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
Caroline considered herself fortunate in the acquaintance of this charming, cultivated English gentlewoman, like the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe close to her in age, with apparently sympathetic interests. In her thoughts was no idea of pleasing George Augustus. She had not intended to welcome a cuckoo into her nest. Nor was the role of mistress one Henrietta had planned or coveted: her motives began and ended with financial stability. Given the nature of Caroline’s marriage, in which husband and wife were frequently together, and the relative intimacy of scale of their apartments in the Leineschloss, it was inevitable that Henrietta’s employment by Caroline should also bring her to George Augustus’s notice. In the first place, she proved one of several objects of his ambulant cupidity.
They did not become lovers in Hanover, nor, later, straight away in London. So gradual was Henrietta’s transition from lady-in-waiting to prince’s mistress that Caroline had time to accustom herself to her husband’s infidelity. By then he had taken other lovers; by then Caroline knew enough of Henrietta, and George Augustus’s attitude towards her, to assess with confidence the limits of her rival’s influence. But a telling detail suggests that such equanimity may not have been her first response, recognising in Hanover the way the wind was blowing. Sophia told her that the liaison would improve George Augustus’s English.166 This wry dismissal, offered by the older woman to the younger, was perhaps her means of setting aside Caroline’s resistance, and seems to point to initial objections on Caroline’s part. Sophia’s intervention reminded her of unchanging truths about princely marriage. Stoically Eleonore had endured Billa von Neitschütz, Sophia the Countess von Platen; George Louis, of course, had Madame Schulenburg. Even Frederick of Prussia, who had so little interest in Madame von Wartenburg that their relationship remained unconsummated, understood that the status of a prince demanded a mistress; Figuelotte’s revenge had consisted of addressing her exclusively in French, a language Madame von Wartenburg did not understand. Mistresses were simply accessories to a crown. For a princess of Caroline’s ambition, it was a debit to be weighed against credits. With George Augustus’s complicity, she would prevent Henrietta from becoming his confidante. Strenuously Caroline would deny her younger rival any exercise of influence. Sensibly she swallowed Liselotte’s advice: ‘Once jealousy has taken root there is no getting rid of it.’167
On 16 December 1713, prompted by rumours of Anne’s rapidly worsening health, Leibniz sent Caroline assurances of his ‘perpetual devotion’. More revealingly, he wrote, ‘I pray … that you may one day enjoy the title of Queen of England so well worn by Queen Elizabeth, which you so highly merit.’168
It was a striking connection to draw. England’s Elizabeth I was synonymous with strong female rule. Skilfully she had resisted encroachments on her power by male politicians; she had allowed herself to appear a Protestant champion; she had participated in a court culture in which the figure of the queen inspired poets, playwrights, painters; she was a figurehead for English victory over the Spanish; as the Virgin Queen she posed as a divinely endowed mother of her people. Bar the last her roles were adjuncts of sovereignty, pretensions that lay beyond Caroline’s remit as consort. As ever, Leibniz’s purpose was flattery. In spotlighting Elizabeth over more recent female rulers Mary II and Anne, his compliments ignored the wifely submission of Mary and Anne’s vexed struggles to dominate bitter political factionalism. They overlooked Marlborough’s victories against the French and the effectively publicised Protestant piety of both Stuart women, their grounds for usurping their Catholic father, James II. Instead Leibniz aligned Caroline within what was already a more mythologised tradition, regarded in eighteenth-century Britain as a golden age. Within his courtly sycophancy lay a statement of aspiration.
Leibniz said just enough to acknowledge Caroline’s dependence on George Augustus: ‘Consequently I wish … good things to his Highness, your consort, since you can only occupy the throne of that great Queen with him.’169 His defining of George Augustus as the agent of Caroline’s promotion – ‘his Highness, your consort’ – is significant. Leibniz had first encountered Caroline a decade earlier. His intuition was fallible, as we have seen in the matter of her proposed marriage to the Archduke Charles, but his knowledge of her character was extensive. His association of Caroline with Elizabeth I was highly charged, even if the seed had been sown by Caroline herself, six months earlier, in naming her daughter ‘Caroline Elizabeth’: inevitably it invited comparisons between the two women. If such a comparison represents a distortion of Caroline’s true nature, it reveals much of how Leibniz regarded her.
