people and a puppet of sovereignty, that was forced to go to them for every shilling he wanted, that was obliged to court those who were always abusing him, and could do nothing of himself. And once [she] added, that a good deal of that liberty that made them so insolent, if she could do it, should be much abridged’.270 It was a statement of what Hervey characterised as her ‘German’ outlook, her inclination to authoritarianism, her aversion to contradiction, her conviction of royal prerogative. In a fictional exchange between Caroline and Walpole, imagined by Hervey, an exasperated queen tells the minister, ‘There is your fine English liberty! The canaille may come and pull one by the nose, and unless one can prove which finger touched one’s nose, one has but to put a plaster to one’s nose, and wait to punish them till they pull it again; and then, may be, they shall pull one’s eyes out of one’s head too.’271 It was a viewpoint George Augustus shared with his wife. As the failure of excise proved, they would struggle to impose it outside their family.
Like all else at court, the slow unravelling of the relationship between George Augustus and his mistress Henrietta Howard took place in public. By the late 1720s, observers agreed that they appeared ‘so ill together that, when he did not neglect her, the notice he took of her was still a stronger mark of his dislike than his taking none’.272 In her apartments at Richmond Lodge next to Henrietta’s, Lady Bristol listened through adjoining walls to George Augustus’s harsh rebukes and peremptory dismissals. It had become a relationship of perfunctory coitus and mutual irritation, but the king was a man of habit and routine, his life ‘as uniform as that of a monastery … [and] never the least change’.273
Henrietta’s correspondence suggests that her position was not enviable. ‘Forced to live in the constant subjection of a wife with all the reproach of a mistress’, she was also plagued by a hearing impairment.274 Through her forties her state of health worsened. A letter from Lady Hervey indicates that she had never been physically robust: ‘All extremes are, I believe, equally detrimental to the health of a human body, and especially to yours, whose strength, like Sampson’s, lies chiefly in your head.’275 Against the vicissitudes of George Augustus’s character and the petty revenge taken by Caroline in insisting on full observance, even during illnesses, of Henrietta’s duties as her bedchamber woman ought to be set concrete advantages. From a position at court, Henrietta had hoped for financial security, and this she had attained. Afterwards she had craved protection from her abusive husband Charles Howard, and this too had been granted her. On more than one occasion Caroline had come to her assistance, notably the night Charles broke into the queen’s apartments at St James’s Palace and threatened Caroline with physically abducting his wife. With a greater show of courage than she felt, Caroline had challenged him to ‘do it if he dare’. Afterwards she admitted, ‘I was horribly afraid of him … all the while I was thus playing the bully … I knew him to be so brutal, as well as a little mad … so I did not think it impossible that he might throw me out of the window.’276 By such increments she won Henrietta’s reluctant gratitude and bound her husband’s mistress more tightly to her, but nothing in either woman’s surviving papers points to real approaches to intimacy or sympathy.
Admittedly Henrietta’s position lacked influence: both Caroline and George Augustus had always been determined it should be so. Nonetheless it afforded her meetings with prominent men and women, including politicians, poets and garden-makers, whose interests she shared. And George Augustus’s beneficence, derisory in comparison with his father’s enriching of Madame Schulenburg, had at least enabled her to buy land and build the house that compensated her for court drudgery: Marble Hill, in Twickenham.
Prior to 1728, even the idea of escape was impossible given her fear of returning to her husband. It was in that year, however, that Charles and Henrietta Howard signed a formal deed of separation. In addition, George Augustus agreed to pay Charles an annual pension of £1,200 for his wife’s continuing presence at court.
Charles Howard was the heir to his childless brother Edward, Earl of Suffolk. Separation notwithstanding, a clause within the deed enabled Henrietta to become Countess of Suffolk in the event that Edward died and Charles succeeded to the earldom. This happened in June 1731. Henrietta’s good fortune was twofold. Under her brother-in-law’s will she received money he withheld from Charles; and her new status as countess disqualified her from serving any longer as Caroline’s
woman of the bedchamber. But Caroline was not ready yet to dispense with Henrietta’s usefulness. Henrietta as George Augustus’s mistress was a manageable challenge; another mistress might prove less so. Caroline offered her promotion to the rank of lady of the bedchamber. Within a week of Edward’s death, with a degree of holding out on Henrietta’s part, she had accepted the senior position of groom of the stole, resigned in her favour by an obliging Duchess of Dorset. ‘Mrs Howard’s friends say she was offered to be Lady of the Bedchamber, which she declined and wished for any other employment,’ wrote Lady Pembroke to Charlotte Clayton.277
Henrietta’s lighter duties enabled her to divide her attention between court and Marble Hill. She described her time as at last her own. With a degree of punctilio, setting aside personal feelings, she applied herself to the task of Caroline’s wardrobe. Her purchases on Caroline’s behalf included sumptuous gold fabric obtained at Henrietta’s request by the Earl of Essex from Sardinia.278
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