To Caroline’s lot fell problems of government beyond her understanding. Three years earlier she had railed at the part played by popular pressure in the collapse of the Excise Bill. In the summer of 1736 she showed herself similarly at odds with the public mood. The regency government granted a six-week reprieve to Captain John Porteous, commander of the Edinburgh City Guard, after he was found guilty of murder following a riot in the Scottish capital in April. Its intervention, sanctioned by Caroline, provoked public resentment of such magnitude that a mob of several thousand people took the law into their own hands, and on 7 September dragged Porteous from his prison cell and killed him. Caroline responded to this insurrection with affrontedness, Walpole with shock; both intended harsh reprisals. ‘Sooner than submit to such another insult I will turn Scotland into a hunting-field,’ a bellicose Caroline told the Duke of Argyll.317 Further discussion with the Scottish nobleman tempered her indignation.
It was an unhappy autumn nevertheless. With difficulty Walpole persuaded Caroline of the need to write to George Augustus suggesting he bring Madame von Walmoden back with him to court. Charlotte Clayton opposed the idea, seconded by Lady Pomfret. Caroline gave in. At St James’s Palace she emptied rooms of books to make space for apartments for her latest rival; the rooms in question adjoined Henrietta’s old apartment.318 The king’s thanks were heartfelt, but Amalie would remain in Hanover during Caroline’s lifetime, sensibly wary of face-to-face confrontation with her lover’s formidable spouse.
The effort of reorganising her books nudged Caroline towards advancing plans for the new library that the Daily Journal had announced as long ago as the summer of 1727. As well as accommodating three thousand volumes, it would provide a setting for the ‘Busto’s in Marble of all the Kings of England from William the Conqueror’ that she had lately commissioned from Rysbrack, initially as bookcase ornaments for the library at Merlin’s Cave.319
In George Augustus’s continuing absence, Caroline remained at Kensington Palace. St James’s stood empty, inviting criticism of the king’s absenteeism. In some quarters this rebounded on Caroline in the form of praise of her long suffering. Up to a point sympathy for Caroline helped restore her public standing from its nadir of the excise crisis, though an appearance at the opera was greeted by hisses in place of cheering, and her support of the Gin Act in September proved predictably unpopular. For the first time since his accession George Augustus missed celebrations of his birthday.
In December weather thwarted George Augustus’s journey home: his ship was forced to return to port. Rumours of the ship having been wrecked in ferocious storms caused panic for Caroline and Walpole. Frederick’s reaction, by contrast, Caroline categorised as one of sang-froid, and wrote as much to George Augustus. For her own part, her emotions were a compound of love and fear for the future. Walpole claimed that on his accession Frederick ‘would tear the flesh off [her] bones with hot irons’; he dreaded her ‘falling into the hands of a son who hates her’.320 He feared for himself too, and inevitable loss of office. But George Augustus survived the storm’s anger. Relief inspired magnanimity and he wrote a letter to Caroline thirty pages long, full of loving kindness and impatient longing. He called her his ‘perfect Venus’, and she preened herself to the extent of showing his letter to Walpole.321 After a five-week enforced delay on the Dutch coast, George Augustus arrived at St James’s on 15 January 1737. With chameleon unpredictability he greeted Caroline delightedly, and quickly succumbed to excruciating piles.
George Augustus’s pleasure in being reunited with the wife he had harried, humiliated and abandoned for eight months did not extend to his eldest son. In January 1734 he had cancelled Frederick’s birthday ball, citing as excuse Caroline’s gout. The truth, Lord Egmont recalled, lay in a ‘misunderstanding’ between father and son that would not be resolved in Caroline’s lifetime.
