Читать книгу The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach - Matthew Dennison, Matthew Dennison - Страница 16

‘The affections of the heart’

Caroline was wooed by a prince in disguise and in a hurry, Figuelotte’s nephew George Augustus, Electoral Prince of Hanover.

His departure for Ansbach – at midnight, under cloak of darkness – suggests romance, even derring-do. He was short in stature, vain, with pale bulbous eyes, fine hair of an indeterminate colour and a peppery self-importance – or, in Toland’s characteristically rosier assessment, of ‘a winning countenance, speaks gracefully, for his Years a great Master of History, a generous disposition and virtuous inclinations’.1 Unlike his intended bride he was fascinated by ghosts and werewolves, his religious outlook ‘without scruples, zeal or inquiry’.2

It was the first week of June 1705. George Augustus travelled in the garb of a Hanoverian nobleman and called himself ‘von dem Bussche’. His former tutor, Baron Philipp Adam von Eltz, a Hanoverian privy councillor, accompanied him under the alias ‘Steding’. With a single manservant, they directed their tracks southwards to Ansbach. There they presented themselves at the margrave’s court as travellers en route for Nuremburg. Only the elector George Louis knew their true destination and purpose. Afraid of the reaction of Frederick in Berlin, he insisted that both remain secret.

The prince was twenty-one, eight months younger than Caroline. From his grandmother, the dowager electress Sophia, and his aunt Figuelotte he had heard her charms itemised and magnified. For the better part of a decade his father had pursued fruitless negotiations with Charles XII of Sweden. His initial purpose had been to win for George Augustus the hand of the king’s stubborn, musical younger sister, Ulrike Eleonore. Following a switch of tactic in 1702, he had targeted Charles’s elder sister, Hedwig Sophie, recently widowed. In December Figuelotte wrote that the marriage was settled.3 She was mistaken. In both cases George Louis’s tenacity went unrewarded, and in February 1705 he had begun to look elsewhere for his son’s bride, with no apparent regret on George Augustus’s part.

Caroline’s blonde voluptuousness was quite to contemporary German tastes. Her natural good looks made a pretty contrast to the ‘rosy cheeks, snowy Foreheads and bosoms, jet Eyebrows, … scarlet lips … [and] Coal black Hair’ that, with crude cosmetic help, were universal among the ‘beauties’ of George Louis’s court.4 Her connection to Prussia’s newly royal Hohenzollerns had its value too. During the spring of 1705 the English envoy in Berlin repeatedly reported a rumour that Frederick’s family intended to reclaim their ward for themselves: the prince royal, Frederick William, wanted her for his wife.5 In Hanover the electoral family reacted with stealth and belated alacrity. ‘There is in this court a real desire of marrying the prince very soon,’ wrote Sir Edmund Poley.6 Thwarted by the secrecy of George Augustus’s midnight flit – ‘a mystery of which I know nothing’ – Poley correctly hazarded the amorous purpose of his journey. The prince’s attentions, he offered, would be directed at one of three likely candidates: princesses of Hesse-Cassel and Saxe-Zeitz, and ‘the Princess of Ansbach’.7

While Poley puzzled, George Louis’s plans progressed apace. Confident in his disguise, the mysterious von dem Bussche enjoyed a conversation alone with Caroline at her brother’s summer palace at Triesdorf. To what extent he hoodwinked Caroline, with her ‘ready and quick Apprehension, [and] lively and strong Imagination’, not to mention her familiarity with both his aunt and his grandmother, remains uncertain.8 To his father, George Augustus reported the result as love at first sight: ‘he would not think of anybody else’.9 It was an outcome shaped less decisively by Caroline’s ‘uncommon turn for conversation, assisted by a natural vivacity, and very peculiar talents for mirth and humour’ than her considerable physical attractions, described by one historian as ‘a bosom of exemplary magnitude … encased in the fairest and pinkest of skins’.10 As he wrote to Caroline herself, ‘I found that all I had heard about your charms did not nearly equal what I saw.’11 Job done, he returned with von Eltz post haste to Hanover.

There, discussions with George Louis lasted two hours and left the dour and fractious elector in uncommonly good humour. All that remained was for von Eltz to retrace his steps to Ansbach and, following to the letter George Louis’s careful instructions, prosecute the prince’s suit first with Caroline and afterwards with her brother. A single injunction dominated von Eltz’s orders: that he ‘guard in every way against the Princess having any kind of communication with the Court of Berlin until such time as this project of marriage is so far established as to prevent any possibility of its being upset’.12 Fixed in his purpose, the elector did not intend his Prussian brother-in-law to thwart him.

Darkness, disguises and the utmost discretion were no shield against the compulsive gossip of courtiers and diplomats. As George Louis had predicted, speculation reached its most intense in Berlin, Caroline’s home until the previous winter. From there, Lord Raby wrote to George Stepney on 5 July, ‘Some are uneasy at this Court at the late journey incognito of the prince Electoral of Hanover.’ Again, Raby reported, many cited the Princess of Hesse-Cassel as George Augustus’s object. Her brother had married Frederick’s daughter Louise Dorothea, and ‘they can’t help being jealous of so audacious an allegiance for the House of Luenburg [sic]’. Others came closer to the mark. They ‘say that the prince was at Ansbach to see that princess who refused last year to Change her Religion to have the King of Spain Charles the 3rd’.13 Already, her resistance to apostasy defined Caroline. For good measure Raby enclosed a description of Figuelotte’s funeral. Catching up from behind, belatedly Poley described Caroline as the ‘most agreeable Princess in Germany’.14

What neither Raby nor Berlin’s gossipmongers realised was that, two weeks before Raby’s letter, both Caroline and her brother William Frederick had accepted a highly secret formal proposal of marriage on the part of George Augustus. Vienna, too, remained misguidedly optimistic. On 24 June, more than six months after Leibniz composed Caroline’s written refusal, an imperial emissary requested a meeting of members of the courts of Vienna and Ansbach ‘to make a final representation on behalf of the King of Spain’. To add ballast to his request, he wrote on the joint instructions of the Elector Palatine and the emperor.15

By the end of July the marriage contract had been signed. By early September, Wilhelmine Karoline, acclaimed in the formal documentation as ‘Princess of Brandenburg in Prussia, of Magdeburg, Stettin and Pomerania, of Casuben and Wenden, Duchess of Crossen in Silesia, Electress of Nuremburg, Princess of Halberstadt, Minden and Cannin and Countess of Hohenzollern’, had exchanged Ansbach for Hanover, and the uncertainty of spinsterhood for marriage to the Electoral Prince of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Generous within his means, her brother bestowed on her a dowry equivalent to around £4,000 and a trousseau that included ‘a splendid outfit of jewels’, items of silver and, inevitably, clothes; her later claim of having come to George Augustus ‘naked’ was a conventional enough exaggeration.16 George Louis assigned to Caroline the castle of Herzberg as her dower house in the event of George Augustus’s death, and a guarantee of 14,000 thalers for her widowhood.17

Neither Frederick in Berlin nor Sophia in Hanover had been aware of the first parries of this lightning matchmaking. Predictably, their reactions were at odds. Confirmation of the forthcoming marriage was general knowledge by late July; Frederick’s ‘dissatisfaction’ and ‘ill humour’, directed at the court of Ansbach as well as that of Hanover, persisted throughout August and beyond.18 With arch disingenuousness and in words that mimicked his own, Sophia told Poley, ‘the Princess of Ansbach hath always been talked of at this court as the most agreeable Princess in Germany’. Less truthfully, given George Louis’s behind-the-scenes role as puppet-master and her own contribution in focusing attention on Caroline in the first place – as early as November 1704 she reported conversations with George Augustus, and ‘in talking with him about her [Caroline], he said, “I am very glad that you desire her for me”’ – she added that ‘the Elector had left the Prince entirely to his own choice’.19 In the long term such fine points of equivocation proved of no importance. It suited George Augustus’s preening nature to believe that ultimate credit for his ‘discovery’ was his own. At least Sophia did not dissemble her pleasure. Without sparing Frederick’s irritation, she told him, ‘I have never made a secret of loving the Princess from the moment I set eyes on her, or of desiring her for one of my grandsons.’20 Letters from Liselotte at Versailles confirmed Caroline’s exemplary reputation and ignored Frederick’s wounded amour propre: ‘A great many people here have seen the Princess of Ansbach, and they are full of praise. I hope the marriage will be a happy one … It is very lucky when such a marriage gives everyone pleasure: it is not often the case.’21

Frederick’s fulminating was a risk George Louis was prepared to take. For Frederick, who had lived in close proximity to Caroline for almost a decade, the princess previously singled out by the emperor’s younger son and forged in Figuelotte’s image promised advantages to his newly royal dynasty as well as to Brandenburg-Prussia at large. In Hanover, however, the electoral family had more specific and more pressing reasons for courting Caroline.

In 1701, at an age when many of her contemporaries were dead, the dowager electress Sophia had experienced an upturn in her fortunes. With uncharacteristic but deliberate extravagance, she had welcomed to Hanover an English embassy led by the Earl of Macclesfield in mid-August that year. Its purpose was to present her with a copy of recent legislation passed by Parliament in Westminster and, on William III’s behalf, to invest George Louis with England’s highest order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter.

This was more than ordinary diplomatic flummery. In the Act of Settlement of June 1701, Hanover’s electoral family were named as heirs to the thrones of England and Scotland in the event of the death without issue of the current heir, Princess Anne, younger daughter of the deposed James II. First in line was Sophia herself. After her, in the Act’s key wording, came ‘the heirs of her body, being Protestants’: George Louis, then George Augustus.

