No royal guards attended prince and princess in their hasty flit. The doors of the palace were closed against them, the Chapel Royal too, their attendance at court forbidden and every special act of deference suspended. Still the choleric and implacable monarch protested at his inability under British law to halt their payments from the civil list. Even Caroline’s children, a baby of three weeks and three daughters ranging in age from four to eight, were prevented from accompanying her in this hour of disgrace. They remained abed within the palace. The king had ‘[taken] his grey goose quill/And dip’t it o’er in gall’, a balladeer wrote. His sentence was comprehensive:
Take hence yourself, and eke your spouse,
Your maidens and your men,
Your trunks, and all your trumpery,
Except your children.9
Where the royal couple took their unhappy caravanserai was the house of Henry d’Auverquerque, Earl of Grantham. Since February, this slow-witted loyalist, his character dominated by ‘gluttony and idleness, … a good stomach and a bad head, … stupidity and ennui’, had served as Caroline’s lord chamberlain, the highest-ranking officer of her household.10
Up St James’s Street the convoy jolted. Across Piccadilly to Grantham House in Dover Street it wound its way. Servants followed separately, in the glimmering illumination of the new round glass street lamps, lit only on moonless nights, that marvelling visitors to the city likened to ‘little Suns of the Night’.11 The Duke of Portland described the party on arrival as ‘in the utmost grief and disorder, the Prince cried for two hours, and the Princess swooned several times’.12 Caroline had given birth only weeks earlier, an event, in the words of one phlegmatic diarist, ‘which occasioned great joy for the present, but proved of short duration’.13 Following months of escalating tension, the baby’s christening was the battleground on which king and prince collided. By 2 December neither Caroline’s strength nor her nerves had recovered from birth or baptism. Besides the daughters she entrusted to governesses on that darkest evening, she left behind her in the care of his wetnurse her baby son.
Caroline’s friend, the Countess of Bückeburg, recalled the anguish of their parting: ‘The poor Princess went into one faint after another when her weeping little Princesses said goodbye.’14 Caroline had told the king that she valued her children ‘not as a grain of sand compared to [her husband]’, but there was more of bravado than truth in the statement.15 None of the family would recover from the fissure wrought that winter night. Before the spring was out, the baby Caroline left behind her ‘kick’d up his heels and died’.16 He was killed by ‘convulsions’, water on the brain, a cyst on his tiny heart; each internal organ was swollen, distended, angrily inflamed. The miracle was that he had survived so long.17 That this looked bad for the king was cold comfort for a grief-stricken Caroline. ‘That which, in our more liberal age, would be considered as bare invective and scurrility, was the popular language of those times,’ wrote Lord Hailes, looking back in 1788.18 In this instance scurrility rose up in Caroline’s defence. Doggerel commended her suffering; it condemned the king’s heartlessness: ‘Let Baby cry/Or Lit [sic] it die/Own Mother’s Milk deny’d,/He no more car’d/How poor thing far’d.’19
‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ sang beautiful Mary Bellenden, and rain and darkness engulfed her song. The king she meant to upbraid was not listening, and the royal gaggle’s short journey, undertaken pell-mell on foot in view of a hastily convened sympathetic crowd, soon carried them out of earshot. In Lord Grantham’s house, smaller than their apartments in St James’s Palace, prince and princess were forced to share a bedroom. Such intimacy, and confines of space, prevented any ceremonial in their rising or retiring to bed, the complex rigmarole of bedchamber staff, of basins and ewers proffered on bended knee, shifts, chemises, gloves, fans and shoes presented or withdrawn by attendants greedy for the privilege: the ritualised posturing of baroque monarchy. Instead ‘Higgledy-piggledy they lay/And all went rantam scantam.’20
To his father, the prince dispatched the tersest of notes. ‘I have just obeyed your Majesty’s orders, having left St James’s. The Princess goes along with me, and our Servants shall follow with all imaginable Expedition.’21 No response was requested or forthcoming.