Money proved the catalyst. Before his departure for Hanover, George Augustus had omitted to make any provision for Augusta. For some time Frederick’s spending had significantly exceeded his income. Pressed by creditors, he gave his backing to an opposition motion to lobby Parliament for the £100,000 allowance he considered his right. Walpole offered an out-of-house settlement: an additional annual payment to Augusta of £50,000. The message to the prince from the cabinet council on 21 February offered George Augustus’s ‘sudden going abroad’ after the royal wedding and ‘his late indisposition’ as reasons ‘retard[ing] the execution of [his] gracious intentions, from which short delay His Majesty did not apprehend any inconveniences could arise’.322 Politely Frederick indicated that the matter was no longer in his hands. The motion was defeated in both houses of Parliament, but not before public attention had focused firmly on divisions within the royal family that rekindled memories of 1717, to the benefit of neither parents nor son. For this sole reason George Augustus resisted banishing Frederick. Caroline contented herself with refusing to speak to him.
Frederick’s decision to politicise personal grievances points to the extent of the breakdown between the two households. Caroline habitually resented disrespectful behaviour towards George Augustus. In Frederick’s case, her emotions were highly wrought but unorthodox. She described her son as ‘the most hardened of all liars’; she considered him weak, disputatious, faithless.323 Famously, she caught sight of Frederick from her dressing-room window and exclaimed to Lord Hervey, ‘Look, there he goes, that wretch! – that villain! – I wish the ground would open this moment and sink the monster to the lowest hole in hell.’324 These were not conventional motherly responses, and her intimacy with Hervey did nothing to mitigate Caroline’s furious loathing. His own failed, possibly homosexual relationship with Frederick made Hervey an unreliable sounding block.
Caroline’s feelings went further. In clinging to her preference for William Augustus as George Augustus’s heir, she was determined her elder son would prove infertile. With Hervey and in some detail she considered the possibility of Frederick substituting another man in his own place in Augusta’s bed in order to guarantee his wife’s conception. This unsavoury speculation became an idée fixe. In its wake Caroline entertained similarly improbable feats of gynaecological legerdemain. Mistrusting likely shenanigans, she resolved to be present at any lying-in of her daughter-in-law’s. ‘At her labour I positively will be, let her lie in where she will; for she cannot be brought to bed as quick as one can blow one’s nose and I will be sure it is her child.’325
Evidently Frederick understood the direction of her thoughts. He was equally determined Augusta would give birth without his mother’s presence. For six months after she conceived, assisted by the bulkiness of court fashions, husband and wife concealed her pregnancy. Augusta’s waters broke at Hampton Court, in the evening of 31 July 1737, just twenty-six days after Frederick had written to his parents, ‘Dr Hollings and Mrs Cannon have just told me that there is no longer any doubt of the Princess being with child.’326 ‘With an obstinacy equal to his folly, and a folly equal to his barbarity’, Frederick insisted on an immediate departure for London, despite the princess’s protests and warnings of the dangers to which he exposed her.
The royal coach was crowded. Augusta’s mistress of the robes, two of her dressers, Frederick’s equerry Bloodworth ‘and two or three more’ accompanied the flitting couple. With difficulty they prevented Augusta giving birth en route. They arrived at St James’s Palace at ten o’clock, a sorry sight, Augusta howling with pain. Her clothes were stinking and sticky with ‘filthy inundations’, ‘notwithstanding all the handkerchiefs that had been thrust one after another up Her Royal Highness’s petticoats in the coach’.327 In the dark, shuttered palace were neither clean sheets nor hot water. Lying on a tablecloth, Augusta was delivered of ‘a little rat of a girl, about the bigness of a good large toothpick case’.328 The Archbishop of Canterbury arrived fifteen minutes too late to witness her birth.
Informed of Frederick’s perfidy by night messenger, Caroline saw the child in the early hours of the mo
rning. She told Caroline and Amelia, the Duke of Grafton and Lord Hervey, ‘if, instead of this poor, little, ugly she-mouse, there had been a brave, large, fat, jolly boy, I should not have been cured of my suspicions; nay, I believe … that I should have been so confirmed in that opinion, that I should have gone about his [Frederick’s] house like a madwoman, played the devil, and insisted on knowing what chairman’s brat he had bought’.329 Instead she treated Augusta with tepid kindness and cautioned Frederick against appearing too soon in front of his father. While George Augustus raged, she made a number of further visits to her first granddaughter over the coming days. She identified her motives cynically as ‘une bonne grimace pour le publique’ (a good show for the public).