This was not unexpected. William III had applied pressure to Parliament to pass a similar resolution as early as 1689. England’s Dutch king was well disposed towards Sophia. His friendship with the ‘good old duke’, her brother-in-law George William of Celle, was warm and of long standing, and he had been impressed by George Augustus after meeting him at George William’s court in October 1698. For all that, the Act’s implications were momentous. Hanover in 1701 was a region of limited international profile and territorially insignificant, mostly confined between the North Sea and the Harz Mountains and bounded by the Elbe and Weser rivers. It had been granted electorate status only within the last decade. Months earlier, it had been outflanked by the promotion of neighbouring Brandenburg, now effectively the Kingdom of Prussia, a piece of political leapfrogging decried by Sophia as ‘the fashion for Electors to become Kings’.22 In return for Protestantism, however, the Act of Settlement offered Hanover’s ruling family promotion to sovereigns of one of Europe’s oldest kingdoms, shortly to be formally ‘united’ by the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. That the bride of George Augustus, now fourth in line to the British throne, should already have proven so convincingly her Protestant mettle ‘and in all her words and actions … declared herself to be on the most reasonable conviction, a sincere Christian, a zealous Protestant’ was an obvious recommendation in the aftermath of this seismic adjustment.23

The significance of Caroline’s stand was increased by the nature of Sophia’s claim. Like England’s current heir Anne, Sophia was a granddaughter of James VI and I. She was the twelfth of the thirteen children of James’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, by her marriage Electress Palatinate and, briefly, Queen of Bohemia. Anne’s happy marriage to Prince George of Denmark had resulted in seventeen pregnancies but only a single child who survived infancy, William, Duke of Gloucester. He in turn died on 30 July 1700, aged just eleven, of acute bacterial infection exacerbated by pneumonia and water on the brain.24

But his death did not make Sophia Anne’s closest heir. The second marriage of Anne’s father had produced a son, James Edward Stuart, who as a result of James’s religious conversion in the 1670s was a Catholic. In 1688, Catholicism had accounted for James’s own loss of his throne. Apparently in accordance with the will of the people, certainly in accordance with the will of sections of parliamentary opinion, James was replaced that year as England’s sovereign by his elder daughter from his first marriage, Mary, and Mary’s husband, the Dutch prince William of Orange, both of them Protestants, Mary devoutly so. Parliament’s Bill of Rights, passed the following year, sought to legitimise this dynastic shuffle, the so-called Glorious Revolution. The Bill formally excluded Catholics from the succession in perpetuity, and damned government by any ‘papist prince’ as ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom’. It was by this means that James Edward Stuart, brought up in exile on the generosity of Louis XIV of France, was stripped of his right to the throne. By the same means, more than fifty cousins and family members who were more closely related to Anne than Sophia, but who were Catholics or married to Catholics, including descendants of Sophia’s elder brothers and of Charles I’s daughter Henrietta, also forfeited their claims. Sophia’s ‘legitimacy’ as England’s heir stemmed from the rejection by Members of Parliament of the principle of hereditary succession. It was grounded in religious intolerance.

Her understanding of the contentious nature of her candidacy and its potential for divisiveness prompted Sophia’s commission of a commemorative medal, the ‘Mathilde medal’, ahead of Macclesfield’s embassy. Its two sides bore a profile of Sophia herself and, in a markedly similar portrait on the reverse, an English princess called Mathilde, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1156 Mathilde had married George Louis’s most warrior-like forebear, Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. More than Sophia’s Protestantism, the Mathilde medal celebrated former glories and the Hanoverians’ specifically ‘English’ descent. It was among Sophia’s gifts to the suite that accompanied Lord Macclesfield in the summer of 1701. The earl himself received a gold basin and ewer that had cost his hostess half her annual income, while to William III Sophia wrote tactfully, ‘we await [the] event without impatience here, and pray with all our hearts “God save the King”’.25 Periodically she took care to deny any personal desire to occupy England’s throne, a politic deceit on the part of this ambitious princess who, despite her age, was not above opportunism. Piously she wrote to Archbishop Tenison, ‘I live in quiet and contentment, and have no reason for desiring a change.’26

Little wonder, then, that her thoughts should have turned to Caroline as a wife for George Augustus. Whatever sleight of hand was employed to convince this strutting, eager prince that the selection of Caroline for his future consort was his own, his grandmother as well as his father had reached the same conclusion ahead of him. Caroline’s desirability in George Augustus’s eyes was almost certainly sharpened by the interest she excited in Charles of Austria and his own younger cousin Frederick William. He also anticipated increased standing and greater autonomy at his father’s court as a result of his marriage. For Sophia and George Louis, other princes’ partiality mattered not a jot. Caroline’s commitment to Protestantism was a powerful weapon in the dynasty’s British aspirations, and an essential counterweight to family crisis.

In 1658, Sophia’s own marriage contract had included a clause permitting her, in Lutheran Hanover, to continue to practise the Calvinism of her upbringing. This concession was made at her father’s request rather than her own, and she did not value it highly. Later she had shown pragmatism – calculation too – in the matter of Figuelotte’s faith, placing her daughter’s marriageability above doctrinal allegiance. With Leibniz as her sounding block, she had since entertained herself with philosophical rather than specifically religious discourse, and read a number of key texts, including Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy.27 She was aware of Leibniz’s attempts in the early 1690s to win support for a reunion of Catholic and Protestant Churches in the electorate and, equally, was not opposed to the initiative.28 And she approved her husband’s acquiescence in a plan for building a Catholic church in Hanover, as a means of wooing the good opinion of the emperor.29

This easy-going position inevitably changed following the Act of Settlement. There were other factors too that contributed to a religious stance on Sophia’s part that appeared (although in fact it may not have been) increasingly hardline. The conversion to Catholicism of her son Maximilian in 1701 explained aspects of the permanent rupture in their relationship; until his death at the battle of Munderkingen in 1703 she was troubled by the possibility of her fifth son, Christian, following in Maximilian’s footsteps. Happily George Louis’s plodding Lutheranism permitted no grounds for concern. Caroline had demonstrated that she was likewise sound in her allegiances. Recent events appeared to indicate that she would buttress George Augustus’s faith, an essential prerequisite since the 1701 Act. For, if George Augustus failed to provide the dynasty with Protestant heirs, the family’s claims to the English crown evaporated. With Maximilian a Catholic and Sophia’s youngest son, Ernest Augustus, almost certainly homosexual, the long-term position of the electoral family was scarcely less precarious than that of the Stuarts they meant to displace.

Meanwhile, the year after Macclesfield’s official presentation, the English envoy extraordinary in Hanover, James Cresset, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting the loan of communion plate, ‘a dozen or two’ prayerbooks and a Bible. He meant to set up a chapel in his house in Hanover and make it available to leading dignitaries. He explained his aim to Tenison as a means of ‘inspir[ing] in the Court esteem for the Established Church’.30 The archbishop, however, although he referred to himself disparagingly as ‘an uncourtlie, but well intention’d, old man’,31 was already in regular communication with Hanover’s court, via Sophia, and would take his own measures to convince the new heiress of the importance of religious conformity. Sophia responded in kind. On 16 August 1701 she had written to Tenison to express thanks for his support, and that of his fellow bishops in the House of Lords, for the Act of Settlement.32 In letters to Tenison written in French, she labelled herself with statesmanlike nicety ‘votre tres affectionée amie’. Whatever Cresset’s misgivings, Sophia understood clearly that Protestant orthodoxy was paramount among her claims on England. It was a conviction she was assiduous in broadcasting, and one she did her best to impress upon her family. Evidence like Giuseppe Pignata’s dedication to George Louis, in June 1704, of his anti-Catholic Adventures with the Inquisition suggests she succeeded.33

The lapse of almost a year between Caroline’s rejection of Charles’s suit and her marriage to George Augustus was attributable to several causes, including George Louis’s reluctance to antagonise the emperor. Equally important was the death, on 1 February 1705, of Figuelotte.

Figuelotte was thirty-seven. She died of pneumonia on the journey from Berlin to Hanover, and her sudden loss inspired near-universal regret. For five days and nights a grief-stricken George Louis immured himself in his rooms, refusing to eat, kicking the walls in his misery, talking to and seeing no one; ‘by hitting his Toes against the Wainscot … he had worn out his Shoes till his Toes came out two Inches at the Foot’.34 Rumour – lurid but unsubstantiated – suggested an alternative cause of Figuelotte’s death: that she had ‘been poisoned, before she left Berlin, with Diamond Powder, for when [her body] was opened her Stomach was so worn, that you could thrust your Fingers through at any Place’.35

Frederick devoted five months to planning funeral obsequies of surpassing magnificence, as Figuelotte had known he would. More touchingly, he renamed Lützenburg ‘Charlottenburg’ in her memory. To Leibniz, writing from Ansbach, Caroline confided devastation on a scale with George Louis’s: ‘The terrible blow has plunged me into a grievous affliction, and nothing can console me save the hope of following her soon.’ Her recovery from the strain of recent ordeals suffered a setback, and she was once again ill. Her letter betrays the extent to which Figuelotte had come to occupy a mother’s place in her emotions. ‘Heaven, jealous of our happiness, is come to carry away our adorable queen.’36 If the rhetoric is conventional, the sentiments were sharply felt. In her illness, Caroline did not attend Figuelotte’s funeral. Nor, in the short term, did she see or communicate with Sophia. But in her response to von Eltz’s proposal on George Augustus’s behalf in June, the baron reported to George Louis, she ‘admit[ted] that she would infinitely prefer an alliance with your Electoral House to any other; and she considered it particular good fortune to be able to form fresh and congenial ties to compensate for the loss she had suffered by the death of the high-souled Queen of Prussia’.37

To the prospective father-in-law whom she had never met these were honeyed words. Equally accommodating was her willingness to fall in with George Louis’s requirement that Frederick remain in the dark, a circumstance that reveals something of Caroline’s own anxiety that the match come off. Not for the last time in their lives, Caroline’s measured diplomacy contrasted with the impulsiveness of her husband-to-be. George Augustus wrote to her on the eve of her departure for Hanover, ‘I desire nothing so much as to throw myself at my Princess’s feet and promise her eternal devotion,’ and there is puppyishness even in the copybook posturing. ‘You alone, Madam, can make me happy; but I shall not be entirely convinced of my happiness until I have the satisfaction of testifying to the excess of my fondness and love for you.’38 Undoubtedly Caroline reached her own estimate of this ‘fondness and love’ that was based on a single meeting. But with memories of her mother’s treatment at the hands of the elector John George still painful, she could only be reassured by such effusive auguries. Like Eleonore’s second marriage, Caroline’s marriage to George Augustus represented a step up the ladder; her response to von Eltz’s proposal indicates her assessment of the prize at stake. At twenty-two, ambitious and clear-sighted but with a genuine attachment to the electoral family based on her affection for Figuelotte and Sophia, she was still young enough to hope for love too.

