On George Louis’s instructions, Frederick stayed behind in Hanover with his great-uncle, Ernest Augustus. His grandfather had decided that Frederick would serve as the family’s permanent representative in the electorate. He was seven years old. Only in January, Sophia had written to Liselotte of his excitement that Christmas. ‘I have no doubt that your Prince Fritzchen was absolutely delighted with the Christchild, because I still remember so well how I loved it,’ Liselotte replied.189 To enforce a permanent separation from his parents and siblings on so young a child was an act of terrible cruelty, from which neither prince nor parents would fully recover. Caroline’s immediate response has not survived, but it is unlikely that George Louis invited discussion of his decision; he had previously asserted his right to make key choices regarding Frederick’s upbringing in the educational programme he devised for the boy in September 1713, entrusted to his chamberlain J.F. von Grote. Nor did Caroline confide her feelings to Henrietta Howard, who had left behind in England her own seven-year-old son only the previous year. Instead she consoled herself that her case was less extreme than that of her mother: in the 1690s, Eleonore had temporarily lost both of her children to the court of Berlin.
Further delayed by the illness of her youngest daughter, who remained for the time being in Hanover, Caroline travelled as far as the Dutch coast with her brother, William Frederick. Both correctly surmised that they would never see one another again, and henceforth William Frederick’s outward focus reverted to the localised concerns of his forebears. In 1729, his son Charles married his Hohenzollern kinswoman Frederica Louisa of Prussia, Figuelotte’s granddaughter and George Augustus’s niece. His passion for hunting, especially falconry, earned him the moniker the ‘wild’ margrave. Among those who made valedictory visits to Herrenhausen to take leave of Caroline and her daughters was George Augustus’s grandmother, the ‘mouse droppings in the pepper’ Duchess Eléonore.
Before her departure, Caroline appointed her first two English ladies of the bedchamber. They were Louisa, Countess of Berkeley, and Elizabeth, Countess of Dorset, whose husband was described in terms certain to endear him to George Augustus as ‘in spite of the greatest dignity in his appearance … in private the greatest lover of low humour and buffoonery’; he would later be rewarded with a dukedom.190 Four years earlier, through foresight or simple calculation, Mary, Countess Cowper, had opened a correspondence in French with Caroline, apparently with a view to a similar appointment; with her children, she claimed, she had taken to nightly drinking ‘[George Augustus’s] Health by the Name of Young Hanover Brave’.191 Following Anne’s death, she dispatched a ‘Letter of Congratulation … [and] another Letter to offer her my Service, and to express the perfect Resignation I had to whatever she would think fit to do, were it to choose or refuse me’.192
Caroline’s reply was evasive. Its suggestion that the decision rested ultimately with George Augustus was deliberate and significant. In her letter to Mary Cowper, Caroline constructed the conceit with which she would keep faith lifelong, of a partnership between husband and wife, in which the latter deferred to the former; it was only partly misleading. ‘This Letter she answered,’ wrote Lady Cowper, ‘telling me she was entirely at the Prince’s Disposal, and so could give me no Promise; but that she did not doubt the Prince’s Willingness to express his Friendship to me upon all Occasions.’193 Little wonder that the poet Stephen Duck, seeing only what Caroline wanted him to see, could later describe her as the ‘most submissive Wife;/Who never yet her Consort disobey’d’.194 Caroline’s career as Princess of Wales had begun.
PART TWO
Britain
I
Princess of Wales
‘Majesty with Affability’
On 13 October 1714, to the crack of gun salutes at the Tower of London and in St James’s Park, Caroline arrived in a city described only six years previously as among ‘the most Spacious, Populous, Rich, Beautiful, Renowned and Noble … that we know of at this day in the World: ’Tis the Seat of the British Empire, the Exchange of Great Britain and Ireland; the Compendium of the Kingdom, the Vitals of the Common-wealth, and the Principal Town of Traffic …’1 She would never leave.