Caroline did not oppose George Augustus’s decision in September to expel Frederick and Augusta from the royal palaces, as they themselves had once been expelled. To Augusta she wrote, ‘I hope Time & due consideration will bring my Son to a just sense of his duty to his Father; which will be the only means of procuring that happy change, which you cannot more sincerely wish than I do.’330 As it happened, it was her final act of loyalty to the husband who, in public, she had acknowledged as her lodestar for more than three decades.
In several accounts of her death, Caroline achieved the Protestant apotheosis forecast for her from the moment British writers learned of her rejection of the future Charles VI. These versions of the royal deathbed conjure a seamless transition from palace to afterlife. ‘She never … showed the least fear of the pain she endured, or of the closing scene,’ wrote Lady Hertford, describing an unlikely coincidence of agony and tranquillity. Poet Mary Jones pictured the ailing Caroline magnified in her virtues: ‘those noble Sentiments, which always warm’d her Breast … exert[ed] themselves with greater vigour, the nearer they were being extinguished’.331 A monody by Joseph Smith imagined Caroline in Heaven, in the poet’s estimate her reward for earthly piety: ‘Oft have I seen her, with submissive ear,/The oracles of God unfolded hear./Oft have I seen her, with seraphic love,/Her prayers preferring to the throne above:/Where now the praises to the King of Kings,/Triumphant, with angelic notes, she sings.’332 Lady Hertford made much of the attendance at Caroline’s bedside of the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Potter. He ‘told me he never saw a behaviour equally glorious and Christian to hers, and that all she said to him deserved to be printed’.333 She claimed Caroline’s earthly thoughts were of George Augustus, whose feelings she spared by sending away the candles that illuminated her final moments.
The truth was less orderly than the countess’s smooth narrative or Smith’s undeviating couplets. For twelve days Caroline faced the imminence of death, unable any longer to escape the consequences of the umbilical hernia she had concealed for so long. Hervey’s eyewitness account denies elegance. Princess Caroline, plagued by nosebleeds and rheumatism, attends her mother ineptly. A conniving Frederick sends messages, instructs his courtiers to infiltrate the forbidden palace. Caroline herself is testy and fractious at key moments; her hatred of Frederick shows no abatement. Predictable in George Augustus’s behaviour is every impulse from tenderness to boasting. Sporadically the sickroom stinks. Caroline is perversely angry at discovery of the cause of her affliction. The royal doctors are incompetent, the patent medicines Hervey foists upon his mistress useless quackery that help her not at all. Only Caroline’s hard-won eleventh-hour dignity redeems his lengthy record.
The problem, which manifested itself as ‘racking pains … in her belly’, was caused by a section of Caroline’s small intestine that had begun to poke through her ruptured stomach wall – predictably, given her obesity. By working the protuberance back where it came from, disaster might have been averted. Instead Dr John Ranby and an octogenarian assistant called Dr Bussier cut it away. In removing a section of Caroline’s bowels in this way, they eliminated the possibility of her recovery.
Caroline’s suffering began in the morning of Wednesday, 9 November. She had visited the library that Kent had completed for her only a month earlier, its long views out across St James’s Park. By the early hours of Sunday morning, the wound had begun to fester. For another week Caroline loitered somewhere between life and death, offering last words to her unmarried daughters and William Augustus, whom she loved so much more than his older brother. She had made her will already, a straightforward document that bequeathed everything to her husband. To him she entrusted the ruby ring first given her at her coronation. From her sickbed she spoke to him with loving humility; she begged him, as she had done before, to marry again once she was dead. He wept and stammered over his reply and told her, with distinctive crass banality, that he would only have mistresses. And her sense of humour was restored, and she reminded him, as she knew so well, that this was scarcely an impediment to marriage.
Some days the surgeons cut away at the wound they ought never to have made. As the second week of Caroline’s ordeal limped blackly onwards, her stomach erupted. ‘In the afternoon one of the guts burst in such a manner that all her excrement came out of a wound in her belly,’ drenching the bedclothes, spilling from the bed on to the floor.334 Despite unimaginable pain, Caroline neither complained nor cried. Only once did she request opium for pain relief.
