Vienna’s second choice fell on a princess renowned for her beauty, Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the granddaughter of the same Duke Anton Ulrich who, in cumbersome prose, fictionalised the heroism of Caroline’s sacrifice. Like Caroline the sixteen-year-old boasted a profusion of blonde hair, pale skin and what contemporaries regarded as perfectly formed arms and hands; she was ‘God-fearing and graceful to all’.131 Again the Archduke Charles was all admiration: theirs would be a genuinely loving marriage. Even in middle age, reduced by quack fertility remedies to an obese alcoholic scarcely able to shuffle unaided from chair to chair, her pale skin flushed an ugly red, her lovely arms pendulous with fat, Elisabeth-Christine would remain in Charles’s eyes his ‘weisse Liesl’ (‘white Lizzy’).
Her suit was vigorously promoted by Duke Anton Ulrich. Praise for Caroline’s resolution notwithstanding, the ambitious duke made no concessions to his granddaughter’s religious sensibilities. Like Caroline, Elisabeth-Christine had been brought up Lutheran. Like Caroline, she felt no inclination to convert to Catholicism. Ultimately she attributed her change of religion to family pressure: ‘I feel obliged to follow the divine direction and worthy opinion of my highly honoured grandfather graciously in all things.’132 Leibniz reassured her that salvation took no account of liturgical differences: neither Protestants nor Catholics could claim a monopoly, and in changing her faith she in no wise jeopardised her eternal prospects.
First her family set about her apostasy. Afterwards the empress, her future mother-in-law, played her part. Like Caroline in her early dealings with the Elector Palatine, Elisabeth-Christine appears to have done her best to satisfy expectations. She accompanied the empress on a pilgrimage to the statue of the Virgin Mary at Mariazell in 1706; a year later she was deemed ready for conversion. Her scruples had survived almost three years, and, as in Caroline’s case, the outcome during that period was at intervals sufficiently in doubt to form a subject of conjecture across the Continent. The marriage of archduke and princess was finally solemnised in 1708, a decade after first rumours of Caroline’s candidacy. In London, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Tenison received a letter informing him of Elisabeth-Christine’s conversion and subsequent marriage as late as July of that year.133 Three years later, following the death of Charles’s elder brother Joseph I, the Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, zealous in her new faith, found herself Holy Roman Empress. In the short term she was also ‘the most Beautifull Queen upon Earth’, with the added satisfaction, since 1710, of the late-in-life conversion of her ‘highly honoured grandfather’, Anton Ulrich.134
The former accolade might have belonged to Caroline. It was not an omission she regretted; indeed she would exploit it skilfully. Over time her refusal to exchange Protestantism for Catholicism – described after her death as ‘an early proof of her steady adherence to the Protestant cause’ – became a key aspect of Caroline’s identity and achievement.135 Four days after the coronation of her father-in-law as George I of Great Britain, on 24 October 1714, Joseph Acres reminded his parishioners in the church of St Mary in Whitechapel, ‘What a rare thing for a young Lady that has been bred up in the Softness of a Court, to decline the Pomp and Glory of the World.’136 Caroline’s upbringing had contained little of ‘softness’, and ‘the pomp and glory’ she rejected in 1704 was not the imperial crown that the Archduke Charles, as a younger son, did not then expect to inherit. Undoubtedly her decision contained its measure of religious unease. Her reservations were perhaps no more acute than those first experienced by Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. But while the latter succumbed to family pressure, Caroline, lacking parents or grandparents – and perhaps aware of likely overtures from a different quarter – resisted. As a later British encomium had it, she ‘chose rather to wait with a safe Conscience, in the Exercise of the true Protestant Faith, for any remote Rewards of her Merit and Vertue, than to accept the Imperial Dignity, when it must be connected with a false and idolatrous Worship’.137
‘He is very impertinent to suppose that I, who refus’d to be Empress for the Sake of the Protestant Religion, don’t understand it fully,’ Caroline later remarked when a well-meaning Bishop of London offered to ‘satisfy her in any Doubts or Scruples she might have in regard to our Religion, or to explain Anything to her which she did not comprehend’.138 Her lady-in-waiting described her on the occasion as ‘a little nettled’.
For the remainder of her life Caroline took pride in her renunciation, her determination to ‘slight th’Imperial Diadem’.139 To Leibniz, as late as November 1715, she wrote, ‘You know that I am not at all a Jesuit,’ a reminder of her hard-fought sacrifice.140 The vehemence of her feelings indicates the trouble it had cost her – and a certain shrewdness in her estimate of the value of her resistance that transcended Duke Anton Ulrich’s elaborate fictions.
II
Electoral Princess
‘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 disgui
se, 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.
The First Iron Lady Page 6
