Caroline’s reaction to these clandestine strategies included a measure of astonishment. Whether she chose to confide in Figuelotte or her brother William Frederick, who had recently succeeded his second stepbrother as margrave in Ansbach, is unclear. So is the extent, if any, to which Vienna’s imperial court had communicated its intentions to Frederick as Caroline’s guardian. That Caroline reached her own conclusion about events afoot appears inevitable. The Austrian emperor, Leopold I, had two sons, of whom the elder, Joseph, King of Hungary, was married already. On 24 February 1699 he had married Duchess Benedicta’s daughter, Amalia Wilhelmine.
In Weissenfels, as if to emphasise to Caroline the honour of an imperial visit, Fredericka Elisabeth’s spendthrift husband provided for the young Archduke Charles a ‘generous and magnificent reception’ costing ‘tons of gold’. In September 1703, in accordance with an agreement brokered in 1699 by Louis XIV and England’s William III as a contingency plan following the death of Spain’s feeble-minded and childless Carlos II, Charles had been proclaimed King of Spain.86 Although the War of the Spanish Succession would deny him his Spanish pretensions, his behaviour in the meantime indicated in full measure consciousness of his eminence. A later observer commended Charles’s ‘art of seeming well pleased with everything without so much as smiling once all the while’.87 Leibniz labelled him ‘an amiable prince’, but he can scarcely have been an easy guest.88 It says much for the charms of the twenty-year-old Caroline that Charles’s aide-de-camp was able to assure her by letter that, after five hours in her company, their ‘most happy and delightful meeting had filled [the Archduke] with the liveliest admiration’.89 On 1 October, anticipating Caroline’s return from her brother’s court at Ansbach, Figuelotte described recent improvements in her looks as likely to attract a suitor.90
In the language of the time, this sort of lively admiration amounted to a decided expression of interest, albeit not a formal proposal. By a circuitous route, Charles set off from Weissenfels to claim his crown in Spain. His aide-de-camp informed Caroline of his progress and the golden opinions he won along the way, including at Queen Anne’s court at Windsor and in Lisbon, where, in honour of a new alliance, the Portuguese king, Pedro II, outdid himself in the splendour of his ceremonial welcome; Anne commissioned his portrait from Godfrey Kneller.91 For six months, these long-distance tweets proved Caroline’s only update on the ‘extremely important matters concerning [her] greatest happiness’. The question was out of Charles’s hands. In Vienna, the thoughts of the imperial court centred less on Charles’s admiration and Caroline’s charms of mind and body than on the issue of the princess’s religion.
Once, it was rumoured, Eleonore had considered conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Maximilian II of Bavaria. Now, for an infinitely greater marriage prize, Caroline’s change of faith would become the sine qua non. Insistence on such a condition cannot have come as a surprise to any of the key players in this unromantic drama. Nor did any doubt Caroline’s acceptance of this inevitable and overriding preliminary.
She had inherited from Eleonore, Stepney’s ‘princess of great virtue and piety’, a sturdy Lutheranism remote from Habsburg Catholicism. By 1703, time had tempered her unhappy mother’s influence. In exchanging the dower house at Pretzsch for the palaces of Berlin and Lützenburg, Caroline found herself in an environment in which religious faith, alongside philosophy and metaphysics, formed one strand of a continuous dialogue about the nature and governance of the universe. Sophia of Hanover, one clergyman claimed, ‘multiplied’ questions, one leading to another: no single answer satisfied her, and she failed to convince herself of any conclusion.92 This habit of intellectual restlessness her daughter Figuelotte shared. While religion for Eleonore had been a narrow matter of faith, Sophia’s approach was discursive and, above all, pragmatic. She had delayed Figuelotte’s confirmation until after her sixteenth birthday, in order to widen her marriage prospects to embrace Catholic as well as Protestant suitors. As an adult, Figuelotte disclaimed any attachment to dogma. Debate at Lützenburg centred on what she described as her ‘curiosity about the origin of things’, her desire ‘to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness’:93 a continuous creedless disquisition about ethics, free choice, love and the soul, through which Figuelotte set out to emphasise reason over superstition and relished verbal or epistolary skirmishes for their own sake. But no one forgot that the setting for these skirmishes was the palace bestowed on Figuelotte by an indulgent husband. Hers were the freedoms of a married woman.