‘I am so sorry for our dear Princess of Wales that I shed tears for her yesterday,’ her closest correspondent wrote.22 As a measure of his distress, George Augustus succumbed to a feverish ‘inflammatory distemper, with bumps in his face somewhat like a rash’. Doctors treated Caroline for fainting fits and violent throat pains.23 For all its brevity, her journey from familiar certainties, beginning with a walk in the dark, was a big one. Her life encompasses its share of new beginnings and abrupt severances.
PART ONE
Germany
I
Princess of Ansbach
‘Bred up in the softness of a Court’
In Wenceslaus Hollar, the old palace of Ansbach – towered, turreted and architecturally uninspiring – found its ideal chronographer. An etcher from Bohemia, born in 1607 and destined, surely unfairly, to die in poverty, Hollar worked in black and white for a fixed rate of fourpence an hour, creating topographical views as intricately wrought as Flemish lace.
First printed in the 1630s, Hollar’s view of the south German town of Ansbach has a congested spikiness. He delighted in inky shadows, details sharp as pinpricks, the awkward geometry of serried roofs. The tiny figures he scattered across his panorama – riding in a coach, chasing a stag across an empty field – are fragile as house spiders and likewise insignificant. Like spiders they thread the crooked streets. Their meagre limbs are gossamer alongside the solider outlines of steeples and town walls and the criss-cross fronts of timber-framed merchants’ houses. Hidden from view are Ansbach’s metalworkers and cloth-makers, whose workshops oozed woodsmoke and sweat. Out of earshot the ring of hammers and wooden tools, expletives, invective, laughter.
Instead, it is the old Renaissance palace that draws the eye in Hollar’s etching. Built in the third quarter of the sixteenth century by an architect from Swabia called Blasius Berwart, it is a tall building of four storeys, and its walls form the sides of a square. Hollar depicts it as a cat’s cradle of uprights and mullioned windows. From its corners, narrow towers rise, topped by spires. Gables frame shuttered dormers. A pennant – or possibly a weathervane – flutters stiffly from the spire of the largest, central, hexagonal tower. Above the steep-pitched roof, a chimneystack supports a bird’s nest complete with resident stork. Hollar’s scale is all wrong, and the stork, brought to life, would have been enormous, like an airborne dodo. At the start of our chronicle the bird is appropriate, associated with new beginnings, harbinger of new life.
In one version of Hollar’s etching the building is labelled ‘Furstlich Residents’, ‘princely seat’, in letters as big as the palace windows.1 The same print offers the viewer a key: the princely seat is sight ‘A’. Hollar’s contemporaries would have agreed with him that any viewer’s primary interest must be the home of Ansbach’s first family – not the taller Gothic churches of St Gumbertus and St John to the east, nor the palace’s formal garden within crenelated walls to the west, each flowerbed a filigree square. Buildings close to the palace are nondescript by comparison: regular as boxes, like the plastic houses on a Monopoly board, much as they remain.
In Berwart’s palace, in a room quite different from that later mocked up for tourists as ‘Queen Caroline’s apartment’, complete with rococo boiseries and Chinese porcelain, Caroline of Ansbach was born on 1 March 1683. Otherwise, save in Hollar’s etching, the old palace of Ansbach has been forgotten. It was remodelled and extended at the turn of the eighteenth century, after Caroline had already left it.
Today’s Residenz Ansbach – now the administrative seat of the government of Middle Franconia – is an exercise in baroque symmetry begun in 1705: routinely grand. Last whiffs of absolutism confer a bland sort of glamour. Externally, pilasters divide ribbons of tall windows; from the
pediment statues gesture sturdily. Vanished is the dark, mysterious poetry invoked by Hollar, gone the mighty stork on its twiggy nest, long dead those spidery figures chasing a stag, jolting in their carriage, working iron or bronze in hidden forges. Nothing remains to recall the older palace at the heart of this cluster of timber-built houses and soaring churches and small-scale provincial aspirations set amid green meadows and distant wooded hills above the Rezat river.