Like Hollar’s etching of Ansbach, the view of Hanover by an unknown draftsman published by printmaker Christoph Riegel in 1689 depicts a Gothic town compact within its walls and dominated by church spires.39 At intervals along the city boundaries, fortified towers bristle above undulations of the Leine river. The only building identified in the key that is not a church is the Fürstlich haus, the home of Hanover’s ruling family called the Leineschloss. From its extensive but otherwise unremarkable façade long views unroll across the water. Behind it, hugger-mugger along busy streets cluster the tall houses of townsfolk, their steep roofs red-tiled and gabled, modest in their dimensions since Hanover’s nobles lived elsewhere, in castles and country manor houses. From Versailles Liselotte remembered the market square as overrun with street urchins and, at Christmas, its box trees decorated with candles.40

A windmill in the foreground denotes the proximity of farmland: British diplomat George Tilson described it as ‘flat Country … very full of fir and Corn; mostly rye’.41 It is grazed by sheep for the lucrative wool trade or set aside for hops. Out of sight, nearby forests are plentifully stocked with game. Within tranquil surrounds lies this small, unassuming town of no more than ten thousand inhabitants, ‘neither large nor handsome’ in the estimate of the well-travelled Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and lacking magnificence, rich only in ‘miserable’ taverns.42 The main gates were closed every night.

Despite its middling size, smaller and so much less impressive than the Dresden and Berlin of her childhood, the town that greeted Caroline at the end of her ten-day journey from Ansbach, undertaken in the company of her brother, offered intimations of a grandeur absent from many provincial capitals. Sophia’s late husband Ernest Augustus, the eldest of four brothers, had ultimately succeeded to the bulk of the brothers’ joint inheritance, united under his rule as the Duchy of Hanover. Ambition had prompted his campaign for electoral status, which was granted in 1692, six years before his death. Like his Brandenburg son-in-law Frederick, he had exploited cultural initiatives to support his political aspirations, to the benefit of his old-world capital. In addition to the masquerades, gondola festivals, illuminations and Venetian-style annual carnival that raised the court of Hanover above many of its neighbours for style and splendour, these included a theatre in which French comic actors performed nightly, and an opera house within the Leineschloss hung with cloth of gold and crimson velvet and capable of seating 1,300 spectators. Lady Mary rated the latter as ‘much finer than that of Vienna’.43 Its completion at breakneck speed within a single year stemmed from competitiveness with the neighbouring court of Wolfenbüttel, which had embarked on a similar endeavour at the same time.44 Ernest Augustus sealed his victory with an inaugural performance of Steffani’s opera Enrico Leone, a celebration of the dynasty’s superhero, Henry the Lion. Three years later the Leineschloss opera house staged ‘the finest operas and comedys that were ever seen … [including] the opera of Orlando Furioso’.45 Ernest Augustus also oversaw the embellishment of a palace begun by his father in 1665: Herrenhausen.

For Caroline, as for Sophia before her, Herrenhausen would become the glory of Hanover. Two miles outside the city walls, it occupied three sides of a large courtyard, a sprawling two-storey expanse designed in its first phase by Venetian architect Lorenzo Bedoghi and completed by his countryman Hieronymo Sartorio ten years later. Where Lützenburg aimed to delight and to showcase the refinements of its savant princess, the purpose of Herrenhausen was magnificence. Its stables accommodated six hundred horses. An outdoor theatre, overseen for Ernest Augustus by Steffani, suggested an Italian opera house. Here in 1702 George Louis and Figuelotte took part in a dramatic performance based on Petronius’s account of Trimalchio’s banquet in the Satyricon, written for the occasion by Leibniz. As at the Leineschloss the palace exterior was unassuming. Within, Gobelins tapestries, damask-lined walls and coffered ceilings painted and gilded conjured the heavyweight majesty of divinely ordained princely rule.

Beyond lay the gardens. South of the palace was the Great Garden, bordered by poker-straight avenues of trees, and on three sides by an artificial canal on which gondolas floated under the watchful eye of a Venetian gondolier, Pierre Madonetto. Largely Sophia’s creation, it was laid out from 1683 in conscious emulation of the baroque formal gardens she remembered from her childhood in the Dutch Republic. In 120 acres, melons grew under Murano glass cloches, a mulberry plantation fed silkworms, pomegranate and fig trees, date palms, apricot and peach trees defied a changeable climate, and hothouses warmed by tiled stoves nurtured the orange, lemon and pineapple trees which so astonished Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visiting in the chill of December in 1717.

At the garden’s heart lay the Great Parterre, created by court gardener Henry Perronet to designs by Sartorio. It featured swirling arabesques of low box hedging, gravel paths and classically inspired statues by Dutch sculptor Pieter van Empthusen carved from white Deister sandstone from nearby Barsinghausen. Imported from Paris were twenty-three busts of Roman emperors. There was a grotto and a cascade, a maze, hedges and screens of hornbeam and, in time, an allée of more than 1,300 lime trees. A wooden temple, filled with doves, occupied the centre of a labyrinth. Additional designs devised by Sophia’s gardener Martin Charbonnier, a Huguenot exile, extended the parterre’s doily-like geometry. Like Siméon Godeau, whom Figuelotte had employed at Lützenburg, Charbonnier was a pupil of the great Le Nôtre. However powerful Sophia’s attachment to the gardens of The Hague, the influence of Versailles was all-pervasive. Fountains animated circular pools – Leibniz had advised on the necessary hydraulic mechanisms. Afterwards George Louis consulted English architect and politician William Benson to create ever more spectacular jets and falls, ‘great and noble’ waterworks of the sort commended during his visit of 1701 by John Toland. The result was a fountain thirty-six metres high whose installation cost George Louis the enormous sum of £40,000.

In her widowhood Sophia occupied one wing of the palace. Daily she made a lengthy circuit of the gardens she described as her life, ‘perfectly tiring all those of her Court who attend[ed] in that exercise’, a promenade of two or three hours which one English visitor considered the sole ‘gaiety and diversion of the court’.46 Herrenhausen was not, as her niece Liselotte assumed, Sophia’s dower house. In 1699 she had made over to George Louis the income willed to her by Ernest Augustus for its upkeep, and the palace continued to serve as the court’s summer residence from May to October.47 In the year of Caroline’s marriage, George Louis embarked on an extensive refurbishment. Under Sophia’s influence furniture, tapestries and objets d’art were commissioned from the Dutch Republic. For the large building in the garden called the Galerie, a little-known Venetian painter, Tommaso Giusti, created a fresco cycle depicting the story of Aeneas, that epic tale of filial piety and the foundation of an empire.48

In Dresden and Berlin, Caroline had learned to recognise visual culture as a conduit for princely agendas. The Saxon Kunstkammer, with its collection of dynastic portraits, and the marvels of the Green Vault, had first stirred in her an aesthetic awakening continued by Frederick and Figuelotte. Sophia’s collection of paintings in Hanover rivalled her daughter’s. Her cabinet of curiosities was rich in jewels and gemstones, and her garden was the foremost in Germany. Compared with that of his father, George Louis’s court lacked panache, peopled by ‘such leather-headed things that the stupidity of them is not to be conceived’.49 The court opera was closed, and celebrations, including that of Caroline’s marriage, missed the flourish prized by Ernest Augustus and Frederick. Court routine was dully repetitive: ‘We have not much variety of Diversions, what we did yesterday & to day we shall do tomorrow’; the daily ‘drawing room’, or formal reception, did not daily delight.50 Even Sophia’s gatherings of learned and distinguished men, albeit they included after 1710 the composer George Frederick Handel, employed as George Louis’s Kapellmeister or master of court music, wanted the sparkle of Figuelotte’s effervescent sodality. After the dowdiness of Berwart’s shadow-filled palace in Ansbach, Herrenhausen and the Leineschloss were splendid enough.

Caroline’s married life began in Hanover itself. At the Leineschloss Sophia formally welcomed her, on 2 September 1705, ‘with all the expressions of kindness and respect that could be desired’.51 Her wedding took place the same evening, in the palace chapel, in a service notable for its simplicity. Caroline wore a dress of coloured silks. There was a ball and a French play, the former accompanied by modest quantities of alcohol, Caroline’s introduction to the abstemiousness that was a feature of Hanoverian court life.52 George Augustus slept through the wedding sermon, provoking predictably ribald comment. ‘What good news for the bride that he should be well rested,’ Liselotte wrote, the sort of quip that, a century later, earned her the epithet of the ‘most improper Letter-writer in Europe’.53 From England Queen Anne wrote too, letters of congratulation to Sophia and her family. Days later Sophia still remembered the faces of the congregation as ‘wreathed in smiles when we looked at the young couple’.54 George Louis was almost certainly the exception. Acrimony and impatience dominated his feelings towards his only son, and would colour aspects of his relationship with Caroline. He acknowledged her good looks but as yet made no further approaches to intimacy.

It is also possible that Caroline’s smiles lacked conviction. Both she and George Augustus had anticipated from the elector a more generous wedding present. She ‘really could not help taking notice’, wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘that the presents made to her on her wedding were not worthy of [George Augustus’s] bride, and at least she ought to have had all his mother’s jewels’.55 With a degree of subtlety, Caroline’s complaint was not on her own account. She protested at the suggestion of any slight to George Augustus.