From Weissenfels, Caroline had returned to Berlin. She could not avoid informing Frederick as well as Figuelotte of what had taken place. From now on Vienna would communicate with Frederick directly, albeit intermittently. Ever alert to worldly advantage, Frederick described the meeting between Caroline and the archduke as ‘God’s providence’.94 Nevertheless, the wheels of Habsburg statecraft revolved slowly. To her brother, the Elector Palatine, the emperor’s wife entrusted supervision of the process by which Caroline’s eligibility for marriage could be accomplished. Without Caroline’s conversion there could be no formal proposal. Six months after her single meeting with Archduke Charles, the Elector Palatine requested that Caroline return to Weissenfels. His purpose was to apprise for himself this future imperial bride and compile a report for the empress.
To Caroline, a portionless princess, the imperial court offered no incentive bar the incontrovertible lure of a Habsburg prince. Distant were the glory days of the Empire, when Austria had defended Christian Europe against the Turkish infidel; but still an aureole of greatness clung to the imperial family. Austria’s sons represented the greatest prize in the marriage market of the German-speaking world. After she had endured a six-month virtual silence, Caroline’s reaction was moderate to the point of obstinacy. She resented the requirement to return to Weissenfels, and retraced her steps with an ill grace. Having done so, she lingered at her aunt’s court for almost two months, awaiting the absent elector, before ignoring Frederick’s protests and journeying back to Lützenburg late in August. Tardily the Elector Palatine recognised the mettle of the young woman with whom he was dealing. His departure from Vienna was days too late. Instead he sent after Caroline his Jesuit confessor, Father Ferdinand Orban, with the request that she ‘[be] completely persuaded that what he will lay before your noble incomparable self … is the pure, undefiled, genuine, holy truth’.95
Until now Caroline’s exposure to Catholicism had been scant. In 1685 the Great Elector had passed the Edict of Potsdam, offering protection in Brandenburg to French Protestants in the aftermath of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Since 1701, and the religious conversion of her improvident third son Maximilian, Sophia of Hanover had nurtured a vitriolic hatred of Jesuits, which she certainly communicated to Figuelotte. The Lutheran orphan Caroline found herself living with Calvinist guardians in a state that was tangibly and proudly Protestant. ‘I feel assured that your Highness … will … accord [Father Orban] a patient hearing and then your fullest approval,’ the Elector Palatine wrote to her.96 It was an optimistic statement and one that, despite its measure of coercion, acknowledged likely obstacles.97
As summer turned to autumn, Frederick found himself on the horns of a dilemma. From an alliance with the imperial family he anticipated considerable boon; as his protests in the early 1690s against the proposed creation of a Catholic tenth electorate for ‘a prince of the house of Austria’ indicate, his was a Protestant outlook.98 That he anticipated the probability of Caroline’s resistance to apostasy, even in the face of arguments of powerful material persuasion, points both to aspects of Caroline’s character and the strength of her religious convictions. Frederick did not resort to sophism. There is a cynical truthfulness in his appeal to her that includes, as she understood, a reminder of what she owed to him and his guardianship. ‘For your part you may be able to exercise a moderating influence,’ he told her, ‘not to mention the advantages therefrom that might accrue to our royal a
nd princely house. I do not very well see how your Highness can decline such an offer, since it is to be hoped that you will be so firmly established in your religion that no one need feel anxious about your soul.’99
For an instant, Caroline was persuaded. She yielded. To the Elector Palatine, who had sent her Father Orban, she wrote that she had perceived the errors of her Lutheranism.100 To the authorities in Vienna, the Austrian resident in Berlin reported that she ‘had already changed and was resolved to marry the King of Spain’.101 And Caroline agreed to a second proposed meeting with the Elector Palatine, this time in Düsseldorf.