In her response, Caroline demurred without conviction. Elegantly she shuffled Leibniz’s compliment on to Sophia. Still her reply uncovers facets of her self-perception and, undeniably, something of her longing for the British throne: ‘I accept the comparison which you draw, though all too flattering, between me and Queen Elizabeth as a good omen. Like Elizabeth, the Electress’s rights are denied by a jealous sister with a bad temper [Anne] and she will never be sure of the English crown until her accession to the throne. God be praised that our Princess of Wales [Sophia] is better than ever, and by her good health confounds all the machinations of her enemies.’170 A spirited exercise in humbug, Caroline’s letter accurately reflects her nervousness about the Hanoverian succession. ‘You do well to send me your good wishes for the throne of England, which are sorely needed just now, for … affairs there seem to be going from bad to worse. For my part (and I am a woman and like to delude myself) I cling to the hope that, however bad things may be now, they will ultimately turn to the advantage of our House.’171
Twelve years had elapsed since Parli
ament had passed the Act of Settlement for Anne’s brother-in-law, William III. Without fondness or relish Anne had been forced to accept her German cousins as her heirs, even before she succeeded to the throne. After seventeen fruitless pregnancies she found the succession issue vexatious and distasteful. At intervals, flashes of impatience and irascibility had spliced her ‘perfect friendship’ for the electoral family. Sophia’s demands for further acknowledgement provoked outbursts of frustration, even hostility. Among Britain’s political classes, opinion was as divided over the Act as Anne’s. Whig supporters favoured its terms, while among Tories and Jacobites were those loyal to the queen’s half-brother James Edward Stuart, already recognised by Louis XIV as James III. Daniel Defoe showed that similar divisions existed throughout British society: ‘If you cho[o]se to listen to your cookmaids and footmen in the kitchen, you shall hear them scolding and swearing and fighting among themselves, and when you think the noise is about beef and pudding, the dishwater or the kitchen staff, alas, you are mistaken; the feud is about who is for the Protestant Succession and who for the Pretender.’172
Inside and outside Parliament partisans and troublemakers contributed to acrimonious debate. To the electoral family this suggested that, after more than a decade, their prospects remained unsettled. Beyond reminding George Louis that she had given ‘on all occasions, proofs of my desire that your family should succeed to my crowns’, Anne withheld any sop to Hanoverian nervousness.173 She would not countenance a single member of the family setting foot in England, ‘it being a thing I cannot bear to have any successor here though it were but for a week’.174 Her half-brother’s court was at St Germain-en-Laye, north of Paris, a focus for Jacobite loyalty; she refused to permit a second focus for opposition closer to home, within her own capital. In interpreting her aversion as personal, Sophia and George Louis mistook her.
The political turbulence of Anne’s reign further stoked persistent anxiety in Hanover. Parliamentary elections in 1710 returned an increase in the number of Tory members of the House of Commons; the ministry of Robert Harley and Henry St John was more decidedly Tory in persuasion than its predecessor. In 1713 its leaders canvassed for peace with France. Via the Treaty of Utrecht, Britain formally withdrew from the War of the Spanish Succession. Her allies, including Hanover, remained at war, proof in Hanoverian eyes that the British government had ceased to regard the electorate’s fortunes as contiguous with its own. George Louis considered the peace an act of betrayal. It provided grounds for dislike of the Tories for both George Louis and George Augustus for years to come.
Beginning in the autumn of 1713, dispatches from the new Hanoverian resident in England, George von Schütz, bolstered George Louis’s uncertainties. Like his employers, Schütz bluntly misread Anne’s intentions. He described the queen as ‘totally prejudiced against us’: ‘she will endeavour to leave the crown to the greatest stranger rather than … the Electoral family’. His explanation of her motives lay in belated feelings of filial guilt: ‘It is certain she attributes the loss of her children to the dethroning of her father.’175 Letters from Liselotte echoed the strain. ‘Queen Anne must be well aware in her heart of hearts that our young king [James Edward Stuart] is her brother; I feel certain that her conscience will wake up before her death, and she will do justice to her brother,’ she wrote on 12 January 1714, after a winter in which gout, erysipelas and recurrent fever had undermined Anne’s battered health.176
Under the circumstances, George Louis’s response, made with the support of all his family, could not have been more provocative. Among requirements of the memorandum he dispatched to England at the beginning of May 1714 was Anne’s agreement to residence in Britain for a member of the electoral family. Anne’s rejection was curt, categorical, furious: letters dispatched separately to Sophia, George Louis and George Augustus, each uncompromising in its rebuttal. Among their disavowals was any possibility of George Augustus taking his place in the House of Lords as Duke of Cambridge, which she described as an ‘infringement … on my sovereignty … a project so contrary to my royal authority’.177 ‘The Electoral Prince … is practically in despair about going to take his seat in the English Parliament according to his right,’ Caroline wrote afterwards. ‘I fear for [his] health, perhaps even his life.’178 Equally emotionally, the eighty-three-year-old Sophia claimed the affair would be the death of her, but retained sufficient vim to hope that Anne’s angry rejoinders might be published to discredit her. Caroline’s subsequent letter to Leibniz reads like a public manifesto, its smooth denial of private intent a slick piece of political self-effacement. ‘I do not know how the world may judge our conduct,’ she writes of George Louis’s request and George Augustus’s dashed hopes. ‘I do not regret the loss we may personally suffer from it so much as having in some measure to abandon the cause of our religion, the liberty of Europe, and so many brave and honest friends in England.’179 Once before she had demonstrated the strength of her Protestant convictions. Beneath the pious afflatus was truth in her mistrust of James Edward Stuart’s Catholicism.