Several of Berwart’s interiors survived the remodelling. There is little today save a handful of portraits that would be recognisable to the blonde-haired princess baptised into the Lutheran faith in the spring of 1683 as Wilhelmine Karoline. In the event, circumstances throughout her life would discourage her from looking back. First family tragedy, later political expediency, forced her to fix her gaze on the present and the future. Her contemporaries discounted her early years. British printmakers even confused her baptismal names: Edward Cooper called her ‘Wilhelmina Charlotta’, Thomas Bowles ‘Wilhelmina Charlotte’.2 It seems likely that she was known first as ‘Wilhelmine’. The switch to ‘Caroline’ coincided with the prospect of a life in Britain, following her marriage into the reigning house of Hanover. ‘Caroline’ was easier for the British to pronounce.
Begun in the year of Caroline’s marriage, Ansbach’s new palace is an exercise in regal conformity: a cumbrous assertion of majesty inspired, like so much German palace-building, by Louis XIV’s Versailles. Her own later life would share this concern with successfully projecting authority. Like the building she never knew, her future career encompassed baroque bombast and a focus on order, reason and measure more typical of the Enlightenment. All that lay ahead.
In March 1683, her birth was of no importance. No poets hymned her tiny limbs, no kerfuffle ruffled diplomats’ dispatches. Only love could justify John Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, beginning a second family after the death of his wife Joanna Elizabeth of Baden-Durlach. The three surviving children of his first marriage, Christian Albert, Dorothea Frederica and George Frederick – seven, six and four respectively – already filled his turreted palace with noise and the surety of another generation. By 1683, Ansbach required from its ruling prince no more sons or daughters. Caroline was a baby without purpose or promise. Save in a mother’s heart, few aspirations can have been nurtured for her. Yet there is no reason to doubt her parents’ happiness at her birth. Given the existence already of two male heirs to the Ansbach patrimony, even her sex cannot have disappointed.
John Frederick was a man of imagination and culture. He wrote fiction, in the manner of contemporary French authors, published under the pseudonym Isidorus Fidelis (‘Faithful Isidore’), and expanded and reorganised the court library; he loved music, especially opera. He employed the composer Johann Wolfgang Franck as director of court music at the outset of his career; he was a patron of composer and well-known castrato singer Antonio Pistocchi. Franck wrote two new operas during his six years in Ansbach, including a version of the story of Perseus and Andromeda: chivalry overcoming tyranny.3 Pistocchi meanwhile would first teach Caroline to sing.4 And John Frederick commissioned for his palace a double portrait of himself and his new wife. She was Eleonore Erdmuthe Louise, elder of the two daughters of John George I, Duke of Saxe-Eisenach. The home she left behind her lay 150 miles to the north, on the north-west edge of the Thuringian forest, an enclave every bit as insignificant as tiny Ansbach.
An uxorious image, John Frederick’s marriage portrait suggests a man happy with his spouse. The sturdy German margrave leans towards his charming consort, seven years his junior, and proudly clasps her hand. Like many another princess, she was acclaimed by poets as the loveliest alive; a shrewder observer noted her mildness of temper, compliance, good sense.5 Her double chin, plump forearms and breasts as deliciously rounded as the peaches in the basket she cradles, indicate her conformity to prevailing notions of beauty. Visual metaphors of fecundity are easily unravelled. Less so her auburn hair, possibly a wig, a tottering confection of marshmallow curls. Corkscrew ringlets foam about her pale shoulders. She wears a necklace of pearls and bulky, square-cut jewels glimmer on her bodice. John Frederick wears a brown wig of a style that had changed little since the middle of the century.
The couple’s pale eyebrows suggest that their colouring was naturally fair – as it appears in Samuel Blesendorff’s engraving of the painting, as well as mezzotints of an earlier portrait of John Frederick attributed to Willem Wissing, in breastplate and chivalric orders.6 A contemporary engraving of John Frederick by Mark Anton Gufer shows that Caroline inherited from her father her distinctively rounded face, with pointed chin and long, straight, pointed nose; her brother William Frederick resembled her closely.7 From her mother Caroline would inherit her quantities of pale blonde hair and, as time would show, considerable strength of character. Her father bequeathed her in addition bibliophilia, a relish for poetry and music, his manipulation of cultural patronage as a medium for communicating power. Although she lacked Eleonore’s uncontested beauty, Caroline would share her ‘expressive countenance’.8 Inviting curves and a splendid embonpoint – a plenitude of milk-white fleshiness and snowy bosom – were also gifts of Eleonore’s. A possibly apocryphal story has a youthful Caroline being followed through Ansbach’s narrow streets by a crowd of gawping admirers. Like Eleonore, she would inspire devotion in her future spouse. Like both her parents, she would make an essentially arranged marriage successful and rewarding.
