The First Iron Lady
Page 33
Yet the challenge of successfully dressing Caroline’s swollen figure could not outweigh Henrietta’s aversion to the life she had once pursued so avidly. She was described coming ‘in the Queen’s train to the drawing-room … with the most melancholy face that was possible’.279 She had never loved George Augustus; her feelings for Caroline were equally bleak. Among her friends were so many opponents of the regime: Pope, Swift, Chesterfield, Walpole’s particular enemy Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke … and, from 1730, a Whig MP called George Berkeley with whom she shortly fell in love. To Henrietta’s relief, on 28 September 1733 Charles Howard died. In mid-September 1734 she requested from Caroline a six-week absence from court to recover her health in Bath, prompted by disaffection of long standing and her determination finally to experience life beyond Caroline’s curt manipulations and George Augustus’s ‘contempt, neglect, snubs, and ill-humour’.280
Caroline granted Henrietta’s request. She understood from previous conversations the younger woman’s subtext. Her own health faltered that summer, she had awaited Walpole’s victory in the recent general election with considerable anxiety, and it is possible that she temporarily lacked appetite for conflict. Walpole had lately lectured her on her health. His motives may have been selfish, concerned with his own political survival, but his anxiety was evidently real. Their conversation did not prompt Caroline to action: she did not consult her physicians beyond submitting to the routine futility of being blooded, or admit to George Augustus the oppression she laboured under. ‘Your life is of such consequence to your husband, to your children, to this country, and indeed to many other countries, that any neglect of your health is really the greatest immorality you can be guilty of,’ Walpole told her. ‘Your Majesty knows that this country is entirely in your hands, that the fondness the King has for you, the opinion he has of your affection, and the regard he has for your judgement, are the only reins by which it is possible to restrain the natural violences of his temper, or to guide him through any part where he is wanted to go. Should any accident happen to Your Majesty, who can tell into what hands he should fall, who can tell what would become of him, of your children, and of us all?’281 Caroline denied his flattery. Hervey described her ‘coughing incessantly … her head aching and heavy, her eyes half shut, her cheeks flushed, her pulse quick, her flesh hot, her spirits low, her breathing oppressed, and in short, all the symptoms upon her of a violent and universal disorder’.282
Henrietta made her excuses and, to the astonishment of court gossips, withdrew to Bath until George Augustus’s birthday on 30 October. There she entertained friends including political opponents of Walpole. In Bath at the same time, Princess Amelia reported to her mother each incriminating encounter. At a stroke, George Augustus’s indifference to his mistress of two decades coalesced into angry dislike.
His furious silence on her return lay behind an interview, lasting an hour and a half, between wife and mistress. For every argument in favour of Henrietta leaving court for good, Caroline offered complacent rebuttals. But Henrietta’s mind was made up. She was no longer the frightened adventuress who, feigning admiration for Leibniz, had cast in her lot with the Electress Sophia’s grandson and his wife. Taunt by taunt she refuted Caroline’s smiling bullying. Long disillusionment, her sojourn in Bath and the confidence she drew from her growing intimacy with Berkeley had convinced her, as Lord Bathurst wrote to her within the month, ‘that the sun shines, even … above one hundred miles from London; and that there are men and women walking upon two legs, just as they do about St James’s, only they seem to stand steadier upon them … A great king, who happened to be a philosopher, could find out nothing more to be desired in human life, than these four things – old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read; you may be sure of enjoying all these, and the third of them … in a more perfect degree than his majesty or his queen.’283 Caroline saved face by insisting Henrietta take a further week to reconsider. Nastily she demanded she promise ‘not to read any romances in that time’.284 George Augustus protested, ‘What the devil did you mean by trying to make an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast stay and plague me when I had so good an opportunity for getting rid of her?’285
Henrietta departed court at the week’s end, inspiring ‘a great deal of discourse’ among those she left behind.286 To Caroline’s lot fell ‘the ennui of seeing [George Augustus] for ever in her room’.287 On 26 June 1735, Henrietta married George Berkeley. Casting happily about for her replacement, the king’s eye alighted briefly on his youngest daughters’ governess, the pretty, ambitious widow Mary, Countess of Deloraine.