A living ghost shared with Caroline and George Augustus the quarters allocated to them in Hanover’s town palace. She was the prince’s mother, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, and though very much alive, dead to the court and the electoral family, by whom her name was never mentioned. Not for the first time in our chronicle, her story is one of conflicted emotions, double standards and novelettish melodrama that nevertheless impacts on events to come.

Sophia Dorothea was George Louis’s first cousin. Her father was Ernest Augustus’s younger brother, George William, Duke of Celle. Her mother, Eléonore d’Olbreuse, was a Huguenot noblewoman of striking good looks, whose commoner blood earned from Liselotte the pithy dismissal of ‘mouse droppings in the pepper’.56 Neither love nor romance played its part in forging the cousins’ disastrous union. At the time of their marriage in November 1682, Sophia Dorothea was sixteen; spoilt, self-willed, preoccupied with dress and luxuries, but notably pretty in the curvaceous, pale-skinned manner of the times, and, if an early portrait by Jacob Ferdinand Voet can be trusted, lacking in confidence and anxious to please.57 George Louis was twenty-two. By the terms of their marriage contract, kept secret from Sophia Dorothea, he received straight away her entire dowry; at her parents’ death, their revenues and property became his too. It was an arrangement guaranteed to deny George Louis’s bride the possibility of financial independence.

Opportunities for acquaintance had recurred throughout the cousins’ childhoods; decided antipathy predated their marriage. Although G.K. Chesterton exaggerated in describing George Louis in 1917 as ‘the barbarian from beyond the Rhine’, his preoccupations were strenuously masculine.58 Off the battlefield he enjoyed hunting. ‘Low of stature, of features coarse, of aspect dull and placid’, he inherited few of his mother’s rarefied interests, only walking and music, and no aptitude at all for the role of romantic swain.59 Like many German princelings, including his lecherous father, he began as a busy fornicator, though his momentum would slow with increasing responsibility. He was otherwise undemonstrative and emotionally costive. He was sixteen when Figuelotte’s under-governess fell pregnant with his first child: Sophia castigated him as a ‘progenitor of bastards’.60 His first full-time mistress shortly afterwards was Maria Katharine von Meysenburg, the sister of his father’s redoubtable mistress Countess von Platen. With no eye to psychological complexities, this curious arrangement had been brokered by Ernest Augustus himself.61 His mother insisted that George Louis would ‘marry a cripple if he could serve the house’, but in the event this was not required of him.62 Instead, despite rumours that Sophia’s English family wished him to marry Princess Anne of York, the future Queen Anne, and, in 1680, an inconclusive trip to London apparently to that end, his father chose for George Louis his pretty young cousin in neighbouring Celle.

It was an arranged royal marriage like others before and since, and compatibility between the partners was an afterthought. Ernest Augustus’s plan was twofold: to bring together the disparate territorial possessions of his family, and to ensure their long-term security by introducing primogeniture in the next generation. George Louis’s marriage enabled Ernest Augustus to knit together Calenburg, Celle and Hanover. In time both George Louis and his eldest son would inherit outright the contiguous raggle-taggle of all three duchies, as well as the fourth segment in the patrimonial jigsaw, the prince-bishopric of Osnabrück.

It was unfortunate that George Louis’s response to the prospect of marrying Sophia Dorothea combined delight in her good looks with ‘repugnance’ at aspects of her character, and that her own reaction was something akin: of such was the stuff of political necessity.63 The glister of Sophia Dorothea’s inheritance outweighed her temperamental and emotional unsuitability to play the parts of George Louis’s wife and Hanover’s electress, outweighed even the £40,000 dowry of Princess Anne, with additional annual promises of £10,000. A portrait of the mid-1680s by Henri Gascar depicts the married Sophia Dorothea with flowers in her curly hair. Her dress of richly woven fabric slips alluringly from her shoulder. A garland of flowers in her hand represents fertility and the promise of springtime, but nothing in this seductively decorative image suggests gravity.

As the marriage approached, Sophia wrote tactfully to the bride’s father that she had never imagined George Louis capable of so violent a passion.64 Three of his four younger brothers were similarly smitten, with Frederick Augustus serenading his sister-in-law as ‘bellissime’, ‘most beautiful’. For her part Sophia Dorothea hurled a diamond-set miniature of George Louis against the wall. But the couple’s first child and only son, George Augustus, was born a year after their wedding. At the outset, irrespective of bridal aversion, youthful sexual excitement contributed its precarious bond.

Even taking into account George Louis’s repeated absences during the first years of his marriage, on campaign with the imperial army fighting the Turks, the interval between Sophia Dorothea’s two pregnancies – in 1683 and 1688 – tells its own tale of marital harmony unravelling. In 1689, the year after she gave birth to a daughter named after her, Sophia Dorothea met the man who three years later became her lover, Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck. Their relationship tracked a familiar course: acquaintances, correspondents, bedfellows. The pretty electress’s infatuation was stoked by boredom, a comprehensive rejection of every aspect of her married life from Hanoverian court etiquette to behaviour on George Louis’s part that encompassed neglect, overt hostility and even acts of frightening physical violence, described in some accounts as close to attempted strangling. Above all she was jealous.

Infidelity was a prerogative of princes. Sophia tolerated Countess von Platen, Figuelotte mostly overlooked Madame von Wartenburg; Ernest Augustus indicated to his daughter-in-law that she must make similar concessions. In 1690, George Louis had acquired the mistress to whom he would remain faithful for life, tall, thin, plain Melusine von der Schulenburg, whom his mother disparaged as a ‘malkin’, a picturesque noun applied equally to scarecrows and slatterns.65 Within three years Madame Schulenburg had two daughters, referred to as her nieces, and, like the elector John George IV in his affair with Billa von Neitschütz, George Louis all but lived with her. Sophia Dorothea’s retaliation had a tit-for-tat quality, but husband and wife inhabited a world in which men and women were not judged as equals, and women’s faithlessness, with its danger of pregnancy and illegitimacy, threatened the integrity of royal succession. ‘Does the young duchess not know that a woman’s honour consists of having commerce with no one but her husband, and that for a man it is not shameful to have mistresses but shameful indeed to be a cuckold?’ Liselotte asked rhetorically.66

A predictably tight-lipped nineteenth-century verdict casts Königsmarck as a ‘handsome, wicked, worthless reprobate’; his sister judged him ‘an equal mixture of Mars and Adonis’.67 To Sophia Dorothea, the raffish Swedish mercenary provided an exhilarating contrast to George Louis, with his brusque neglect, eruptions of physical violence and, when it suited him, perfunctory love-making. In suggestive French, in letters written in code in invisible ink, Königsmarck wooed his princess. He called her his ‘divine beauty’, he signed his name in blood. He courted her lady-in-waiting, Eleonore von dem Knesebeck, who acted as go-between for the lovers, concealing Sophia Dorothea’s replies to his letters in hats and gloves and stitching his own letters into curtain linings safely out of sight. He also cultivated the good opinions of Sophia and Ernest Augustus. In 1692 Stepney reported Königsmarck directing ‘splendid ballets … all in maskeradings’ in the Leineschloss opera house.68

‘Maskeradings’ on the electoral stage were an apt metaphor. Princess and count progressed from artless dalliance to desperate longing, fuelled in part by their shared talent for self-dramatisation. In their letters and dizzy assignations they slipped between the worlds of fairy tale and melodrama, their emotions heroic in intensity, in daring, in urgency. Königsmarck labelled himself ‘a poor butterfly burnt by the flame’; he confided to Sophia Dorothea a terrifying but prophetic dream in which his actions were punished by execution; he was exaggeratedly jealous of George Louis’s continuing conjugal rights and begged God to kill him if Sophia Dorothea failed him.69 Neither lover accepted responsibility for behaviour they knew to be perilous. But Sophia Dorothea’s posturing included a measure of genuine unhappiness.

That she crossed the Rubicon from flirtation to infatuation was plainly ill-advised. That she disdained discretion or concealment was still more injudicious. Sophia and Figuelotte were among those who counselled against the dangers of transgression. Determined to divorce George Louis and marry Königsmarck, she ignored their warnings. Unaware of the impossibility of her financial position, she fixated on the idea of elopement. ‘Let us love one another all our lives and find comfort in one another for all the unhappiness brought on us,’ she pleaded.70

Four years after their first exchange of letters, desperate measures brought to an end the romance of Sophia Dorothea and her dashing Swede. On the eve of his departure for Dresden to take up a position as major general in the Saxon army, Königsmarck was murdered en route to his mistress’s apartments in the Leineschloss. Orders for his killing probably originated with Ernest Augustus or, on his behalf, Countess von Platen. A particularly gruesome version of events has a vengeful and incensed countess grinding his face beneath her high-heeled shoe. George Louis was absent on a visit to Figuelotte in Berlin.71 The deed itself, on 1 July 1694, was the work of a quartet of Hanoverian loyalists, including von Eltz and an architect called Nicolò Montalbano, who shortly received from Ernest Augustus an enormous one-off payment of 150,000 thalers.72 Königsmarck was stabbed over and again. His body was concealed in a weighted sack and thrown into the Leine river, where it settled into muddy wastes alongside general debris and the drowned carcasses of cattle. Sophia Dorothea knew nothing of this squalid butchery. With mounting apprehension, she continued to await her lover.

