Through precocity, boredom or curiosity, Caroline took matters into her own hands and set about teaching herself to write.13 For the rest of her life, her sprawling, forward-tilting handwriting with its bold loops and lopsided incontinence betrayed the struggle it had cost her. She wrote ‘like a cat’, her husband protested, and could never spell in any language: ‘Choresbury’ for Shrewsbury, ‘Hamthuncour’ for Hampton Court, ‘Lady Bomffrit’ for Lady Pomfret – even the name of her closest lady-in-waiting was variously rendered as ‘Clayton’, ‘Claiton’ and ‘Klethen’.14 Her punctuation was erratic or non-existent, an oversight in the cat-like torrents. From the inky tangle emerges a vigorous quality to her character as well as the sharpness of her intelligence. It would not be reasonable, a Church of England bishop would comment later, ‘to measure the extent of her Royal Highnesses abilities by the common standard’.15 If handwriting is a guide, Caroline was determined, quick-witted, vehement, expressive.
Happily for Caroline’s future choices, Eleonore did not change her religion. When it happened, the remarriage of the widowed margravine served only to jeopardise her family’s wellbeing.
In November 1691, five years after John Frederick’s death, Eleonore travelled to Berlin at the invitation of Frederick III. On the eve of her thirtieth birthday she retained her good looks – ‘[a] beautiful person, the admiration of all who saw her’;16 unmistakeably she bore the imprint of grief, money worries and separation from her children. ‘She is handsome, well shaped but too lean,’ Stepney recorded.17 Weight loss won few plaudits at the end of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Stepney’s admiration can be inferred from the poem written in French that, despite their differences of rank, he subsequently addressed to Eleonore, and his assiduity in undertaking errands on her behalf.18 Eleonore appears poised and strikingly attractive in a portrait of the early 1690s, sumptuously swathed in ermine and heavy silks, every inch the baroque consort. But the outline of her face is less rounded than in John Frederick’s marriage portrait; ditto the fullness of that lovely décolletage.
Frederick III’s purpose in summoning his widowed kinswoman was Eleonore’s remarriage. His motive was neither altruistic nor prompted by affection. Improved relations between the mutually mistrustful electorates of Brandenburg and Saxony had recently been sealed symbolically by the inauguration by their rulers of a shared chivalric order, the Order of Sincerity. Frederick intended to consolidate diplomatic amity with a marriage between Eleonore and his Saxon counterpart, Elector John George IV. Her friendship with Frederick and his wife Sophie Charlotte of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and distant relationship, through her father, to the Saxon electoral family, ideally positioned Eleonore for the role of bridal pawn. In practice it proved a marriage of emotional barrenness and unusual acrimony, and spectacularly failed to benefit any of its key players.
The man who became the nine-year-old Caroline’s stepfather, in a service conducted with unceremonious haste at Leipzig on 17 April 1692, following a formal exchange of treaties on 10 February, was ‘round shouldered, of a sullen look, which … does not belie his humour … [and] of a saturnine temper’. He spoke little, ‘offer[ed] no jest himself and [was] not pleased when others [did] it’; his killjoy obstinacy was marked.19 So, too, his variable health, though he was six years younger than the bride who, by April, had seen enough to disabuse her of every romantic illusion. George Stepney described him as incapacitated by the smallest debauchery, but unable to resist the heavy drinking endemic in German courts; his kidney problems were well known. ‘I look upon him as a man that will not be long-lived,’ Stepney noted. Had Eleonore but known of it, this last observation would have constituted her single slender thread of hope in the nightmarish years to come. In the meantime, in Leipzig, ahead of the couple’s formal entry into the city of Torgau, their marriage was ‘consummated with such an air of debauchery’ that courtiers muttered their misgivings. Having ‘bedded his bride in her own apartments’, the sated but loveless John George abandoned her rooms for his own, returning to complete his night’s rest alone at five o’clock in the morning.20
The emotions of Eleonore’s second husband could not have been more different from those of her first. John Frederick had delighted in his comely bride; John George’s affections were already engaged elsewhere and, in Stepney’s assessment, ‘his humour … quite contrary’.21 Stepney drew attention to the family’s poor record of marital fidelity, stretching back ‘two generations at least’.22 In John George’s case, he embarked on marriage under duress. Courtier and captious memoirist Baron von Pöllnitz described Eleonore in Saxony as ‘a Princess, whose excellent accomplishments gain’d a great veneration’.23 Not on the part of her new husband. John George’s intentions towards Eleonore extended no further than fulfilment of his conjugal duties. Stepney described her position unenviably as ‘not unlike Penelope or good queen Catherine [of Braganza] in the reign of Charles II’, a combination of abandonment and clutching after crumbs of affection.24
How much the elector was master of his limited faculties his contemporaries were willing to debate. There were those in Saxony – including members of his closest camarilla – who considered their master a victim of witchcraft.
