Accustomed from girlhood to the toxic ‘softness of a Court’, Caroline knew enough to take little on appearances as she journeyed through cheering crowds and streets of brick-built houses black with soot on that mild October day. From the beginning she set out to win over this teeming microcosm of the kingdom whose length and breadth would remain hidden from her in the three decades she dwelt exclusively in London and its fringes.
With a combination of affability and regal dignity she impressed the denizens of George Louis’s capital. Courtiers had already noted George Augustus’s approachability. As early as 12 October they were described as ‘backward in speaking to the King, tho’ they are ready enough to speak to the Prince’.32 Clearly husband and wife had evolved between them a deliberate policy of openness, especially as George Augustus was later regarded as one who ‘never could put on when he was not pleased’ any ‘air of good humour’.33 Lord Hervey, a gentleman of the bedchamber to George Augustus who became one of Caroline’s closest friends, later reported Caroline as claiming ‘popularity always makes me sick’; her early behaviour seemed designed to just that end.34 And her approach, in which consciousness of her position was balanced by ebullient warmth, won plaudits. A song written in 1714 by a Mr Durfey claimed that Caroline had possessed all hearts, ‘and will more every Age ov’rcome,/By her Temper, that Charms and adorably Warms’.35
The coordinated attitudes of the new Prince and Princess of Wales kindled memories of the double monarchy of William III and Mary II, itself the template of Protestant parliamentary kingship prescribed by the Act of Settlement. In the case of Caroline and George Augustus the comparison was accurate insofar as it indicated a shared profile, with aspects of their royal role assigned by gender. Robert Molesworth’s dedication to Caroline in 1716 of Marinda: Poems and Translations upon several occasions suggests that she benefited from the likeness. Admiringly, Molesworth described her in glowing comparison to Queen Mary: an ‘incomparable Consort’ who ‘(like your Royal Highness) understood how to joyn Majesty with Affability, how to make Magnificence consistent with Oeconomy, the strictest Virtue with the most Obliging Freedom; the Highest Wisdom with the least Pretences to it’.36 With its focus on royal accountability, it was a distinctively Whig appraisal.
In the event, affability, virtue, wisdom, majesty and a frugal approximation to magnificence would define Caroline’s public persona until her death, her version of queenship. Like Mary, her religious faith was key to her standing, as John Gay indicated: ‘Religion’s cheerful flame her bosom warms,/Calms all her hours, and brightens all her charms.’37 To bedchamber woman Charlotte Clayton the Bishop of Oxford wrote in the summer of 1714, ‘I see … in her Royal Highness, our blessed Queen Mary revived.’38 A year later, on the anniversary of George Louis’s accession, clergyman Joseph Acres preached that, in Caroline, ‘much of the late Queen Mary is revived, who was the best, God knows, the much best Part of us all’.39 Caroline’s early gift of communion plate to one of Westminster’s seven Huguenot churches was a philanthropic gesture of support for Protestant exiles from France, possibly prompted by the Huguenot blood George Augustus had inherited from Duchess Eléonore; the political astuteness of the gesture is an indication of Caroline’s shrewdness.40 She was punctilious in her churchgoing and, despite initial mutterings about her Lutheranism, earned praise for her religious observance, ‘the devoutest in the World’.41 She maintained the recent tradition of churchgoing on ‘the anniversary of the martyrdom of King Charles the First … and appeared in mourning, as is usual on that day’.42 Like Mary, she publicised visible piety alongside programmes of cultural patronage; beneficiaries of her charity included the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy. And Caroline would be more fortunate than Mary, whose sudden death from smallpox, aged thirty-two, prevented the completion of her plans.