In her ignorance she was not alone. The best the ever-vigilant George Stepney could manage was to describe the circumstances of Königsmarck’s disappearance as ‘doubtfull’ and, with a degree of accuracy, point to the probability of ‘daggers and poyson’ in Hanover.73 But the nature of the count’s infraction was widely understood: ‘I believe his amours made that court too hot for him,’ Stepney wrote during one of Königsmarck’s regular absences the month before Montalbano’s blow.74

Sophia Dorothea retreated to Celle and her parents; she refused to return to George Louis. Anxious about the effect of such a scandal on Hanover’s standing in the Empire, Ernest Augustus took refuge in cod legalities. In a punitive divorce settlement finalised in December, Sophia Dorothea alone was accounted culpable. Cresset reported that ‘the sentence was pronounc’d upon malicious desertion’.75 The Englishman considered the elector guilty of sharp practice: ‘Hannover has made a pretty good hande of this match. She brought ’em in land of purchas’d estate 50,000 crowns, besides jewels which they are now takeing from her and she is pack’d off with about £800 a year in bad rents.’76

Sophia Dorothea was banished to the castle of Ahlden, a timbered and moated manor house in Celle, more than thirty miles from the town of Hanover. She spent the remainder of her life as a prisoner there, writing ‘most patheticall letters’ to her mother, who visited sporadically, but denied any contact with her children or the possibility of marrying again.77 To preserve an illusion that the newly styled ‘Duchess of Ahlden’ had retired voluntarily after forsaking her marriage, she was provided with an annual income of eight thousand thalers and a roster of servants appropriate to her rank as former electress: ladies-in-waiting, two pages and gentlemen-in-waiting, two valets, a butler, three cooks, a confectioner, a head groom, a coachman, fourteen footmen, twelve maids and a garrison of forty infantry- and cavalrymen to ensure her confinement.78 A handful of visitors were closely supervised.

George Louis embraced tranquil domesticity with Madame Schulenburg and a princely establishment that, in one contemporary estimate, eventually ran to more than 1,100 servants and retainers.79 The ravages of smallpox, which left Melusine pockmarked and virtually bald, in no way diminished George Louis’s affection. She wore a red wig and a thick varnish of make-up, and gave birth to the couple’s third and last daughter, Margarete Gertrud, known as ‘Trudchen’, in 1701. In stark contrast to his relationship with George Augustus and the younger Sophia Dorothea, the elector was devoted to all three of his mistress’s ‘nieces’. For her part, Sophia Dorothea had imagined she would continue to see her children following her divorce, and wrote to Sophia as intermediary, begging that she be allowed to embrace them once more. Her surviving correspondence does not otherwise lament their loss: her daughter is mentioned in a single letter, George Augustus not at all.80 At intervals she implored her father-in-law to reconsider the terms of her confinement: other courts, her mother reported to her, condemned their harshness and injustice. All in vain. Sophia Dorothea remained at Ahlden for thirty-two years, ‘lead[ing] a very solitary life, but all the same … splendidly dressed’, in one of Liselotte’s less sympathetic observations.81

Shorter in duration was the confinement in the state prison of Scharzfelz Castle of Eleonore von dem Knesebeck, who was tortured for her part in the lovers’ perfidy. She narrowly escaped a charge of attempting to poison George Louis with nitric acid after explaining her possession of the chemical as a beauty aid. In 1701, William III’s patience with Duchess Eléonore finally snapped. For seven years she had lobbied him on her daughter’s behalf, and with no wish to antagonise George Louis or risk the loss of Hanoverian support in his campaigns against the French, he forbade her to broach the subject any longer.82

Over the Leineschloss and Herrenhausen settled an immoveable silence. Sophia Dorothea was never mentioned again, her name excised from state prayers. Her portraits were banished to storerooms, including Jacques Vaillant’s confusing image of her with her children, of 1690, in which a heavily jewelled electress embraces George Augustus while her dress parts to disclose tantalisingly full pink-white breasts. At a stroke both her children were motherless. George Louis and Sophia restricted the time either spent alone with Duchess Eléonore.

In chancelleries across Europe Sophia Dorothea’s story electrified idle prattlers. As late as 1732, it inspired the rapidly suppressed shilling-shocker Histoire Secrette [sic] de la Duchesse D’Hanover. Gossip came close to the mark nevertheless. Stepney based his final explanation for Königsmarck’s vanishing on rumours that dogged Ernest Augustus’s court: ‘a great lady … (with whom he is suspected to have been familiar) may have been cause of his misfortune’.83 And steps were taken to put the curious off the scent, beginning with Königsmarck’s sister Aurora, mistress of Augustus the Strong of Saxony. ‘His sister raves like Cassandra and will know what is become of her brother,’ Stepney wrote, ‘but at Hanover they answer like Cain that they are not her brother’s keeper.’84 Only Duke Anton Ulrich, habitually at odds with his Hanoverian neighbours, successfully uncovered the full facts of the murder, laid bare in his correspondence with a Danish diplomat called Otto Mencken.85 To Octavia, a Roman Story, he added a sixth volume. In his tale of ‘Princess Solane’, Sophia Dorothea is a romantic innocent fatally outmanoeuvred by George Louis and Countess von Platen.

‘Her natural feelings for the pains and distresses of others are not to be described,’ wrote Dr Alured Clarke, the author of An Essay Towards the Character of Her late Majesty Queen Caroline, in 1738. ‘They were so strong that she became a fellow sufferer with them, and made their cases … much her own.’86

If there is any truth in this posthumous panegyric, it seems likely that the story of George Augustus’s mother, known to Caroline before her marriage, provoked her fellow feeling – and not only with Sophia Dorothea but with George Augustus. Sources have not survived that document either short- or long-term effects on George Augustus of his mother’s fall from grace, only a series of assumptions made by successive historians. How much the eleven-year-old prince understood in 1694 is not clear. Nor is the nature of his response in the decade ahead. The abruptness of his severance from his mother was surely traumatic, as was his exposure to the bitter recriminations against Sophia Dorothea which consumed the electoral court. Rich in pathos, a story of George Augustus attempting to catch a glimpse of his vanished mother by stealing away from a hunting party, only to be caught four miles from Ahlden, is almost certainly a sentimental invention. His grandmother Sophia became the dominant female presence in his childhood, a role to which, by nature and inclination, she was ideally suited. George Louis’s attitude, by contrast, suggested at best detachment.

A response to Sophia Dorothea’s history was required of Caroline from the beginning of her marriage, in her several roles of wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law and granddaughter-in-law. The younger Sophia Dorothea categorised her mother’s error as one of imprudence, and, following her own marriage and departure from Hanover, wrote to her regularly. Such leniency would have been impolitic on Caroline’s part. Nevertheless, unspecified ‘courtesies’ apparently paid by Caroline and George Augustus to the widowed Duchess Eléonore, living modestly outside Celle at Wienhausen, indicate a joint response to the dilemma by husband and wife.87 Sophia, by contrast, regarded her former daughter-in-law with hostility, while on the subject of recent family history George Louis maintained a discouraging silence.

In the autumn of 1705, Caroline cannot have shared for long Toland’s view of Hanover’s court as ‘even in Germany accounted the best both for Civility and Decorum’.88 With Sophia Dorothea’s disgrace and, in 1698, Ernest Augustus’s death had vanished much of ‘the old gay good humour’.89 Animus between George Louis and his grown-up son was deeply ingrained. A tradition of hostility between ruler and heir had been a feature of Hanover’s ruling family as far back as the Middle Ages, but its absence from George Louis’s relationship with Ernest Augustus invited questions concerning its re-emergence in the current generation.90 It was unavoidable that Caroline should look for explanations in the collapse of George Louis’s marriage, as well as in the undoubted physical resemblance of George Augustus and his mother, both slight in build, impulsive, quick to blush. Caroline’s loyalty to George Augustus in his disputes with his father indicates that, in Clarke’s words, the case she made her own was not Sophia Dorothea’s or George Louis’s, but that of her husband. In 1705 this attitude proved important in consolidating their affection: an awareness of the ties that bound them would characterise their marriage. Caroline too felt the shadow of Sophia Dorothea’s transgression. George Augustus’s compulsion for orderliness, his need to control and obsessive focus on small details – afterwards thorns in Caroline’s side – traced their roots to the vacuum created by his parents’ divorce, and his resulting uncertainty and disorientation.

Caroline recognised in addition warnings for herself in her predecessor’s downfall. By 1705 her exposure to the vagaries of royal marriage was broad. Too young to remember her mother’s happy marriage to John Frederick, she was unlikely to forget the unhappiness of Eleonore’s second marriage. She had witnessed Figuelotte’s unconventional management of Frederick and the latter’s admiration. And the case of Sophia Dorothea implied aspects of the electoral family’s views of the role of wives. Having spent her entire life in courts, Caroline understood the necessity, in such an environment, to temper her behaviour to the prevailing clime – as Stepney had once intimated in Eleonore’s case, if necessary to the point of dissembling. She was aware that ‘in courts … the affections of the heart are as much conceal’d as its substance’, and that there ‘even trifles, elegantly expressed, well looked, and accompanied with graceful action … ever please beyond all the homespun, unadorned sense in the world’.91 Her success in Berlin, her conquest of the Archduke Charles at Weissenfels, her resistance to Father Orban and the Elector Palatine, and her seamless, discreet management of her engagement to George Augustus testify to something remarkable in Caroline’s character. From the outset her fidelity to George Augustus was more than sexual or emotional. She kept faith with something in herself too.

In April 1708, once more bound for war against the French, the Duke of Marlborough, commander in chief of Queen Anne’s forces, described his reception at the court of Hanover.92 Present at the audience granted him were Sophia – who considered Marlborough ‘as skilled as a courtier as he is a brave general’, ‘his manners … as obliging and polished as his actions are glorious and admirable’ – George Louis and George Augustus.93

As electoral princess, the Hanoverian equivalent of Princess of Wales, Caroline played a visual role in court ceremonial: her primary function was dynastic, a provider of heirs and progeny. That she was not present at Marlborough’s audience indicates the perimeters of her sphere of activity. For Caroline, the decade before Queen Anne’s death and the family’s move to London was overwhelmingly domestic in character. George Louis vigorously excluded George Augustus from politics. By continuing to oversee court entertainments, Sophia as effectively barred Caroline from key aspects of a consort’s role.94 With the exception of Sophia herself and Caroline’s favourite of Sophia’s ladies-in-waiting, intelligent, beautiful Johanna Sophia, Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, afterwards Countess of Bückeburg, whose husband, like George Louis, preferred the company of his mistress, Caroline mostly lacked rewarding female friendship. She had little in common with rapacious and dreary Melusine von der Schulenburg; she knew enough of courts to maintain friendly relations with her father-in-law’s favourite and her ‘nieces’. Although Leibniz had been urged in 1705 to ‘cultivate her good qualities assiduously, for there you have a spirit naturally beautiful, and an intellect completely disposed to reason’, the philosopher’s frequent absences from Hanover meant Caroline also lacked intellectual stimulus.95 The period was not without its strains.