The source of the rot was the mistress of John George’s father, Ursula von Neitschütz, the wife of a compliant army officer. Die Generalin, as the obliging colonel’s wife was known, possessed boundless rapacity and the valuable asset of a beautiful but unintelligent daughter, Magdalena Sibylla, called ‘Billa’. Deprived of princely handouts at her lover’s death in 1691, Ursula von Neitschütz conceived a plan to prolong the good times by promoting her daughter to the role she herself had previously occupied. The possibility that the late elector was Billa’s father, making her John George’s half-sister, did not apparently trouble her mother. ‘Stories of filters [philtres] and incantations’, shortly circulating in the Saxon court, suggested she had resorted to spells and magic potions to sway John George’s emotions.25 Given the latter’s lack of imagination, and other instances in German courts of a single family providing royal mistresses over several generations, the real explanation is possibly less sensational. Nevertheless, in October 1695 Die Generalin would find herself on trial for her life, accused of being a witch. That her jurors were drawn from the law faculty of the University of Leipzig indicates the seriousness of both charge and proceedings.26
Eleonore was fully apprised of her new husband’s entanglement before the marriage contracts were signed. Under pressure from Frederick III, realistic in her measure of the precariousness of her position, brought up to understand that royal women’s purpose lay in dynastic diplomacy and with an eye to her own and her children’s security, she hesitated to muster objections. For appearance’s sake, Billa had been temporarily removed from John George’s entourage. On 25 April 1692, when, as part of their formal entry to the electoral capital, John George and Eleonore travelled by gondola along the River Elbe, the night sky illuminated with fireworks marking out the letters of their linked monograms, Billa was included among guests at the elector’s table for the banquet that followed. Eleonore’s feelings are easily imagined. In Stepney’s eyes she was sufficiently sensible ‘to dissemble her grievance’.27 Characteristically, John George did not stoop to dissimulation. On Eleonore’s side, the marriage was an exercise in good behaviour from the outset. She paid a high price for financial stability and the outward lustre of the electress title. Her powerlessness – how well she knew it – was simply in the nature of things.
With Frederick III’s departure from Torgau on 29 April, and Caroline and William Frederick still in Berlin, Eleonore found herself, less than a fortnight into her marriage, as much alone as she had been at Crailsheim. At least the splendour of Dresden, called ‘the Florence on the Elbe’, and the magnificent royal palace – contemporary with the old palace in Ansbach – put paid to recent memories of poverty. Behind iron shutters beyond a single door in the elector’s apartments lay the Secret Repository, known as the Green V
ault, built in the previous century by the elector Maurice as a treasure chamber. Its glittering collections – priceless trinkets of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, amber and precious stones – dazzled even Peter the Great, visiting six years later. Artefacts prized for the technical virtuosity of their craftsmanship inspired admiration for the electors’ connoisseurship; rarefied materials suggested the wonder of the natural world.28 In the short term Eleonore could derive some satisfaction from the discovery that she was pregnant. While John George flaunted his infatuation for Billa von Neitschütz to the extent of lobbying the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, to grant her an imperial title, appearances were seemingly maintained by such obvious evidence of married relations.