William Augustus’s twelfth birthday in 1733 inspired Stephen Duck to verse. He endowed his sturdy subject with godlike attributes: ‘warlike Strength and Courage’ from Mars; ‘Venus’s graceful Look’; ‘Hermes’s Eloquence’ and ‘superior Sense’.288
In its inventory of ‘princely’ qualities Duck’s was a portrait of an idealised George Augustus, which Caroline approved wholeheartedly. Her younger son remained her favourite. Five years had not diminished her misgivings about Frederick nor her resentment of his place in the succession; George Augustus dismissed his myopic, insincere but charming heir as a ‘Wechselbalg’, or changeling. Mother and eldest son shared common interests but pursued their enthusiasms separately. Like George Augustus, Caroline was unmoved by Lord Egmont’s assessment of Frederick’s duty ‘to his parents, who do not return it in love, and seem to neglect him’.289 A neglected Frederick sought gratification in indiscriminate dalliances and extravagance. In 1732 he had commissioned from William Kent a splendid royal barge complete with gilded oars; the following year he purchased Carlton House, near St James’s Palace, and at some expense invited Kent to re-landscape its gardens using native and exotic trees, including specimens imported from the New World: a ‘Pennsylvanian Blew Bramble’, black walnut trees and flowering maples from Virginia.290 Kent designed an Octagonal Temple; Frederick commissioned from John Michael Rysbrack busts of King Alfred and an earlier Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, whose bust Caroline would also commission. He began acquiring paintings and appointed as his library keeper Philip Mercier, the German artist of Huguenot descent who taught painting to his three eldest sisters. According to Sir Lambert Blackwell, Frederick ‘lov’d the Muse: For Pope reliev’d his hours,/And with melodious magic sweetly charm’d;/And Thomson [author of The Seasons], Nature’s painter, spread his flow’rs/With more than Titian’s glowing colours warm’d’.291 From 1733 he championed a new opera company, the Opera of the Nobility. Despite overlaps in their cultural patronage, since Caroline’s first regency in the summer of 1729 neither mother nor son had acknowledged any affinity.
Hervey suggests that by 1734 Caroline no longer desired amicable relations with Frederick, while Frederick could not forgive his mother for her closeness to Hervey, his own former intimate, whom she called ‘child, her pupil and her charge’.292 In an audience with George Augustus that summer, Frederick asked that a marriage be arranged for him and that his father explain his coldness of manner towards him. George Augustus ‘told him that his behaviour in general was very childish and silly, but that his particular disregard to his mother and his undutiful conduct towards her was what offended him more than anything else, and that till he behaved better there he would never find it possible to please him’.293 Hervey’s Frederick retreats from his father to Caroline’s apartments, only to find that she has deliberately absented herself, ‘resolving not to see her son, till she had seen the King’. Mother and son meet a day later and Caroline upbraids Frederick for allowing himself to be influenced by people ‘who think of nothing but distressing the King’. She resists itemising a catalogue of sexual indiscretions on Frederick’s part that included fathering a child by her maid of honour Anne Vane and an affair with Miss Vane’s chambermaid, and she overlooks Frederick’s promotion of the Opera of the Nobility, currently operating in direct competition with Handel’s company whose chief pat
ron was George Augustus; Hervey labelled king and queen ‘both Handelists’.
On 14 August, in a letter to Caroline, Frederick restated his desire to be married: ‘Although the King did not receive my request as favourably as I had reason to expect, nevertheless I was consoled a little by the promise your Majesty gave me subsequently to do all in your power to help. I hope that your Majesty will be persuaded that it is not because of a lack of confidence in your promise, and in your kindness, that I am bothering you again; but that you will pardon a little impatience in a man of 28 years, who has never yet in his life demanded anything from your Majesty and who believes that his first request was based, not only on a sound and just reason from his own point of view, but also on the advantage to your Majesties and the public … I beg you to be not only my mother but also my friend.’294
His plea fell on deaf ears: Caroline proved incapable of playing the part of Frederick’s friend. As at every key moment during her marriage she acted in tandem with George Augustus. Six years after Frederick’s arrival in London, forgetful of their own unhappiness at George Louis’s intractability, neither husband nor wife acknowledged his grounds for protest at the absence of appropriate income and spouse. From their children they demanded the same unquestioning obedience they expected of the country at large: Caroline referred to Frederick’s ‘just sense of his duty to his Father’.295 She understood it as precluding opposition.