Her husband and her sister-in-law were her closest contemporaries. Neither had benefited from the irregularities of their childhood. George Augustus was splenetic, irritable and prickly in his self-esteem. In his grandmother’s eyes he lacked good sense.96 His aunt Liselotte attributed his bad temper to Duchess Eléonore’s inferior bloodlines; he was niggardly, boastful and, at moments of strain, intemperate.97 Toland excused his restlessness as ‘great vivacity’ of a sort that did not ‘let him be ignorant of anything’.98 An indifferent portrait by Kneller, painted in 1716, captures something of his Cock Robin self-regard.99 George Louis preferred his daughter. Superficial but spirited, Sophia Dorothea the younger shared her mother’s want of serious-mindedness. ‘All the pride and haughtiness of the House of Hanover are concentrated in her person,’ her own daughter wrote in the early 1740s, when Sophia Dorothea was in her fifties. She insisted her mother was ‘benevolent, generous and kind’, but also claimed ‘her ambition is unbounded; she is excessively jealous, of a suspicious and vindictive temper, and never forgives those by whom she fancies she has been offended’.100

If even part of this assessment was true in 1705, Caroline can hardly have found proximity easy. She was closer in temperament to the dowager electress, whose interests resembled Figuelotte’s, but the two women initially saw little of one another. George Augustus’s early attentiveness to Caroline was marked. ‘The peace of my life depends upon … the conviction of your continued affection for me,’ he would write to her. ‘I shall endeavour to attract it by all imaginable passion and love, and I shall never omit any way of showing you that no one could be more wholly yours.’101 He did not conceal his preference for her company above that of the court, and he and Caroline spent as much time as possible together. As late as May 1712, an English agent reported, ‘the Court is all gone to Herrenhausen for the whole summer, only the Prince electoral and his wife the princess remain here’.102 Such uxoriousness – influenced in part by the aimlessness of George Augustus’s life, which George Louis ensured lacked official responsibility – inspired mixed reactions, including in Caroline herself. Liselotte dismissed her nephew’s cosy behaviour as inappropriately unprincely, another malign legacy of non-royal Duchess Eléonore.103 Within weeks of their marriage Sophia wrote to Baron von Schütz, ‘I have never seen a lovelier friendship than that between the Prince Electoral and his wife. It appears as if they were made for one another, which causes us great joy.’104 But, despite earnest protestations of devotion, the prince struggled to suppress argumentative instincts.

Whenever possible, Caroline sought out fleeting opportunities for time alone with Sophia at Herrenhausen. Their shared interests were wide-ranging and included philosophy, music and politics. During these first months of adjustment, disjointed encounters placed even this relationship under strain. Sophia’s letters to Liselotte make clear her frustration and disappointment: Caroline’s presence failed to staunch the older woman’s grief for Figuelotte, and the new electoral princess was cast firmly on her own resources. She oscillated between gratitude for George Augustus’s attachment and the need to cultivate, or indeed placate, others of her new family. Reading and singing offered her an outlet of sorts. Like Sophia she took lengthy walks in the palace gardens. In 1711, Handel wrote a set of twelve chamber duets for Caroline, described by his first biographer in 1760 as ‘a species of composition of which the Princess and court were particularly fond’.105 That Caroline hazarded the challenging soprano part is testament to the success of the singing lessons begun in her childhood at Ansbach by Antonio Pistocchi.106

A phantom pregnancy during the first year of her marriage, reported by Sophia as early as November, indicates Caroline’s anxiety to provide the necessary heir.107 At twenty-two she could anticipate more than a decade of childbearing; it was George Augustus’s determination to play his part in the long-running War of the Spanish Succession that contributed a note of urgency. Supported by his privy council, George Louis had consistently thwarted his son’s military aspirations. To date the latter’s nearest approach to the theatre of war was a journey to the Dutch palace of Het Loo, undertaken in the autumn of 1701 with his grandfather, the Duke of Celle, as part of William III’s efforts to create a coalition against Louis XIV. Following his marriage, George Augustus again requested permission to join the fight against the French. ‘The court is against it and will not give their consent to let him go into the field until he has children,’ noted a British envoy.108 Repeated prohibitions failed to depress his ardour. Instead his resentment of his father mounted, adding a further note of asperity to a fissured relationship, with inevitable implications for Caroline.

On 31 January 1707, despite gainsayers who attributed her increasing girth to distemper or even wind, and ‘the court having for some time past almost despaired of the Princess Electoral’s being brought to bed’, Caroline succeeded in her primary task.109 Early in the evening, with the windows shuttered against the cold and the doors barred to court flunkeys, she gave birth to a delicate-looking baby boy, Frederick Louis. Unusually – and ill-advisedly, given speculation that Caroline’s pregnancy was once again imaginary – only a midwife and the court surgeon, de la Rose, were present at the birth in the Leineschloss. Responsibility for this break with tradition lay with George Augustus, whose concern was for Caroline’s comfort. His actions irritated the British envoy Emmanuel Scrope Howe and, in the absence of the usual crowd of official witnesses, facilitated lurid rumours that the baby’s father was not George Augustus but one of George Louis’s Turkish valets. Portraits of the prince throughout his life refute such spiteful calumnies. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu afterwards noted in Frederick ‘the fine fair Hair of the Princesse’ and ‘an Air of Sprightliness’ reminiscent of George Augustus’s volatile fidgetiness.110 Introduced to her first great-grandchild at the perfunctory service of baptism held in Caroline’s bedroom two weeks later, Sophia commended both his liveliness and his laughing eyes; erroneously she described him as ‘strong and robust’.111 She stood as one of three godparents, all of them members of the baby’s immediate family.

At George Louis’s insistence, invitations to the baptism were not extended to foreign officials. In England, this second departure from tradition was interpreted as a slight to Queen Anne, whose throne the baby stood to inherit. It was left to George Augustus to untangle the knot of ill-feeling predictably wrought by the double omission. In a dispatch of 25 February, Howe noted with some scepticism divisions in the electoral family and George Augustus’s anxiety to exonerate himself from blame. A measure of his disgruntlement, the envoy tarred elector and electoral prince with the same broad brush: ‘I think the whole proceeding has been very extraordinary. Wherever the fault is, I won’t pretend to judge.’112

Howe’s prickly equivocation notwithstanding, Anne’s view of George Augustus was principally coloured by her ambivalence towards his father and, especially, his grandmother. To George Louis her attitude was remote, in the account of a French spy resentful, because, in 1680, he had ‘refused to marry [her] because of the humble birth of her mother’, Anne Hyde, like Duchess Eléonore a commoner.113 Her resistance to Sophia was shaped by her conviction that the older woman coveted her crown, and was not above meddling in British politics to stir up trouble to serve her own ends. In the short term, Anne set aside her ire and most of her misgivings.

To Howe, a smooth-talking Duke of Marlborough described news of Frederick’s birth as ‘received here [at Anne’s court] with great joy and satisfaction’.114 In its aftermath Anne conferred on George Augustus the titles Duke and Marquess of Cambridge, Earl of Milford Haven, Viscount Northallerton and Baron Tewkesbury, with precedence above all other British peers; she also invested him with the Order of the Garter. The gift of titles was partly made at the request of Sophia. Her response nevertheless was to dismiss her grandson’s elevation as ‘meaningless’, an attitude that neither George Augustus nor Caroline shared.115

George Louis reacted with predictable jealousy. He confirmed Anne’s disaffection by refusing to permit the appropriate ceremonial in the formal presentation of the patents of nobility. With hindsight George Augustus’s assurances to his royal benefactress, via Howe, of ‘the most perfect veneration and … the most zealous and respectful sentiments’ sound increasingly strangulated, the response of a man aware that his family’s attitude towards its future prospects lacked coordination.116

Anne’s emissaries in 1706 included, as secretary to the Lords Justices, the future Spectator essayist and playwright Joseph Addison. Addison’s admiration for Caroline, first encountered then, would prove long-lasting; it was reciprocated in full. In November 1714 he dedicated his tragedy Cato to her. He remembered her as a ‘bright Princess! who, with graceful Ease/And native Majesty, are form’d to please’.117 She in turn told Leibniz that Addison shared all the good qualities of his Cato, though his writing about gardening, especially his advocacy of a ‘natural’ or non-formal approach, ultimately influenced her more than his drama.118

Soon, however, George Augustus’s priority was not the querulous Anne but Caroline. Six months after she gave birth to Frederick, Caroline contracted smallpox. It was the disease that had killed her father as well as her greatly disliked stepfather John George of Saxony and his mistress Billa von Neitschütz. How she reacted is not recorded, and she was fortunate not only to survive but, after a lengthy period of illness culminating in pneumonia, to emerge at the end of August relatively unscathed. To the younger Sophia Dorothea, newly married to her cousin Frederick William in Berlin, Sophia confided that she found Caroline’s appearance greatly altered. She had previously described her as ‘much more beautiful than her portraits’, since paintings failed to convey accurately the luminescence of her skin.119 Others considered the damage to her complexion minimal, and Caroline’s good looks would remain a source of flattery: a decade later she was described as ‘of a fine complexion’.120 Despite the opposition of George Louis and Sophia, George Augustus had remained at her bedside throughout, a well-intentioned but predictably restless attendant. Like John George, his reward was to contract the disease himself, though his recovery from what was evidently mild exposure was quicker than Caroline’s and without setbacks. This proof of his devotion had a symbolic quality. The experience of potentially life-threatening illness served further to cement the couple’s affections, in their own minds as well as their attendants’, and Caroline’s future tolerance of her husband’s foibles would be coloured by gratitude for such evidence of courage and attentiveness.