Eleonore’s pleasure proved short-lived. In August she miscarried. A second miscarriage followed in February 1693. In late October she was described as ‘far gone with child’, and prayers for her safe delivery were said in churches across Saxony.29 Perhaps indicative of her state of mind, it proved a phantom pregnancy – as sympathetic bystanders were quick to discern, a victory for her enemies.30 Laconically, Stepney commented, ‘it seems a little wind could not find passage, and all the while we have mistook a fart for an heir to the Electorate’.31
In despair, Eleonore took to her sickbed. That she nevertheless granted audiences to visiting diplomats suggests her determination not to be sidelined.32 Unlike the wife of John George’s successor, she did not resort to the thermal springs in the Saxon town of Teplitz to encourage conception; probably her heart was no longer in it.33 Meanwhile, in a letter signed on 20 February 1693 by the imperial vice chancellor, Leopold von Königsegg und Rothenfels, the emperor had bestowed on Billa the title Countess of Rochlitz.34 Four months later, on 20 June, at the midpoint of Eleonore’s phantom pregnancy, the new countess had succeeded where Eleonore was to fail, and gave birth to John George’s child. The bastard girl was baptised Wilhelmina Maria Frederica.
Secretly, John George offered his mistress a written pledge: surviving documents include the marriage contract he presented to her.35 Publicly he extolled the pragmatism of bigamy. Stepney quoted claims that, among German princes, bigamy was more widespread than ever before, and that John George ‘va épouser formellement la comtesse de Rochlitz’ (will formally marry the Countess of Rochlitz). Already the Saxons were referring to the ‘young’ electress (Billa) ‘in opposition to the Old’ (Eleonore).36 Late in 1693, Stepney recorded ‘a report that apartments for the countess are being prepared at the court’.37 For Eleonore these were alarming developments: with good reason she mistrusted her husband’s intentions. Bigamy or divorce aside – and political considerations meant that John George dare not attempt the latter – Eleonore understood that her death alone could make good his promise to the countess. In an argument between husband and wife over John George’s gift to Billa of the valuable Pillnitz estate, only the presence of bystanders prevented the elector from stabbing Eleonore with the sword he drew on her.38
How much of her mother’s anxiety Caroline knew about or understood at this point is unclear. Aspects of adult life remain concealed from the most precocious and observant child. Even after Caroline and William Frederick’s return from Berlin, the requirements and formalities of court life separated Eleonore from her children for much of the time. It is possible that Caroline overheard gossip about John George’s behaviour, and probable that she noticed her stepfather’s frequent absences from the palace; she understood the extent of John George’s lack of interest in herself and her brother, and was surely aware of a febrile quality in the atmosphere at court, and her mother’s growing nervousness. At intervals Eleonore appears to have retreated to the safety of a house in Bayreuth with her lady-in-waiting, Madame du Mornay. When it suited him, and contrary to her intentions, John George followed her there.39
That she feared for her life, genuinely concerned that the Neitschütz faction intended to poison her, is not something Eleonore is likely to have shared with her nine-year-old daughter. To others she branded Die Generalin ‘a person guilty of black practices’.40 In explaining her decision finally to abandon the royal palace in favour of the estate, remote from Dresden, at Pretzsch on the banks of the Elbe, that had been settled on her at the time of her marriage, she doubtless happed upon a useful fiction. To the English authorities, Stepney explained that she intended to ‘spend the rest of her life [there] rather than be continually exposed to hard usage’.41 He had previously expressed concern that, in her own best interests, Eleonore should withdraw from court to the country.42 Even if he was unaware of the full extent of the threats to her, he clearly considered that, in Dresden, no good could come to Eleonore.