Meanwhile George Augustus employed a Hanoverian agent, von Schrader, to report to him in secret on marriageable Protestant princesses in the Empire – in Wolfenbüttel, Holstein-Glucksburg and Saxe-Gotha.296 He met his preferred candidate, plain, inelegant, fair-haired, unlettered fifteen-year-old Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, during his visit to Hanover in 1735. The following February he offered Frederick Augusta as his bride. With Frederick’s agreement, preparations began at once for a royal wedding on 27 April. Caroline oversaw appointments to Augusta’s household.
Augusta spoke neither English nor French; she brought with her from the modest country house of her widowed mother her governess and her favourite doll. Her simplicity and apparent naïvety endeared her to Caroline. The profound obeisance the ungainly princess made to Caroline and George Augustus on first meeting, prostrating herself in front of them, endeared her to both. For the wedding ceremony at St James’s Palace the king wore a suit of gold brocade, Caroline ‘plain yellow silk, robed and faced with pearls, diamonds and other jewels of immense value’.297 She translated the service for Augusta and prompted her responses: as she wrote to Anne, ‘I told her to look at me and I would make a sign when she ought to kneel.’298 Afterwards, the king increased his son’s allowance to £50,000, exactly half the sum he himself had enjoyed as Prince of Wales. King and queen noted the new couple’s boycott of the spectacular production of Handel’s Atalanta staged in their honour.299
Like Caroline before her, Augusta won popular approval for her family’s Protestantism. Unlike George Augustus, credit for the success of the marriage would extend to Frederick as well as Augusta. As Lord Stormont offered, ‘From his example/Shall Hymen trim his torch, domestic praise/Be countenanc’d, and virtue fairer shew.’300
For Caroline the wedding day ended in mirth at the tallness of Frederick’s nightcap, worn over a cloth-of-silver nightshirt. She had convinced herself her son was impotent. She prayed there would be no issue of the union, even consulting Hervey about Frederick’s fertility, and took heart from Augusta’s rested appearance the morning after. To Hervey she made clear that nothing had altered her determination that her ‘dear William’ succeed his father.301
On Caroline’s part no surprise had greeted George Augustus’s statement, on his return from Hanover in 1735, that the women of the electorate were patterns of ‘beauty, wit and entertainment’.302 As she had every reason to know, her husband had recently conceived an infatuation.
Husband and wife had lately been painted from memory by portraitist Joseph Highmore, praised by contemporaries for his ‘happy pencil’.303 Of the pair of images, only that of Caroline survives. At fifty-two she has a statuesque magnificence. A loose gown of ermine-lined velvet swathes her considerable bosom; in her hair are a Roman-inspired diadem and twists of pearls. Her cheeks are rosy pink, her throat and chest as pale as the silvery grey of her hair and her eyebrows. Her eyes are bright, firm the set of her jaw. Sarah Marlborough’s ‘Madam Ansbach’ is no longer ‘a little German princess’, but every inch a queen. But youth has vanished, and with it the enticements of the flesh.
It was not to be hoped that her goatish husband would refrain from looking elsewhere for those pleasures he no longer found in Caroline’s bed. He ‘talked bawdy’ with Lady Deloraine, he admired others among Caroline’s ladies, but it was a Hanoverian noblewoman of unabashed physicality who would prove more than a passing fancy.
In the best-known likeness of Amalie von Walmoden – a portrait by Peter van Hoogh engraved by de Köning – she entices the viewer with all the subtlety of a talent-show contestant. Globular breasts are scarcely contained by an ermine-trimmed shift of plunging neckline; a come-hither expression in her bright, black eyes combines challenge, seduction and a suggestion of mirth at the folly of it all. A posthumous assessment claimed it was ‘impossible for any man of taste and sensibility’ not to love her.304 Generous with her favours, Madame von Walmoden succumbed to several. In her tendency to weight gain, she resembled Caroline. The resemblance extended to strength of will and an eye to her own best interests. From Hanover in the summer of 1735, in a torrent of letters of forensic detail, George Augustus shared with Caroline the progress of his nascent affair with this ‘young married woman of the first fashion’.305 He praised Amalie’s face while denying her beauty or wit. ‘Had the Queen been a painter,’ Hervey commented, ‘she might have drawn her rival’s picture at six hundred miles distance.’306 To his wife of three decades, his thraldom was clear.