The following year, with the succession assured, George Louis relaxed his prohibition against George Augustus joining the allied troops. With clear guidelines on suitably princely behaviour in the field, he allowed him to take part in a campaign by English, German and Dutch forces in the Low Countries. Beginning in May 1708, George Augustus was absent from Hanover for six months. His companions in arms included von Eltz, who had accompanied him incognito to Ansbach in 1705. It was the only significant period of time he and Caroline would spend apart until 1729, and they wrote to one another twice or three times every week.

First-hand experience of armed combat offered George Augustus responsibility and princely gloire: a commendation for bravery from the Duke of Marlborough after his horse was shot from under him during heavy fighting near Oudenaarde on 11 July. Not for the last time, his actions inspired indifferent verse, variously attributed to Jonathan Swift and William Congreve. In a sign of the electoral family’s rising profile in England, the poem in question was published in London: by John Morphew, at a printing press near Stationers’ Hall. George Augustus appears in Jack Frenchman’s Lamentation as ‘Young Hanover brave’: ‘When his warhorse was shot/He valued it not,/But fought it on foot like a fury.’ For obvious political reasons the poet ascribed the prince’s courage to his blood ties to Queen Anne. In a battle fought against the Catholic French, George Augustus’s bravery was a useful weapon to advocates of the Hanoverian succession. Afterwards he was described as having ‘distinguished himself early in opposition to the Tyranny which threatened Europe’.121 The next day, exhausted after twenty-four hours without sleep but eager to share his elation, George Augustus wrote an excited letter to Caroline.

Caroline would not be alone in detecting in him a newfound confidence. Short of his twenty-fifth birthday, he had sampled the military daring that remained central to a prince’s role in the Empire. It brought him lasting fulfilment, and the memory of Oudenaarde, including his own part as ‘Young Hanover brave’, was one he cultivated assiduously.

In conversations with Sophia, Caroline expressed her pride in George Augustus’s bravery; during their lengthy separation she was more often prey to fear and anxiety. But the events of Oudenaarde would serve wife as well as husband. As late as 1734, An Ode to be Performed at the Castle of Dublin, On the 1st of March, being the Birth-Day of Her Most Excellent and Sacred Majesty Queen Caroline celebrated Caroline’s role as loving wife to the conquering hero: ‘What Shouts of publick Joy salute her Ears!/See! see! the Reward of her Virtue appears./From Audenard’s Plain/Heap’d with Mountains of Slain,/The Dread of Gallic Insolence,/Grac’d with Spoils,/Reap’d by Toils/In Godlike Liberty’s Defence,/The Hanoverian Victor comes,/Black with Dust, and rough in Arms,/From the Noise of Fifes and Drums,/He comes, he comes, he comes/To gentler Love’s Alarms.’122

Caroline’s satisfaction in the fulfilment of her own public role, as mother of a new generation of the electoral house, was less straightforward. With the self-containment habitual to her, she kept her own counsel. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my soul, that her Royal Highness, whom I value above all persons liveing, continues in so good health, and, as I am inform’d, in as good humor & temper as ever,’ John Toland wrote to Leibniz on 6 October.123 Her good humour was an aspect of Caroline’s infectious zest for life: she had learned long ago the value of counterfeiting even-temperedness.

Three further children completed the nursery in Hanover. Daughters Anne, Amelia – whom Caroline called ‘Amely’ – and Caroline were born at two-yearly intervals from 1709. Although Caroline would later tell one of her ladies of the bedchamber that ‘she thought the principal Duty of a Woman was to take care of her Children’, and at least one contemporary account claimed ‘she took infinite pleasure in amusing herself with the sportings and innocence of young children’, she was not consistently cosily maternal with her children when young.124 Even a sympathetic observer like her future woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Clayton protested at Caroline’s preference for ‘settling points of controversial divinity’ over vigilance in the matter of her children’s development; she was attentive to discipline, and the royal schoolroom included lessons in Latin, German, French, Italian and the work of ancient historians.125

Caroline’s apparent failure to react either swiftly or effectively to the infant Frederick developing rickets suggests negligence, but should be read within the context of contemporary parenting habits and widespread medical ignorance, and balanced by George Augustus’s assurance to her, in a letter written two years later, of his instinctive love for their new baby Anne, a clear indication that she valued affection between parents and children.126 In the event, credit for Frederick’s recovery mostly belongs to Sophia, who, by directing that ‘Fritzchen’ spend time outdoors in the gardens at Herrenhausen, exposed him to the light and fresh air which effected a cure around the time of his third birthday. In her letters, Sophia intimated that her contribution extended to supervising Fritzchen’s wetnurse and feeding regimen: first smallpox then pneumonia had separated Caroline from her baby.127 A subsequent appraisal would absolve Caroline of the besetting flaw of royal and aristocratic parenting, that ‘Parents of rank … have so little regard to … the happiness of their children, as by leaving them in the hands of their servants, to suffer them to receive their earliest impressions from those, who are commonly taken from the dregs of their people.’128 In Caroline’s case it was an assessment of variable accuracy, and Frederick benefited from the doting ministrations of his still energetic great-grandmother.

Caroline had miscalculated Frederick’s delivery date. Two years later, she made the same mistake with her second pregnancy. Ernest Augustus, Sophia’s youngest son, complained that the combination of Caroline’s muddle-headedness and George Augustus’s secrecy in relation to his ‘petite famille’ had left him again unsure whether Caroline was in fact pregnant. Perhaps she had lately miscarried or was on the brink of miscarriage?129 All doubts were resolved on 2 November 1709.

George Augustus was absent from the birth of his first daughter. Mindful of the restlessness of his nursemaiding two years earlier, Caroline had encouraged him to join the remainder of the court at the recently renovated electoral hunting box at Göhrde in the Celle forests. In his absence, he committed to paper effusions of love. ‘I am only a little bit angry that it [the birth] has caused you pain,’ he wrote with clumsy fondness. ‘You should know me well enough, my very dear Caroline, to believe that everything that concerns you attaches me the more deeply to you, and I assure you, dear heart, that I love the baby without having seen it. I pray you, take care of yourself, that I may have the pleasure of finding you well, and that still greater joy may be conferred upon a heart deeply desirous of it.’130 Sophia’s letters from Göhrde, full of the coldness of the weather and the splendour of the palace’s remodelling, echoed a similar strain, proof of an improvement in the women’s relationship since 1705. ‘I am sure you do not doubt that my heart is completely yours,’ the older woman wrote, ‘and that I defy even your Prince to love you more than I will do all my life.’131 To Bothmer she described the speediness of Caroline’s second labour.132

With a view to the family’s future prospects, the baby was christened Anne. At George Augustus’s invitation, the queen agreed to stand as godmother to her infant namesake. Further missives from Hanover prompted a christening gift of Anne’s own portrait miniature set in diamonds. To Caroline she wrote, ‘I take keen pleasure in giving, as often as I am able, proofs of the perfect friendship I bear for your husband as well as the whole electoral family,’ and added, ‘I believe the diamonds are very good.’133 Neither Sophia nor George Louis accepted either of these statements at face value, and indeed the gift had only been forthcoming after a number of tactful reminders. Loftily, Sophia dismissed Anne’s trinket as ‘the sort one gives to ambassadors’. Like her son, she was predictably irked by the queen’s request that Duchess Eléonore stand proxy for her at the baby’s baptism.

Anne’s stipulation may well have been a piece of calculated mischief-making. Certainly it was a reminder to her Hanoverian heirs that, for the moment at least, the balance of power tilted in her favour. The prize represented by the British throne was a considerable one. It had lately been augmented by the passing of the Act of Union, which prevented Scotland’s Parliament from nominating its own successor to Anne, thereby guaranteeing her heirs the double inheritance. Correctly Anne estimated Sophia’s greed for her crown, revealed in the elaborate courtesies she extended to British visitors to Hanover and her ‘many questions about [British] families, customs, laws, and the like’, noted by Toland as early as 1701.134 Diplomats kept the queen informed of efforts made by members of Sophia’s family to prepare themselves for coming apotheosis: lessons in English; the acquaintance of British politicians, men of letters and military men like Marlborough assiduously cultivated; Leibniz’s faulty attempts to master the intricacies of parliamentary opinion, including the divisions between those ‘vile enormous factions’, the Whigs, who supported the Hanoverian succession, and the Tories, who included those opposed to it, as well as the nature and extent of support for Jacobitism; the reception of a delegation from the University of Cambridge in 1706 and, following his appointment in the autumn of 1713, new English books dispatched from London by the Hanoverian resident George von Schütz. George Augustus had begun to learn English in 1701, soon after the Act of Settlement; Sophia extolled his speedy progress the following spring.135 Bilingualism would form a cornerstone of Frederick’s education. At necessary intervals Sophia also protested her fondness for her British niece: ‘I believe that it would be for the good of England that the Queen should live for a hundred years,’ she wrote cumbrously to the Duke of Marlborough.136 Out of earshot she grumbled at the failure of Anne’s government to grant her a pension or civil list payments, or to invest her with the title Princess of Wales. ‘I quite agree, “Altesse Royale” [Royal Highness] has become very vulgar now, much more common than “Your Electoral Serene Highness”,’ Liselotte consoled her.137

In this process of preparation, Caroline acted independently. Sophia was thirty-five years older than Anne. For all she invoked a Dutch proverb about creaking wagons going far, her chances of surviving even so sickly an individual as Anne were slight. George Louis was a man of middle age, dogmatic, unenthusiastic about leaving Hanover. He shared Liselotte’s view that ‘what one is familiar with is always better than anything strange, and the fatherland always appears best to us Germans’, and perhaps also her sense of foreboding that, as king, he would ‘find more worry and trouble than pleasure in his regal condition, and … often say to himself, “If only I were still Elector, and in Hanover.”’138 As Caroline recognised, it was she and George Augustus who stood to profit most from imminent changes. Deliberately she set out to demonstrate a comprehensive embracing of all things British, establishing the pattern to which, in public, husband and wife adhered for the foreseeable future. In her own case this extended even to her name. While she signed her early correspondence with Leibniz, for example, ‘W. Caroline’, by 1710 she was simply ‘Caroline’, Wilhelmine abandoned, as it would remain. The English-sounding ‘Caroline’ allied her with earlier Stuarts. Caroline and Charles shared a common Latin root in ‘Carolus’: the coincidence of name was capable of suggesting continuity between dynasties. It seems likely that this double recommendation outweighed a similar link between Wilhelmine and William. Architect of the Hanoverian succession, champion of both Sophia and George Augustus, the Dutch-born William III lacked the native appeal of Charles II.