Once, smallpox had deprived Eleonore of a doting husband. Now the disease struck again. ‘Die Favoritin’, Billa von Neitschütz, succumbed first. ‘For fear her face should suffer’, her mother dispensed with doctors (such as they were) and concocted remedies of her own. The result was ‘agonyes speechless’. As death approached, ‘locked jaws prevent[ed] [Billa] from taking the sacrament’.43 A grief-stricken John George ordered deep mourning for the entire court.44 Weeks later, on 27 April 1694, smallpox claimed John George’s life too, the price this headstrong and intemperate prince paid for nursing his mistress himself.45 In the medieval church of St Sophia, the corpse of die Favoritin was placed on public view, her face alarmingly discoloured. An eyewitness account survives from 30 April, more than two weeks after Billa’s death.46 So, too, a scurrilous epitaph on John George’s foolish mistress and her scheming and ambitious mother.47
In 1692, George Stepney, then agent to the Brandenburg court, had correctly forecast a short life for the elector John George IV. His appointment the following year to the post of commissary and deputy to the court of Saxony offered Stepney ample opportunity for further observation. In the aftermath of John George’s death, he wrote an elegy to Eleonore, Pour la mort de SAE de Saxe à SAE Madame l’Electrice Eleonore. In it, he described the elector’s passion for Billa von Neitschütz as ‘unworthy’, their love ‘un indigne amour’.48 Finally free from the toxicity of mingled terror and humiliation, Eleonore’s only response was relief. In the witchcraft trial of Ursula von Neitschütz the following year she played no part.
Eleonore had endured the death of her first son. Sincerely she had mourned her first husband. With no option but to leave the palace in Ansbach, yet insufficiently provided for, she had spent almost six years lonely, unhappy and all but penniless in provincial retirement in Crailsheim. Velvet-gloved but iron-fisted cajolery on the part of her ‘friends’ had compelled her to marry again, this time a boor and a drunkard with a pronounced streak of mental cruelty. Either her second husband, or associates of her husband’s mistress, had threatened to poison her. John George himself had drawn his sword on her.
In Saxony, she was more fortunate than in Ansbach in her husband’s successor. John George’s heir, his brother Frederick Augustus, afterwards known as ‘Augustus the Strong’ on account of feats that included rolling up silver plates with his bare hands, ‘revel[led] and dance[d]’ at news of his death, then gave himself up to ‘frolicks and debauches’.49 In John George’s beautiful widow and her children he took a passing interest, as he would continue to do, and Eleonore’s life regained a semblance of normality. Among her surviving papers, for example, is the letter of recommendation – the equivalent of a reference – that she wrote in the summer of 1694 for a former page at Crailsheim.50 George Stepney reported in August that he had twice visited Eleonore since her widowhood, and that she permitted him to call on her frequently. On both occasions she had told him ‘old stories and some particulars of the disorders of the late reign which I should never have learn’d from anybody else’.51 The following summer, in company with Caroline, she revisited Dresden on her way to spas near Koblenz, and had supper with Stepney’s colleague Philip Plantamour.52 Her journey proved unhappy: ‘her wagons [were] plundered by snap-hawks [freebooters]’ and she was robbed of valuable plate and goods.53
Whatever t
he anticipated benefits of Eleonore’s Koblenz trip, the damage, it seemed, had been done. In the interval since John Frederick’s death, her health had deteriorated irreparably. On 9 September 1696, two years after her second husband, Eleonore died. She was thirty-four years old. Her daughter Caroline, just thirteen, found herself an orphan.
A letter changed Caroline’s life. It took the form of an invitation, and offered her a home – her fifth so far – and the security of guardianship. Its author was the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III – to date, as the tone of his letter implicitly acknowledged, an equivocal player in the life of Caroline’s family. With some warmth, Frederick wrote to her in the autumn of 1696, ‘I will never fail as your guardian, to espouse your interests, and to care for you as a loving father, and pray your Highness to have in me the same confidence as your mother always had, which I shall properly endeavour to deserve.’54 Events would prove his sincerity. Caroline had made her home in Berlin before, at Frederick’s glittering court, in the unsettled months preceding Eleonore’s disastrous remarriage. Now, insofar as the young Caroline could ever feel she dare anticipate stability, the shadow of unsettlement temporarily dispersed. Only her parting from her brother William Frederick increased her sorrow. He had returned to Ansbach as heir presumptive, following Christian Albert’s death in 1692 and the accession as margrave of the latter’s unmarried younger brother George Frederick.
The First Iron Lady Page 3