Caroline made her first court appearance the evening after her arrival, at the King’s Drawing Room, or formal assembly, at St James’s Palace. Entering the crowded room at seven o’clock, she remained for three hours. Of the card games on offer she chose piquet in preference to ombre and basset, both of which were distinguished by high stakes and high losses (on 22 February 1718, for example, the Original Weekly Journal reported George Louis losing three thousand guineas playing ombre with the Duchess of Monmouth and the Countess of Lincoln43). Among her fellow players was Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, mistress of the robes to Queen Anne, to whom a tactful Caroline had addressed an introductory letter as obliging ‘as if I had been her equal’.44 Later the duchess’s jealousy, added to her dislike of Robert Walpole, the politician with whom Caroline was most closely associated as queen, made her the most astringent of Caroline’s critics. On this occasion there were no dissenting notes. Nor were eyebrows raised too obviously at Caroline’s choice of cumbersome, lace-trimmed headdress, heavy silk frock and her preferred embroidered silk ‘slippers’ – backless, low-heeled shoes resembling mules – in place of more fashionable shoes with high wooden heels.45 She had yet to acquire the ‘old leather fan’ that afterwards exasperated her ladies.46
From the card table, Caroline appears not to have discerned the difference in deportment between British and Hanoverian women that so troubled the Countess of Bückeburg: ‘the English Women did not look like Women of Quality, but made themselves look as pitifully and sneakingly as they could; … they [held] their Heads down and look[ed] always in a Fright, whereas those that are Foreigners hold up their heads and hold out their Breasts, and make themselves look as great and stately as they can, and more nobly and more like Quality than the others’.47 While players at nearby tables broke off their games and formed an attentive circle around Caroline and Lady Bückeburg, Caroline occupied herself with pleasantries to the galaxy of new faces, intent on making friends even to the point of simulating enjoyment: ‘In matters of lightest moment she had so entire a command of herself, that whenever she pleased, she seemed to enjoy even trifles, as if she was quite unbent, and had nothing else to attend.’48 Meanwhile a habitually drunken peeress would take the earliest opportunity to apprise the countess that, in Britain, noblewomen showed their ‘Quality by … Birth and Titles, and not by sticking out [their] Bosoms’.49
Not only Caroline’s stamina for court entertainments but her willingness, like George Augustus, to speak English – albeit heavily accented and larded with French – contrasted with the behaviour of her father-in-law. A report of March 1718 described George Augustus as speaking English well and correctly on all occasions.50 George Louis did not disguise his preference for the company of his Hanoverian entourage or the less vapid demands of the business of government, conducted mostly out of sight in a small private room off his bedchamber, inaccessible from the main palace staircase. He declined to play cards. His conversation, in French, was confined to a handful of intimates. Unconcerned either to cultivate the good opinion of his new courtiers or to challenge his dismissal by Jacobites as ‘a foreigner ignorant of the language, laws and customs of England’, and averse to ‘outward Pomp and gaudy Attendance’, he spent no more than an hour at the drawing room.51 He brought with him to England that habit of abstemiousness that Caroline had first noted at the Leineschloss on the evening of her wedding.
Unlike George Augustus and Caroline, he did not walk in St James’s Park in the morning or at midday, escorted by yeomen of the guard and accompanied by courtiers, although a painting by Marco Ricci of around 1710 depicts the park, with its three tree-lined avenues, as London’s most fashionable promenade – as Lady Hertford remembered it in a letter to her mother in May 1721, the place where ‘all the fine folks’ exchanged news and gossip, attended by tiny lapdogs, lovers, hangers-on.52 Nor did he betray by word or deed that relish for his new kingdom that George Augustus and Caroline publicised so studiedly. At a ball at Somerset House in December, ‘the Prince and Princess … danc’d our English Country Dances’.53 It was a characteristic gesture, this proof of the trouble they had taken to master these distinctively unGerman measures, and was ac
knowledged the following year when dancing master and choreographer John Essex dedicated to Caroline the second edition of his manual For the Further Improvement of Dancing, which included instructions for country dances.54 Wholly unconvincing, George Augustus’s declaration that ‘I have not one drop of blood on my veins dat is not English,’ and Caroline’s only marginally less misleading insistence that she would ‘as soon live on a dunghill as return to Hanover’, were guaranteed crowd-pleasers.55 The care Caroline took to publicise her love of British history served the same end: in July 1715 she was reported as stating that ‘she was always v[ery] angry with the English when she was reading their history to see how violent and raging they were against one another’.56 By contrast, the Comte de Broglie described George Louis as without any ‘predilection for the English nation, and never receives in private any English of either sex’.57 Broglie’s view was inaccurate – Mary Wortley Montagu was among the new king’s intimates – but serves as a reflection of popular perceptions even among court insiders.