Two days previously she had arrived at Margate on the Kent coast, escorted by a squadron of English men-of-war. Her passage, aboard the royal yacht Mary, had taken ten days. ‘Speaking of the Princess’s comeing’, on 21 September to George Augustus, the new lord chancellor, William Cowper, had ‘wish’d she was here while the Weather was good, lest she sho’d be in Danger in her Passage; he [George Augustus] [had] said, Providence had hitherto so wonderfully prosper’d his Family’s succeeding to the Crown in every Respect … that he hoped it wo’d perfect it’ – a hope that was realised in Caroline’s uneventful crossing.2 After a ceremonial welcome at Rochester she travelled to London with George Augustus at her side and accompanied by her elder daughters. Their journey to St James’s Palace was cheered by representatives of all seven classes of Englishman recently identified by Daniel Defoe, from ‘the great, who live profusely’ to ‘the miserable, that really pinch and suffer want’.3 It was a fitting first exposure to her husband’s future subjects.
For their part, the British applauded Caroline’s manner while judging her appearance less to their tastes than did her countrymen; she drew compliments for her ‘native Majesty’ and easy comportment.4 An occasional visitor to court described her as ‘fat … of a fine complexion, & … very ugly’; subsequent gifts of clotted cream from a lady-in-waiting may point to a sweet tooth.5 The same observer judged her height at somewhere between that of George Louis and the shorter George Augustus, but acknowledged that she seemed ‘very good natur’d & obligeing’. The Daily Courant informed its readers that ‘the whole conversation’ of those who encountered Caroline ‘turn[ed] upon the charms, sweetness and good manner of this excellent princess, whose generous treatment of everybody, who has had the honour to approach her, is such that none have come from her without being obliged by some particular expression of her favour’.6 Similarly anodyne was an early commemorative print by John Simon. Even in this conventional image of poodle curls and ermine furbelows lurks a glimmer of shrewdness in Caroline’s unblinking gaze.7 The publisher labelled the portrait ‘Wilhelmina Charlotta, Princess of Wales’, evidently unaware of Caroline’s change of name. A contemporary German version of a related image used the same names.8
At thirty-one, a mother of four children, her early bloom dulled by smallpox and her figure beginning to thicken, Caroline would chiefly be appraised not on her looks but her religious soundness and her fecundity – according to John Gay, ‘the lovely parent of our royal race … The tender mother, and the faithful wife.’9 She was the first Princess of Wales since Catherine of Aragon married Henry VIII’s elder brother Arthur in 1502. Not since the birth in 1367 of the future Richard II, a grandson of Edward III, had a royal succession been assured over three generations. And since the death in 1708 of Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, Britain had lacked a royal spouse. Descriptions of George as ‘very fat, loves news, his bottle and the Queen’ offered Caroline limited guidance in creating a role for herself.10
Within weeks of her arrival, Joseph Addison, who had first seen Caroline in Hanover in 1706, could claim, ‘No longer shall the widow’d Land bemoan/A broken Lineage, and a doubtful Throne;/But boast her Royal Progeny’s increase,/And count the Pledges of her future Peace./O Born to strengthen and to grace our Isle!’11 She was praised as the mother of ‘hopeful issue’ by the Bishop of Oxford, William Talbot, in a sermon that anticipated ‘many more pledges of the lasting happiness of these kingdoms’.12 In his Royal Progress of 1714, poet Thomas Tickell celebrated the fruitfulness of Caroline’s marriage to George Augustus: ‘A train of kings their fruitful love supplies.’