On his return in the autumn, Caroline greeted George Augustus effusively. She affected good humour, good health, good spirits.307 He returned none of her careful unconcern, his behaviour towards her instead sharp and impatient. As he recounted afresh stories of his new mistress his irritation lifted, and he hung on the walls of Caroline’s dressing room recent pictures of court life in Hanover. To Lord Hervey ‘he was often so gracious … when he was with their Majesties in this dressing room for an hour or two in the evening, to take a candle in his own royal hand, and tell him the stories of these pictures, running through the names and characters of all the persons represented in them, and what they had said and done’.308 An increasingly disgruntled Caroline oscillated between ‘lassitude … [and] mirth’, but the king appeared unaware of her reactions.
To courtiers less privileged than Hervey – as well as to Caroline – George Augustus offered unremitting boorishness. Forgotten was the illusion of anglophilia once cultivated at George Louis’s expense. Now no English cook, confectioner, actor, coachman or jockey knew his business, ‘nor were there any English horses fit to be ridden’, or men or women capable of conversation, style, wit, or even ‘any diversions in England, public or private’.309 Only Hanover, rosy through the prism of his randiness, met with his approval. There ‘plenty reigned, magnificence resided, arts flourished, diversions abounded, riches flowed, and everything was in the utmost perfection that contributes to make a prince great or a people blessed’.310 For Caroline, his volte face represented a wholesale rejection of her life’s work. George Augustus’s attitude made it clear that, for the moment, he included her in his comprehensive disparagement.
Hervey believed the king’s bullying overwhelmed Caroline in the winter of 1735. He criticised her eating habits, her habit of visiting the houses of her friends, her choice of paintings for the royal apartments. Tactlessly but accurately, Walpole traced the source of George Augustus’s testiness, indicating to Caroline the demise of her physical allure. He suggested she find a home-grown replacement for Henrietta Howard to divert the king’s attention from Madame von Walmo
den: ‘If the King would have somebody else, it would be better to have that somebody chosen by her than by him.’311 Walpole’s own choice fell on Camilla, Countess of Tankerville, foolish but beautiful wife of one of Frederick’s gentlemen of the bedchamber.312 Caroline ignored his advice. A description of her tending George Augustus at his bedside for a week in February in ‘the most careful and affectionate manner’ by Viscountess Irwin, afterwards lady of the bedchamber to Caroline’s daughter-in-law, suggests self-control, patience and stamina alongside her customary determination that appearances be maintained.313
To Hanover, and the open arms of Amalie von Walmoden, the king returned soon after Frederick’s marriage. Caroline decamped to Kensington, for the fourth time her husband’s regent, Frederick again overlooked. A waggish notice was affixed to the gates of St James’s Palace: ‘Lost or strayed out of this house, a man who has left a wife and six children on the parish; whoever will give any tidings of him to the churchwardens of St James’s Parish, so as he may be got again, shall receive four shillings and sixpence reward. NB – This reward will not be increased, nobody judging him to be worth a Crown.’314 Flippancy could not disguise a darkening popular mood.
George Augustus’s thoughts, however, were of the newborn son Amalie assured him was his own. Again his letters to Caroline enlarged on his newfound happiness. Not content with itemising Amalie’s charms, the curmudgeonly swain had determined to bring her back to London. Caroline jibbed at such overwhelming proof of her loss of sexual sway. Uxorious even in his faithlessness, George Augustus besieged her with letters that flattered as they wounded. ‘You know my weaknesses,’ he wrote, ‘there is nothing hidden from you in my heart, and please God that you will be able to correct my faults as easily as you can see into my soul. Please God that I could imitate you as well as I admire you and that I could learn from you all the virtues that you teach me to see, feel & love.’315 On Caroline’s lips the taste of these pieties was ashes, for all she claimed that ‘she minded [George Augustus’s dalliances] no more than his going to the close stool’.316