The optimism of princess and imperial diplomat was ill-founded. Caroline’s meeting with the Elector Palatine never happened. Her confession of the errors of her faith masked considerable unease. Her discussions with Father Orban, attended by Leibniz, consisted of arguments ‘at length’ over an open Bible. Point-scoring oscillated between priest and princess, but the contest was unequal and the strain unsettled Caroline. ‘Of course, the Jesuit, who has studied more, argues her down, and then the Princess weeps,’ the electress Sophia explained to a niece.102 Afterwards Caroline told Leibniz, ‘I really think his persuasions contributed materially to the uncertainty I felt.’103 The result of their discourse was anything but the ‘fullest approval’ for which the Elector Palatine had hoped. Orban’s smooth coaxing made Caroline miserable, and reinforced all of her objections. Nevertheless, in the midst of her turmoil, mistaking the way the wind was blowing, on 25 October Leibniz claimed ‘everyone predicts the Spanish crown for her’.104
Those more finely attuned to Caroline’s state of mind saw that the matter remained unresolved. In the same week, during a visit to Figuelotte at Lützenburg, Sophia noted Caroline’s vacillation: ‘Our beautiful Princess of Ansbach has not yet resolved to change her religion.’105 A fortnight later, she added, ‘Sometimes the dear princess says “Yes,” and sometimes she says “No”; sometimes she believes we [Protestants] have no priests, sometimes that Catholics are idolatrous and accursed; sometimes she says our religion may be the better. What the result will be … I still do not know.’106 Unnecessarily, Sophia explained that, as long as Caroline remained firm, ‘the marriage will not take place’.107 On 1 November Figuelotte noted that Caroline was ‘still uncertain which course she will take’.108
In the circumstances, the doggedness of Caroline’s indecision is remarkable. Prior to her ‘adoption’ by Frederick and Figuelotte, her prospects had been limited, as she understood, and as the insignificance of her stepsister Dorothea Frederica’s match proved. In Brandenburg she had received an education and promotion beyond aspirations that she could have nurtured either at Pretzsch or, like Dorothea Frederica, fatherless in Ansbach. The result was an offer of marital jackpot, the hand of Prince Charming for this provincial Cinderella. ‘Neither shall I dwell upon her high birth and station any longer than to observe, that she seems to be the only person ignorant of that superiority. She has never been heard to give the most remote hint of it,’ a satirist wrote of Caroline, with vituperative irony, in 1737.109 Whatever the truth of Caroline’s self-importance at the end of her life, in the autumn of 1704 she could have been under no illusions that it was the archduke, not she, who conferred the favour in any proposed connection between them. Up to a point religious scruples and a wish to retain spiritual autonomy weighed as heavily as worldlier ambitions. Even if she was aware of contemporary views of Vienna as a region ‘where mirth and the muses are quite forgott [sic]’, she cannot have been anything but torn, this child of high-ranking penury alert to the frustrations of a princess’s life without position or means.110
She found herself surprisingly alone. She knew Frederick’s mind; less clear were Figuelotte’s thoughts, at first apparently concealed from her. In June, Figuelotte had explained to the Hanoverian diplomat Hans Caspar von Bothmer her belief that Caroline’s likelihood of marrying Charles depended on an improvement in Charles’s fortunes in Spain. In September she confided to him in secret her conviction that the marriage was imminent, and stoically she resolved to enjoy Caroline’s company while she could.111 She consoled herself that princess and archduke shared a love of music: ‘The Princess of Ansbach sings well. She acquits herself wonderfully [as a singer] and this will be very convenient, as the King of Spain is a skilled accompanist on the harpsichord.’112 Possibly the older woman cherished hopes of marrying Caroline to her own son Frederick William. If so, she kept her own counsel.
Sophia’s attitude was less ambiguous. She had already convinced herself of the suitability of her daughter’s ward for her grandson, George Augustus, and had discussed this conviction with Figuelotte.113 This being so, Caroline too may have been aware of the direction of Sophia’s thoughts. In this case, she possessed solid grounds for refusing Charles, since she could assume the likelihood of another proposal, namely George Augustus’s. Sophia, however, hardly dared to hope. ‘If I had my way, she would not be worried like this, and our court would be happy,’ she wrote on 27 October, ‘but it seems that it is not God’s will that I should be happy with her; we at Hanover shall hardly find anyone better.’114 Meanwhile, in Ansbach, William Frederick’s minister von Voit encouraged Caroline to accept Vienna’s offer. Powerful tugs in opposing directions did little to mitigate her difficult decision.