The new reign, like court life in Hanover, began with a series of drawing rooms. Caroline’s presence at each, she protested lightly, threatened to prevent her from assembling suitable clothes for the coronation. This took place on a bright October day a week after her arrival. The service was a revised version of Queen Anne’s, adapted by Archbishop Tenison, its single flourish William Croft’s new setting of an anthem first used at the coronation of William and Mary, ‘The Lord God is a sun and a shield’. At £7,287, George Louis’s coronation cost around half the sum spent by Queen Anne in the previous decade, a result of rapid preparations and the new king’s preference for simplicity.58
Characteristically, George Louis played his part without marked aplomb. Uninspired verse in the Flying Post, London’s leading Whig newspaper, turned even this lack of demonstrativeness into a virtue: ‘We now the gold and jewels cease to view,/And find the truest jewel lodged in you;/The crown no brightness to the monarch brings,/The Crown takes lustre from the best of kings.’59 Implicit was a criticism of Stuart monarchy, with its grandeur, theatricality and vainglory. For Britain’s new dynasty it was a commendation but also a warning, this rhetoric of just deserts and exemplary behaviour. Tangible enthusiasm on George Louis’s part focused on the performance of Rinaldo by his former Hanoverian Kapellmeister Handel, which was included in the celebrations at his own request. A conciliatory choice, it was the first opera the composer had written in England, in 1711. Handel had dedicated it to Queen Anne, labelling it ‘a Native of your Majesty’s Dominions, and … consequently born your Subject’.60 Enthusiasm for Handel, shared by Caroline and George Augustus and a feature of the last years of Anne’s reign, provided connective tissue between old and new regimes.
As Princess of Wales rather than queen consort, Caroline had no place in the formal processions inside Westminster Abbey. She sat beneath a velvet canopy of state, close to the sacrarium, a ringside spectator of goings-on. Her dress was probably that of embroidered silk, worn beneath ermine-lined crimson velvet robes of state fastened with diamond stomacher brooches, in which Kneller painted her in 1716, a stiff and unprepossessing image that nevertheless became Caroline’s chief official likeness. It is a less attractive, less informative portrait than that produced at the same time for George Augustus by Swiss miniaturist Christian Friedrich Zincke. Zincke’s doll-like figure does full justice not only to Caroline’s bosom but to her long pointed nose, inherited from her father, and a steely fixity in her gaze.61 The relative simplicity of her coronation clothes in both paintings lends credence to Caroline’s suggestion that she had had less time than she needed to organise either dress or jewels, and had resorted to careful improvisation. The contrast with the magnificence of the dress she wore at her own coronation thirteen years later – a faithful copy of that worn by Mary II – is pronounced. She is absent from the account of the service Lady Cowper committed to her diary, a sign of her secondary role. The sermon made much of her vocation as mother.
Instead, the religious significance of George Louis’s accession formed Mary Cowper’s principal focus: ‘I own I never was so affected with Joy in all my Life; it brought Tears into my Eyes, and I hope I shall never forget the Blessing of seeing our holy Religion thus preserved, as well as our Liberties and Properties.’62 Contemporary doggerel suggests alternative viewpoints: ‘God in his wrath sent Saul to punish Jewry;/And George to England in greater fury.’63 Coronation Day riots in some twenty large and small English towns, including Bristol, Chippenham, Canterbury, Norwich and Reading, made disaffection manifest; in Birmingham rioters advocated ‘pull[ing] down this King and Sett[ing] up a King of our own’.64 But inside the abbey all passed smoothly, albeit Jacobite aristocrats, ‘looking as cheerful as they could, [were] very peevish with Everybody that spoke to them’, or notable through their absence, like the Earl of Kinnoull, who excused himself on grounds of gout.65 George Augustus’s hastily altered coronet had last been worn by Mary II. In place of coronet or diadem, Caroline looped pearls through her fair hair. Her jewels included the so-called ‘Hanover pearls’ which George Louis had inherited from Sophia.66 She was denied the opportunity to wear the 141-carat Pitt Diamond by the successive refusal that summer of George Louis and George Augustus to purchase it from its owner Thomas Pitt.67 This huge jewel was subsequently acquired by the French royal family.
Any record of Caroline’s emotions has not survived, but her thoughts surely included the older woman whose jewels she wore and whose ambition for the British throne had inspired her own; Sophia had been dead less than six months. She must have thought too of Frederick, George Augustus’s heir, and the decision she had taken a decade ago to decline the Archduke Charles’s proposal, ‘scorn[ing] an empire for religion’s sake’, as John Gay imagined it.68 All around her in the abbey glittered intimations of her future rewards. She was aware on this occasion of the gulf between the positions of consort-in-waiting and consort, and reminded of the extent to which her own position depended entirely on George Augustus. In the short term, she would find few reasons for dissatisfaction. George Louis had no intention of releasing Sophia Dorothea from incarceration in Ahlden to resume her place at his side. In her absence Caroline’s position was considerable. Official female royal patronage lay exclusively within her gift, despite the king’s attachment to Madame Schulenburg and unsubstantiated rumours that the couple had married morganatically, as well as the privileged position enjoyed by George Louis’s half-sister Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, who was frequently mistaken for his mistress though ‘as corpulent and ample as [Madame Schulenburg] was long and emaciated’.69 As Lady Cowper’s letters of the summer had indicated, the scramble for places in Caroline’s household would be determined and energetic.