At the outset she was born to high-ranking obscurity, cut off from the common herd in Berwart’s palace with its garden concealed between high walls, her destiny at best marriage into a court like her father’s. Seventeenth-century Ansbach was part of the Holy Roman Empire. This confederation of around three hundred more-or-less autonomous territories extended across modern-day Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and beyond; its Habsburg overlord was chosen by a handful of the Empire’s leading princes, whose role in the process earned them the title ‘elector’ along with covetable sinecures.9 Situated between Nuremberg to the north-east and Munich further south, Ansbach lies in present-day Bavaria; its outlook focused on its German neighbours. Since the fifteenth century its governing family had been kinsmen of the Hohenzollerns, rulers of the much larger north German territory of Brandenburg, in one eighteenth-century estimate ‘one of the most ancient and illustrious families in Europe’.10 As their title suggests, the margraves of Brandenburg-Ansbach had connections. They had money too, from silver mines in the Harz Mountains, close to the Brandenburg border. John Frederick matched imagination with initiative, promoting traditional local manufactures, including weaving and metal-smithing. But his power was finite, confined like his sphere of influence to an area smaller than an English county, and his family history was middling. Caroline would be the first of Ansbach’s princesses to marry a crown.
If Caroline remembered anything of her early childhood, a period entrusted to the care of nurses and waiting women, her memories of her mother would have been of Eleonore’s near-continuous pregnancies. In January 1685 she gave birth to a son, christened Frederick Augustus, who died three weeks later. Within a year, a second son, William Frederick, was born. Then darkness fell. Two months after William Frederick’s birth, John Frederick died of smallpox. He was thirty-one years old. His remains were interred in the margraves’ vault in nearby St Gumbertus church. Caroline grew up with no memories of the father who died when she was three years old.
Eleonore became a widow at the age of twenty-three; she had been married four years. Six months later her father died in a hunting accident. For the grieving mother of two the darkness of Hollar’s townscape became a reality. John Frederick was succeeded by the elder surviving son of his first marriage, ten-year-old Christian Albert, who felt little warmth for the stepmother who could almost have been his sister, or for the stepsister whom he regarded as a baby. His minority left no role for Eleonore. Instead Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg acted as guardian to Ansbach’s underage margra
ve. He also provided a temporary home in Berlin for Caroline and William Frederick, in company with his gangly daughter Louise Dorothea and, from 1688, an ungovernable son, Frederick William. Alone, Eleonore retreated the short distance to a dower house in Crailsheim, south-west of Ansbach, a small medieval town of no distinction. Forced upon her by the terms of her marriage settlement and Christian Albert’s indifference, her withdrawal was a species of defeat. The uncertainty that was to be the keynote of Caroline’s peripatetic childhood began early.
At Crailsheim, Eleonore struggled for money. Unhappy and distracted, in the intervals when mother and daughter were reunited she neglected Caroline’s education. Penury made her fretful, threatened to overwhelm her. ‘She is a princess of great virtue and piety,’ noted the English diplomatist George Stepney, discussing Eleonore’s Lutheranism: her circumstances demanded the full resources of her faith. Stepney described her as ‘one who passes for a bigot in that persuasion’.11 Exigency is a hard taskmaster. Driven by anxiety, Eleonore was rumoured to have overcome her Lutheran bigotry to the extent of considering conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Maximilian II, elector of Bavaria, whose capital at Munich ‘excel[led] and out-dazzled[d] [all] for her elegant cleanliness’.12 Since the elector was married already, albeit to the fragile Habsburg archduchess Maria Antonia, who shortly died, this rumour – if it has any basis in truth – indicates the pitch of desperation Eleonore had reached. Understandably, her thoughts during the Crailsheim years were of escape by any means.
The First Iron Lady Page 2