Her willingness to convert, communicated to the Elector Palatine in good faith, unravelled over the course of the autumn. Anticipating opposition, in November Caroline announced to her guardians her inability to change her faith. To her surprise, Frederick commended her right-thinking in avoiding becoming the first Catholic princess in his family; Figuelotte encouraged her resolve, which Leibniz was instructed to convey in writing to Vienna.115 For the Austrians, there could be no such comfortable reflections as Frederick’s. On 4 November, Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby, reported to Robert Harley in London the concerns of the imperial resident in Berlin about Caroline’s new determination to remain Protestant.116 A week later, Raby confirmed that Vienna’s anxiety had given way to anger.117
Harried, bruised, a victim of nervous exhaustion but at last convinced of the conclusion she had reached, at the end of November Caroline withdrew to her brother’s court at Ansbach to recover and temporarily escape observation.118 Letters from Father Orban, the Elector Palatine and leading Habsburg courtiers followed her; each one bolstered her certainty. By contrast, Leibniz informed her that an admiring Duke Anton Ulrich of neighbouring Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel intended to include her in a romantic novel. A member of the Fructiferous Order of German literary enthusiasts as well as a reigning princeling, the ageing duke wrote poetry, oratorios and melodramatic novels of extraordinary length. As good as his word, he included passages inspired by Caroline’s recent history in his doorstopper, Octavia, a Roman Story.
A year after their only meeting, Caroline stated her belief ‘that the king of Spain no longer troubles himself about me’.119 From Protestant Hanover, Sophia wrote to Leibniz, ‘Most people here applaud the Princess of Ansbach’s decision.’120 In a letter to Bothmer, her response was delighted, her language high-falutin. ‘I left Lützenburg last Monday,’ she wrote, ‘after witnessing a great fight in the spirit of the beautiful princess. God’s love finally got the upper hand and she has scorned worldly grandeur and a prince she valued highly, in order to do nothing against her conscience, which might cause her what she describes as eternal anxiety.’121 For reasons of her own, Sophia exaggerated. She may have been swayed by a letter in praise of Caroline’s principles which she received in November from her eldest son, the elector George Louis.122
Caroline’s own feelings, although she described herself in December as ‘perfectly recovered’, lacked euphoria.123 To Leibniz, she was studiedly emollient. ‘[I] am glad to think that I still retain your friendship and your remembrance,’ she wrote. Her references to Figuelotte and Sophia were appropriately respectful.124 In truth she need not have worried about either. As long ago as November 1703 Figuelotte had described her as one who ‘
understands with good reason her own quality’.125 Sophia too had taken the measure of that quality. She considered Caroline ‘a beautiful princess of great merit’.126
Caroline was not in love with Figuelotte’s son Frederick William. At seventeen that furious firebrand, whose upbringing she had partly shared, remained recognisably the young boy given to kicking and hair-tugging and bullying servants. In the estimation of his daughter Wilhelmina, Frederick William’s temper as an adult was ‘lively and hot’; he was ‘suspicious, jealous and frequently guilty of dissimulation’; ‘his governor had sedulously inspired him with contempt for the female sex’.127 In spirit, and despite Figuelotte’s doting, Frederick William was not the child of Lützenburg. Determinedly unlovable, he does not emerge from the sources as the grounds for Caroline declining the suit of Archduke Charles – either to gratify Figuelotte’s hopes, of which she was presumably aware, or, as British diplomatic correspondence in the spring of 1705 suggests, Frederick William’s own wish to marry Caroline and a similar hope on the part of her brother in Ansbach.128 Nor is there reliable evidence that Caroline had already directed her thoughts towards the man she subsequently married, Sophia’s grandson George Augustus, Hanoverian elector-in-waiting, or that Frederick offered her guidance in his role as guardian, despite his tendency to ‘[take] upon himself to such an extent to command her to do this, that and the other’.129 Instead Frederick occupied himself elsewhere. Denied one august connection by Caroline’s intractability, he set about planning another, a marriage between Frederick William and a sister of the King of Sweden. It was not to be, but in February 1705 diplomats reported that Frederick was sufficiently engaged with his plotting to be fully restored to good humour.130 It proved of short duration.
The First Iron Lady Page 5