Her copper-bottomed Protestantism contrasted favourably with the Catholicism of recent female consorts: buck-toothed proselyte Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I; Charles II’s barren Portuguese queen, Cat
herine of Braganza; and Mary of Modena, James II’s teenage bride, reviled as the ‘Pope’s daughter’. ‘In your most tender years,’ offered the Saturday Evening Post, ‘you despis’d with so much courage and firmness those dazzling grandeurs which combated the duties you ow’d to conscience that there’s nothing too great for the Protestant religion to expect from so noble a soul.’13 The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland praised her as ‘a princess that has signalled her zeal for the Protestant religion, and hath shown to the world that nothing can with her come in competition with the honour of her God and redeemer, and the peace of her own conscience’.14 Echoing what was clearly already a commonplace, a Welsh schoolboy called John Morgan described Caroline as one ‘who rather for the sake of Piety, Our Princess than an Empress chose to be’.15 And approval of Caroline’s Protestantism inspired a wider celebration of her virtues. With appealing asperity, the poet Mary Jones singled out her sincerity: ‘This Virtue, ’tis said, was first brought over by Wilhelmina-Carolina, Daughter of Frederick, Marquis of Brandenburg-Anspach: but as it was a Plant perfectly exotic, and could never be brought to flourish in this Soil; that illustrious Princess did not much attempt to cultivate it, except in a few warm Bosoms like her own.’16 A reissue of John Toland’s An Account of the courts of Prussia and Hannover, published in 1714 with passages about Caroline added since the first edition of 1705, signified the rise in her prominence and her central place in the new royal family.17
At the outset commentators understood Caroline’s role as primarily reproductive, guarantor of future stability by securing the succession. Save in their impact on her children’s education, her cultural and intellectual achievements were ignored. None remarked on her pleasure in discovering for herself the libraries assembled by William and Mary at St James’s Palace and at Kensington. A single unusual unsigned print of this period places Caroline’s portrait between seated figures of Religion and Knowledge.18
In her first official portrait, by Sir James Thornhill, in a medallion on the painted ceiling of the Queen’s Great Bedchamber at the palace of Hampton Court, completed in 1715, the princess is invested with more typical – and more typically bland – symbolic attributes. A spray of pink roses denotes love and England; she is associated with good sense and, critically, with plenty and ripeness, represented by grapes and a pumpkin.19
That Caroline had been forced to leave behind in Hanover the most dynastically important of her children, Frederick, does not appear to have given rise to undue comment: Frederick’s portrait also featured on Thornhill’s painted ceiling. Rather, engravings like Michiel van der Gucht’s triptych ‘Our Present Royall Soveraign L[or]d’, in which a portrait of George Louis is flanked by images of George Augustus and Frederick, and a mezzotint of Caroline’s four eldest children, published by Edward Cooper, in which a spear-carrying Frederick is surrounded by his pretty sisters, celebrated the strength of the royal line, overlooking Frederick’s absence and the family’s fragmentation.20 Airily, a song of 1714 hymned ‘Prince Frederick, the Rose that in Hanover grows,/And now springs with delightful Bloom’.21 On the eve of their sailing, watchers in The Hague had drawn attention to princesses Anne and Amelia, whose ‘excellent behaviour … showed much above what their age could promise, one being but three and a half and the other but five years old’, a compliment to Caroline in her role of mother and preceptress.22 Lady Cowper likewise noted, ‘the little Princesses are Miracles of their Ages, especially Princess Anne, who at five Years old speaks, reads and writes both German and French to Perfection, knows a great deal of History and Geography, speaks English very prettily, and dances very well’.23 Bar the prettiness of Anne’s English, all were talents inherited from, and insisted upon by, her capable mother. So too was the trait soon identified by one of Caroline’s bedchamber women. Anne, she wrote, ‘displayed from an early age a most ambitious temper’.24
Three years later, Thornhill again painted the princess, as part of the huge mural of the Hanoverian succession in the dining hall at Greenwich Naval Hospital. He presented her in the figure of Prudence. Again she was accompanied by her children.
Despite differences in scale, London in the early eighteenth century was every bit as cramped as Ansbach or Hanover, tight within their ancient walls. Unlike either, home to more than half a million inhabitants, it had overspilt its medieval boundaries, amazing in its ‘prodigious size and length’, according to German diarist Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, who visited in 1710.25 It boasted startling pockets of newness and modernity. Half a century before, the Great Fire of London had swept away a Tudor town of jerry-built half-timberings, medieval churches and tenements. From the ashes had arisen new squares and thoroughfares, including the neighbourhood of St James’s Palace, where George Louis made his court, depicted by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1660 as a venerable country retreat amid tall trees and broad meadows. In the first days of her arrival, wherever Caroline looked she glimpsed a city in the throes of muscular rejuvenation. The rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral by surveyor-general Sir Christopher Wren had been completed only three years previously: visible from the palace gardens, its mighty dome dominated London’s skyline. In 1714, in Greenwich, Spitalfields and Limehouse, work began on handsome new churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in line with provisions of Queen Anne’s Fifty New Churches Act. Shortly work commenced on the tactfully named Hanover Square. Equally tactfully it would displace Soho Square, Leicester Fields and Golden Square as a centre of aristocratic living; householders included the lord chancellor. Ministers and courtiers also settled in Arlington Street, a stone’s throw from the palace.