Moreover, in the aftermath of the coronation, with George Louis’s consent, Caroline and George Augustus took over important aspects of the king’s entertaining. From now on, evening assemblies were held not in George Louis’s drawing room but Caroline’s, twice a week throughout the first winter, supplemented by a series of balls held in the palace and at Somerset House. At every entertainment the new Prince and Princess of Wales were prominent. John Essex claimed that, in reviving balls, which had not featured in Anne’s entertaining, Caroline ‘retriev’d the Grandeur & Gayety of the Court’.70 At a ball in February 1715 the couple were joined by five-year-old Anne. ‘She was admired by all, for her ability surpassed her age and her dance was performed with surprising grace,’ wrote the Dutch ambassador.71
Caroline and George Augustus’s apartments lay in Paradise Court, on the opposite side of a quadrangle to George Louis’s, separate beneath the same roof.72 In the short term, George Louis undertook the brief journey to Caroline’s drawing room. He seldom remained long. He preferred to spend his evenings unobserved in Madame Schulenburg’s apartments, ‘lock[ing] himself up’, as a groom of the bedchamber described it, or else at the theatre. Unlike the Leineschloss, St James’s Palace boasted neither opera house nor theatre for cou
rtly diversion. Instead, that first winter George Louis attended twenty-two of the forty-four opera performances staged by the King’s Theatre, Haymarket.73 Unlike George Augustus and Caroline he avoided the royal box, and so, unlike them, failed to make any lasting impact on his theatregoing subjects. George Louis’s poor English did, however, alter the nature of theatre managers’ offerings, with an emphasis on visual spectaculars and ‘other things which divert the senses more than the mind’.74 Given the gaps in their own English in 1714, Caroline and George Augustus may have shared some of the king’s relief. Undertaken without fanfare, his absences from the palace were rarer than their own.
The engraving of ‘St James’s Palace and Parts adjacent’ made in 1707 by Johannes Kip for Britannia Illustrata, Views of Several of the Queen’s Palaces and also of the Principal Seats of the Nobility & Gentry of Great Britain, depicts a muddled grid of rectilinear buildings of uninspiring Tudor aspect. After dining there alfresco with Charles II in 1686, the diarist John Evelyn described the palace’s French-style formal gardens as ‘a very delicious paradise’. Beyond their boundaries, in Kip’s version, stocks of deer gambolled.
By 1714 such commendations were rare. Elizabeth I’s surveyor John Norden had claimed of the palace, a former women’s leprosy hospital, ‘the situation is pleasant, indued with a good ayre and pleasant prospects’, while a French visitor in 1638 had marvelled at its ‘great number of chambers, all covered with tapestry and superbly furnished with all manner of furniture … [It] is very ancient, very magnificent, and extremely convenient.’75 The building’s subsequent neglect in favour of the nearby Palace of Whitehall until the latter was razed by fire in 1698 resulted in a structure that was ill-equipped both internally and externally to support the pretensions of majesty, despite the new suite of state apartments commissioned in 1703 by Queen Anne from Sir Christopher Wren and Sir John Vanbrugh, and advice on the privy garden from André Mollet, an assistant of Le Nôtre. Visitors agreed on its inadequacy: ‘The whole is an irregular pile. But the very confusion in its plan, with its antiquity … ministers to the fancy, making amends for its want of good architecture.’76 Used to Herrenhausen, elegant and expansive within its elaborate tracery of hedges and ornamental waterways, and the bandbox charms of Lützenburg, Caroline must have shared a view closer to that of Daniel Defoe: ‘The Palace of St James’s, though the … receptacle of all the pomp and glory of this kingdom, is really mean in comparison of the glorious Court of Great Britain. The splendour of the nobility, the wealth and greatness of the attendants, and the real grandeur of the whole Royal Family, outdo all the courts of Europe, and yet this palace comes beneath those of the most petty princes in it.’77 It was smaller than the Leineschloss, less coherent than Berwart’s palace in Ansbach. In 1732, the author of the Critical Review of Public Buildings insisted the palace had ‘no beauty to recommend it, and was the contempt of foreign nations and the disgrace of our own’.78 Caroline’s view has not survived. Later she built a library at St James’s Palace; as king and queen, she and George Augustus used it extensively for court functions. For reasons that will become clear, it was not a building for which she otherwise expressed great attachment. Her preference was for Kensington Palace and Hampton Court.
The First Iron Lady Page 13