Of course George Augustus did not die of his despair. Sophia’s demise, by contrast, three days after receipt of Anne’s searing rejoinder, may have been hastened by the intemperance of her reaction to that missive and the extent to which ‘the miserable affair weighed on her mind’, overwhelming serener thoughts.180 She was walking in the gardens of Herrenhausen after dinner, with Caroline and a company of her ladies, including the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, when she collapsed quite suddenly. She died as the first spatterings of rain darkened the manicured pathways, and every effort to revive her, including bleeding her feet and cutting her stays, failed. Anne’s weary dismissal of the news of her death as ‘chipping porridge’ – a thing of no significance – represents a final defeat for Sophia’s vanity.
In the event, Anne survived her German heiress by six weeks before she too died, infinitely fatigued and, at forty-nine, preternaturally aged, on 1 August 1714. ‘Sleep,’ wrote her doctor, ‘was never more welcome to a weary traveller than death was to her.’181 At St James’s Palace the accession of George Louis as George I was trumpeted to crowds of the curious soon after one o’clock in the afternoon. Later the same day, similar announcements were made across the country, including in York, where Lady Mary Wortley Montagu witnessed ‘greater Crouds of people than I believ’d to be in York, vast Acclamations and the appearance of a general satisfaction, the Pretender afterwards dragg’d about the streets and burnt, ringing of Bells, bonfires and illuminations, the mob crying liberty and property and long live K[ing] George’.182
Thanks to Anne’s intransigence, neither George Louis nor any other member of his family was present in London to witness the age-old spectacle or hear the sonorous proclamation; they were similarly absent from proclamations in Edinburgh and Dublin on 5 and 6 August. To his daughter Sophia Dorothea, thanking her for her congratulations, the new king stated his intention of frequently returning to Hanover. In London, the insertion into the prayerbook of the names of the new royal family was accomplished as a matter of urgency.
At a stroke, Caroline’s husband became heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as the electorate. Her fears, carefully communicated to Leibniz, proved empty. ‘The cause of our religion, the liberty of Europe, and so many brave and honest friends in England’ would not be abandoned after all. In George Louis’s fifty-fifth year, she dared anticipate a greater prize than George Augustus’s seat in the House of Lords as Duke of Cambridge: that sumptuous inheritance that first Sophia, afterwards George Augustus himself, had nurtured in her thoughts since the autumn of 1705. No longer were her aspirations the womanly delusions she had once dismissed so coyly.
But sadness at Sophia’s death tempered every expectation. In her correspondence Caroline turned to Liselotte and Leibniz, last links in the gilded chain that, two decades earlier, had rescued her in the aftermath of Eleonore’s death. ‘It is true that HRH the Princess of Wales does me the honour
of writing very diligently,’ Liselotte noted. ‘Her shortest letters are five sheets long, written on four sides; yesterday I received seven sheets, making twenty-eight pages, the previous one was thirty-five, and an earlier one was forty-three sheets.’183 Her letters were an outlet for Caroline’s feelings. Liselotte’s long-distance companionship offered partial compensation for the loss of Figuelotte and Sophia. Her view that Caroline possessed a heart, ‘a rare thing as times go’, is a valuable assessment.184 Unlike the public effusions that greeted Caroline after 1714, it is based on personal knowledge in a private context, albeit an epistolary version of herself that Caroline constructed in a lengthy correspondence, writer and recipient destined never to meet. With gloomy relish, the older woman would warn her ‘there have been few queens of England who have led happy lives’.185
On 4 September 1714, the deputy earl marshal, the 6th Earl of Suffolk, published ‘A Ceremonial for the Reception of His Most Sacred Majesty George, By the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, etc, Upon His Arrival from Holland to his Kingdom of Great Britain’. Suffolk’s ‘publick notice’ stipulated times and places where ‘the Nobility, the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London, etc, are to meet in order to attend His Majesty’. In celebration it called for conduits to run with wine and ‘the great guns’ at the Tower of London to be discharged twice in bold salute. On the new king’s arrival at St James’s Palace, it required ‘the Foot Guards in the Park [to] fire three volleys, and the Cannon in the Park … to be discharged’.186 The document made no mention of Caroline, who at George Louis’s request remained in Hanover for several weeks after his own departure.
The king was accompanied on his journey to London by his son, his mistress Madame Schulenburg, the latter’s three ‘nieces’, key ministers and courtiers, including his vice master of the horse (and husband of his illegitimate half-sister Sophia Charlotte), Johann Adolf von Kielmansegg, whom he meant to oversee his English hunting, a tailor, two trumpeters, two physicians, footmen, pages, a complete kitchen staff and a dwarf of surprisingly stentorian tones called Christian Ulrich Jorry, whose particular requirements, given his size, included the skills of George Louis’s tailor: in total a flotilla of four frigates, twenty-two warships and six transports for personnel aside from the royal yacht.187 Satirical opinion dismissed the entire pack as ‘pimps, whelps and reptiles’.188 Caroline’s suite the following month was smaller and correspondingly less incendiary. It included the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, who, after a lengthy separation, left behind her neglectful husband Frederick Christian and assumed the title Countess of Bückeburg, and another favourite lady-in-waiting, Baroness von Gemmingen. Princesses Anne and Amelia travelled with her.
The First Iron Lady Page 11