The needs of this enormous, refashioned city were titanic, as Defoe boasted in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain: ‘This whole Kingdom, as well as the people, as the land, and even the sea, in every part of it, are employ’d to furnish something, and I may add the best of everything, to supply the city of London with provisions.’26 London was a centre of consumption. It offered its new royal family every conceivable luxury and all essentials, from the cherries, apples and oysters daily dispatched in season from Kent to the mixed catch of sprats, whiting, herrings and mackerel that arrived from the coast of East Anglia. From Norfolk and Suffolk, poultrymen drove turkeys to London’s markets, geese and chickens too; sheep travelled from Lincoln and Leicester, cattle from Scotland, Wales and Kent, including the isles of Skye and Anglesey; sheep for mutton journeyed from Essex. From Herefordshire came bacon and cider, from Cheshire, Gloucester and Warwick cheese, butter from Suffolk and oats from Surrey. Newcastle dispatched sea coal, Shooters Hill faggots. Shoes, gloves, leather, lace, cloth, clocks and everything pertaining to self-adornment and easy living were in greater demand in London than anywhere else in Britain. Among wares offered by the hawkers and street-sellers of Marcellus Laroon’s The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life, published in 1688, were flounders and ‘biskets’ and ‘ripe speragus’ and caged birds, ‘long threed laces’, ‘fine writeing inke’, ‘lilly white vinegar’, ‘delicate cowcumbers to pickle’ and second-hand ‘satten’, ‘taffety’ and velvet.27 Chimneysweeps, tightrope-walkers, mendicant preachers and, unavoidably, the ‘London beggar’ and the ‘London curtezan’ plied their varied trades.
Greedy and unceasing demand created a vibrant market, which in turn, despite extremes of wealth and poverty, shaped the city’s buoyant outlook. Like every metropolis, the London Caroline first encountered attracted tricksters and charlatans; it was also home to artists, poets, savants and divines. As John Bancks offered in his Description of London: ‘Many a Beau without a shilling;/Many a widow not unwilling;/Many a Bargain, if you strike it:/This is LONDON! How d’ye like it?’
In Caroline’s case, she had determined to like it long before she arrived. In conversations with Sophia, in the plans she had made with George Augustus, in her diligent and determined espousing of all things British during the decade of her marriage in Hanover, she had prepared herself for this moment when she would emerge as George
Augustus’s consort upon a different, larger, grander stage. History has depicted early Georgian London, much as it saw itself, as a city of cut-throat optimism and crude scatology, of growing political maturity, hard-drinking brutality and vicious religious polarities, of commercial zeal, financial resourcefulness and skulduggery, of double-dealing among all classes, of artists and writers beady-eyed in their exposure of the follies and foibles of court, Parliament, low life and foreigners, of freedom of speech held dear: a volatile, effervescent, engaged urban culture chauvinistic in its predilections, its citizens, in the eyes of one foreign visitor, in love with ‘their nation, its wealth, plenty, and liberty, and the comforts that are enjoyed’.28
‘The greatest Part of the People do not Read Books, Most of them cannot Read at all,’ lamented the Jacobite pamphleteer Charles Leslie. ‘But they will Gather together about one that can Read, and Listen to an Observator or Review (as I have seen them in the Streets).’29 Those who could read, even among the artisan class, according to an account of the 1720s, kept themselves up to date by ‘begin[ning] the day by going to the café to read the news’.30 Londoners had views, noisily expressed. ‘Englishmen are mighty swearers,’ noted the Swiss visitor Cesar de Saussure.31
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