She died on 20 November ‘at 11 o’clock this Night … of a Mortification of ye Bowels … aged 54 Years, 8 Months, and 20 Days’, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine. In some accounts George Augustus held her hand for her final moments, in others Amelia read aloud from a prayerbook. Dorothy, Countess of Burlington sketched the deathbed scene, complete with one of the large lace headdresses Caroline had so often worn, and at some expense her body was embalmed. For her funeral at Westminster Abbey, as at her coronation, Handel composed a new anthem, ‘The Ways of Zion do Mourn’, ‘as good a piece as ever he made’.335 More simply, George Augustus told courtiers, ‘I never yet saw the woman worthy to buckle her shoe.’
The London Gazette published instructions for mourning: ‘black bombazines, plain Cambrick Linnen, Crape Hoods, Shamoy Shoes and Gloves, and crape Fans’ for women, for men ‘black cloth without Buttons on the Sleeves or Pockets, plain Cambrick Cravats and Weepers, Shamoy shoes and gloves, Crape Hatbands and black Sword and Bucklers’.336 Carriages were also to be black. Persiflage posted on the Royal Exchange – ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?/To take the Queen and leave the King?’ – points to mourning for Caroline among all classes.
True to his word, within a year George Augustus had installed Amalie von Walmoden at St James’s Palace. She was naturalised as a British citizen in February 1738 and created Countess of Yarmouth the following month. She survived George Augustus by a year, dying of breast cancer in 1761. Nothing suggests that George Augustus loved her, despite the unhappiness she had caused Caroline.
To his sister Sophia Dorothea he had written on 30 November that Caroline’s memory would never be effaced; he described her as a princess of great and rare virtues.337 In the aftermath of her death George Augustus paid her servants and the pensions she had granted; he continued to employ a librarian for Kent’s new library; he maintained her gardens at Richmond, including the upkeep of the Hermitage and Merlin’s Cave. Even twenty years after her death – a foreshadowing of later royal approaches to mourning – he ‘ha[d] never suffered the Queen’s room to be touched since She died’.338
George Augustus was mistaken about Caroline’s memory, which the passage of time has indeed erased. Accurately he estimated her rare virtues.
Afterword
Oxford High Street is seldom quiet in daylight hours. Open-topped tourist buses and coaches to and from London plough its broad stretch. In front of the screen wall of The Queen’s College, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1709, a sign for a bus stop has been fixed. Like the bicycles that lean against the foot of the wall in a ribbon of broken teeth, it stands alongside the grandeur of Hawksmoor’s golden classicism as a reminder of human smallness.
Above the college entrance, high above the bus stop and the hurly burly of the tho
roughfare, is a statue of Caroline of Ansbach for which sculptor Henry Cheere, a competitor of Rysbrack’s, received payment from the college of £130.5s. It stands beneath a cupola, a generic image of classicised womanhood, and Caroline is unrecognisable from her portraits, draped in the long woollen garment Romans knew as a stola, a symbol in Augustus’s empire of female rectitude.
Caroline is also commemorated at Queen’s by an inscription: ‘Carolina Regina, Nov. 12, 1733’. It marks the laying of the foundation stone of the screen wall visible from the high street, after Caroline’s payment at the beginning of the month of the first instalment of a donation to the college of £1,000. Later she promised another £1,000, but died before payment could be made. She had responded to a petition from the college provost, Dr Joseph Smith. Smith had circulated two hundred copies of The Present State of the New Buildings of Queen’s College in Oxford, as part of an appeal to complete the replacement of medieval buildings begun in 1352, after Edward III granted a charter for the college to his wife’s chaplain, Robert of Englesfield. Like previous consorts, including Edward’s own wife Philippa, Caroline was the college’s royal patroness.
Few of those who travel along Oxford High Street are aware of the figure of Caroline, part-shielded by her splendid cupola. Nor would they recognise her name, or the story of this orphan princess who lacked formal education. But I like to think she would take pleasure that one of her few surviving images stands in the heart of this great university city. That she is visible only to those who raise their eyes heavenwards, craning their necks, risking being dazzled by the sun, would surely redouble her enjoyment.
The First Iron Lady Page 34