In her self-anglicisation Caroline was helped by increasing numbers of British travellers who made their way to Hanover. On 11 September 1710, Mademoiselle Schutz, niece of George Louis’s minister Baron Bernstorff, wrote to a friend in London that the electoral court contained quantities of English visitors.139 Others wrote to Caroline, like Edmund Gibson, chaplain to Archbishop Tenison, who in March 1714 sent her a copy of his Codex juris ecclesiastici Anglicani, on the government and discipline of the Church of England, accompanied by fulsome compliments.140

Caroline first tasted tea at her own request from English visitors to Herrenhausen. She employed a Miss Brandshagen to talk and read to her every day in English, unaware that the thickness of the latter’s German accent would leave her with a heavy Hanoverian burr for the remainder of her life. Her English was never perfect, although one commentator credited her with mastering the language ‘uncommonly well for one born outside England’, and in July 1712 Sophia claimed she had begun to speak the language very prettily, and was amusing herself reading everything she could lay hands on either in support of, or against, the Hanoverian succession.141 Alured Clarke’s claim that her ‘uncommon turn for conversation’ was ‘assisted by … her skill in several languages … [and] art of compounding words and phrases, that were more expressive of her ideas than any other’ suggests a distinctive patois of mixed origin, almost certainly including elements of English, French and German.142 At Herrenhausen she spoke English to the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, whose own written English survives as flawless, and in the summer of 1714 to the poet John Gay, whose relief at being spared speaking French as a result was tangible.143 Both women, Gay wrote, ‘subscrib’d to Pope’s Homer, and her Highness did me the honour to say, she did not doubt it would be well done, since I recommended it’.144 Caroline also requested from the poet a copy of his own recent verse, The Shepherd’s Week. Earlier, in another instance of her grasp of cultural developments, Caroline had asked a visiting diplomat to obtain for her in London the works of exiled French essayist Charles de Saint-Evremond, which had been published for the first time in 1705, following Saint-Evremond’s burial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Thanks in no small measure to Caroline, the spring after her marriage, Howe was able to report the enthusiasm of the electoral family for celebrating Queen Anne’s birthday. ‘The Electoral Prince and Princess … told me the night before that they would come and dance. Half an hour before the ball began, they brought me word that the Electress was also coming. The Electress gave the Queen’s health at supper, and stayed till two o’clock.’145

Anne’s response to such heavyweight flattery was muted. The value she attached to it can be judged from the silence with which she greeted news of the birth of Princess Amelia in 1711 and that of Princess Caroline in 1713. Her ‘perfect friendship’ proved, in appearances at least, decidedly variable. By contrast the Duke of Marlborough wrote to George Augustus following Amelia’s birth of ‘the joy that comes to mind from the increase of your illustrious house. It is a subject of rejoicing to all who have at heart the interests and satisfaction of Your Highness.’146 Meanwhile Caroline’s assiduous anglophilia looked beyond Anne’s lifespan. While her second daughter had been named for members of her German family Amelia Sophia Eleanor, her third daughter was christened Caroline Elizabeth. It was a clear indication of the direction of her parents’ thoughts.

In describing George Augustus as possessing ‘rather an unfeeling than a bad heart’, Lord Chesterfield expressed the opinion of his more generous contemporaries.147 The Jacobite Lord Strafford dismissed him as ‘passionate, proud and peevish’.148 The prince had inherited in some measure the ‘honest blockhead’ instincts of his father, ‘more properly dull than lazy’; he shared with his father and his wife the fixation, widespread at German courts, with ‘pedigrees that were of no more signification than Pantagruel’s in Rabelais’, familiar with the antecedents ‘of every reigning prince then in Europe’.149 George Augustus lacked the ‘penetrating eye’ Lord Egmont noted in Caroline, lacked too her penetrating mind.150 Yet husband and wife were affectionate and companionable. In different ways, each was devoted to their growing family. Unlike George Louis, both were straightforwardly ambitious about their British prospects. And Caroline’s good looks had mostly survived her brush with smallpox. At a court where the women were so heavily powdered that the custom of kissing on greeting had been abandoned, Caroline was naturally pale-skinned, with a pink-and-white glow captured in 1714 in a portrait miniature by Swiss artist Benjamin Arlaud.151 Her physical charms inspired in her highly sexed husband a giddy sort of libidinous infatuation, which would prove of long duration.

They were not, however, equals in temperament, intellect or outlook. George Augustus was described as ‘of a small understanding’, while Caroline possessed ‘a quickness of apprehension, seconded by a great judiciousness of observation’.152 Her love of reading, which extended to rereading favourite texts like Leibniz’s Theodicy, based on conversations between the philosopher and Figuelotte, stirred her husband to boorish spite. He dismissed her instincts as those of a schoolmistress, ‘often rebuked her for dabbling in all that lettered nonsense (as he termed it), called her a pedant’ – but on the evidence of her plan, in November 1715, to have Theodicy translated into English, failed to sway her mind.153 He was quick to pique, crimson-faced in his fury. His tantrums exploded and receded like August thunder, and accounts of him venting his anger by kicking his wig around the room like a football inevitably suggest Rumpelstiltskin. By contrast one gushing newspaper labelled Caroline of ‘majestic mien … extraordinary sense … greatness of soul’.154 Her self-control points to a nature more moderate or more calculating, either the ‘low cunning’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu disliked in her or the ‘softness of behaviour and … command of herself’ applauded elsewhere.155 As we will see, there are strong grounds for challenging Lady Mary’s view that Caroline’s ‘extravagant fondness’ for George Augustus was ‘counterfeited’; and if we accept her statement that ‘his pleasures … [Caroline] often told him were the rule of all her thoughts and actions’, the grounds for such behaviour are easy enough to identify in the sexual politics of the period, as the history of Sophia Dorothea amply demonstrates.156 George Augustus had the vanity of a royal first-born, a double entitlement of sex and status. Caroline was spouse, orphan, poor relation, as conscious of her disadvantages as of her strengths.

Leibniz wrote that he ‘admired the equability and honour, the kindness and moderation, which this princess maintains amidst such great prosperity’.157 There were gaps within the couple’s marriage. Caroline combined clear-sightedness about her husband’s limitations with emotional warmth commended by George Ridpath, editor of the Flying Post, as ‘exemplary’.158 George Augustus himself said that ‘her sweetness of temper … check[ed] and assuage[d] his own hastiness and resentment’.159 Her later behaviour would indicate her pride in his sexual thraldom. She did not forget that she owed her ‘great prosperity’ to him.

We should not be surprised that George Augustus took mistresses, nor that the woman he ultimately chose for this role was modest and self-effacing and, like Caroline, sufficiently sensible to shield him from exposure to his own shortcomings. He did not love her, and her sexual allure never eclipsed Caroline’s. Like heroics on the battlefield at Oudenaarde, George Augustus’s acquisition of a mistress was another facet of princely gloire, ‘a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince [more] than an addition to his pleasures as a man’ – important twice over in the case of this posturing, insecure prince-in-waiting, whose father denied him purpose or employment.160 Horace Walpole suggested he was motivated by the ‘egregious folly of fancying that inconstancy proved that he was not governed [by his wife]’ and that he, not Caroline, had the upper hand in their relationship.161 If so, as we shall see, he failed.

Henrietta Hobart was a woman of good family, good-looking without beauty and forced by the early deaths of her parents to hasten into marriage, which she did, aged seventeen, in March 1706. Unlike Caroline in a similar position, she badly miscalculated. ‘Wrong-headed, ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, extravagant, brutal’, Charles Howard was an impoverished good-for-nothing despite aristocratic connections. He swiftly reduced his teenage wife to penurious misery and, in his cups, a state of near-constant fear for her own safety.162

Like Caroline, however, Henrietta Howard was resourceful and courageous; she was serious-minded and intelligent, ‘a complete treatise on subjects moral, instructive and entertaining … [her] reasoning clear & strong’.163 Adversity had schooled her in compliance and made her cynical too. Seven years of humiliating marriage had reduced her to the cunning of an adventuress. In 1713 she conceived a plan to escape the disastrous financial straits to which her husband’s profligacy had reduced them. For a year in dreary London lodgings she scrimped and saved; she sold the last of their possessions, including even their bedding; she received from a maker of periwigs an offer of eighteen guineas for her ‘extremely fair, and remarkably fine’ hair; and with heroic self-sacrifice, she entrusted to the care of relations her adored seven-year-old son, Henry.164 Then husband and wife, bound together only by need and intense mutual dislike, crossed the North Sea from England to Hanover. Their intention was to salvage their fortunes by securing paid employment with Britain’s future rulers.

Henrietta’s target was the dowager electress Sophia, heiress to the throne. Her introduction, easily procurable for a well-born Englishwoman, was a success. Henrietta’s natural emollience, pleasing appearance and, most of all, her knowledge and reading, commended her rapidly. Her visit to Herrenhausen was repeated, then repeated again. She met Caroline. Henrietta’s professed admiration for Leibniz, possibly a careful deceit, impressed both princesses. Caroline offered her a position as dame du palais, or lady-in-waiting, beginning immediately; Sophia extended the promise of a greater prize, an appointment as bedchamber woman in the event of her accession to the British throne, with a salary of £300. More surprisingly, the unprepossessing Charles Howard – ‘a most unamiable man, sour, dull and sullen’ – secured a promise of equivalent employment from George Louis, as groom of the bedchamber.165