Extensive alterations began soon after George Louis’s accession. Most were confined to the palace’s service quarters – new cellars, sculleries, laundries, even a new confectionery kitchen – although George Augustus and Caroline also enlarged and redecorated their apartments, to designs by Nicholas Hawksmoor, and commissioned a kitchen of their own. (This was not completed until 1719, by which time the couple had left the palace.79) The state apartments remained unchanged. Throwbacks to the last reign in their decoration and picture hang, they suggested to visitors visual continuity with Anne’s court. This may have arisen from apathy on George Louis’s part.
Pressure of space forced the bulk of royal servants and retainers to live elsewhere, lodged in Somerset House and buildings around Whitehall. Hugger mugger, three generations of the royal family found accommodation in the antiquated precincts, while George Louis, George Augustus and Caroline each set about assembling the entourage of courtiers which comprised the top rung of their households. George Louis’s British household eventually extended to 950 people, including, by 1720, seventeen gentlemen of the bedchamber, a harpsichord-maker, herb strewer, master of the tennis court and keeper of the lions in the royal menagerie at the Tower of London. Annually it consumed an estimated one-eighth of the national budget.80 More modestly, Caroline provided herself with six ladies of the bedchamber, all peeresses, six women of the bedchamber and six maids of honour, serving on a rota. All were British bar the Italian-born Duchess of Shrewsbury, Adelaide Talbot. She owed her place to George Louis’s repeated intervention. As much as her husband’s position as the king’s lord chamberlain, her ‘wonderful Art at entertaining and diverting People’ and her willingness to ‘exceed the Bounds of Decency’ may well have swayed his favour; Sir Gustavus Hume recorded George Louis’s enjoyment of polite bawdy: ‘the freer the conversation the more to the King’s mind’.81 Since Caroline’s own conversation included its measure of indelicacies, lapses in the duchess’s good taste are unlikely to have proved a stumbling block.
The highest-ranking office, the incongruous-sounding post of groom of the stole, fell to the Duchess of St Albans, one of the eight ‘Hampton Court Beauties’ whose portraits by Kneller Mary II had commissioned in 1691; her presence suggested a link between later Stuart courts and that of the new dynasty. The position was mostly ornamental. Scarcely more was expected of ladies of the bedchamber. Women of the bedchamber faced more onerous responsibilities, akin to well-born ladies’ maids, although all those ‘in waiting’ could expect lengthy days in the royal presence with consequent vulnerability to fatigue, boredom and royal caprice. A supporting cast of sempstresses and laundresses maintained the princess’s wardrobe. Apothecaries and physicians ministered to other needs.
The choice of her household was among Caroline’s first tests, and gave rise to speculation and concern. On 23 October a disdainful Lady Mary Wortley Montagu dismissed three rumoured nominees, Lady Townshend, Lady Hinchinbrooke and Lady Mary Lumley. ‘She must be a strange princesse if she can pick a favourite out of them, and as she will one day be Queen … I wonder they don’t think fit to place Women about her with a little common sense,’ she told her husband.82 By 26 October Caroline had finalised key appointments, excluding all three of Lady Mary’s bugbears; she postponed choosing her maids of honour, a junior post for younger, unmarried women. As in her letter to Lady Cowper, written from Hanover, she maintained the fiction that in each instance the casting vote belonged to George Augustus. Her protestations may have rung hollow. As Mary Wortley Montagu indicated, gossip that Caroline ‘ha[d] an influence over her Husband’ had preceded the princess’s arrival.83
Particularly anxious for a place in Caroline’s household was the Countess of Bristol, ‘hard as flint’ and ‘the oddest, and I fear the worst woman that ever lived’, in her daughter-in-law’s estimate.84 The devoted wife of a staunchly pro-Hanoverian politician, and the mother of seventeen children, Lady Bristol failed to find favour until some years later, when necessity forced Caroline’s hand. She ‘[spoke] to the Princess to be Mistress of her Robes … She [Caroline] answered her that she did not design to have any, but that if she was obliged to take one, the Prince had made her promise it should be Mrs Coke [a former maid of honour to Queen Anne, married to Anne’s vice chamberlain].’85 Such was Lady Bristol’s zeal – not to mention what sounds like pique – that she promptly embarked on a scheme to disgrace Mrs Coke. The failure of this response on Lady Bristol’s part is unsurprising. Its mixture of rancour and temerity in challenging what Caroline had insisted was George Augustus’s prerogative temporarily sealed the fate of the eager noblewoman.
Other women, equally tenacious, behaved with greater circumspection. Mary Cowper reported the Duchesses of Bolton and St Albans, Henrietta Howard and Charlotte Clayton, together at St James’s Palace in the aftermath of the coronation in order to pay their respects to Caroline and win the coveted appointment. Persistence and a measure of impudence, Mary Wortley Montagu asserted, were the way to get ahead at court; Lady Cowper’s brother, John Clavering, concluded that only by ‘tormenting’ those with influence could he be anything but ‘the worst sollicitor for my self in the World’.86 In Henrietta Howard’s case, the need was especially pressing. Lady Frederica Schomberg wrote that ‘Mrs Howard had had a Promise … from Hanover in the Princess Sophia’s Time’, an understanding Caroline had reiterated.87 Given her parlous finances and the loathing she felt for her reprobate husband, it was essential that Henrietta successfully translate kind words into solid emolument and an offer of accommodation.
Her success in securing a place as one of Caroline’s women of the bedchamber should not be underestimated. Henrietta Howard was unusual among royal attendants in lacking either a powerful champion or strong claims to royal attention. Five of Caroline’s bedchamber ladies – the Duchesses of St Albans and Shrewsbury, Lady Dorset, Lady Cowper and Lady Berkeley – were married to prominent Whig politicians, while the sixth, the Duchess of Montagu, was a daughter of the Duke of Marlborough, energetic over a number of years in his efforts to assure the electoral family of his support. Charlotte Clayton, a fellow bedchamber woman with Henrietta, also enjoyed Marlborough sponsorship: her background was humble, her origins obscure. In the absence of worldly advantages, Henrietta’s appointment suggests genuine liking on Caroline’s part. Alternatively, if we accept the contemporary view that insisted Caroline was ‘exact in her knowledge of the Characters and Merits of Persons’, she made a correct assessment of Henrietta’s virtues.88 A measure of attachment to Sophia’s plans for this resourceful but unassuming Englishwoman may also have swayed the princess, who was still in mourning for her former mentor and adopted matriarch.
Inevitably politics played its part in nominations to Caroline’s household: likewise similar decisions taken by George Louis and George Augustus. Father and son shared pronounced antipathy for the Tories, whom they considered responsible for the anti-Hanoverian Peace of Utrecht as well as traitorously inclined to Jacobitism. In George Louis’s case, anti-Tory bias in his household appointments was increased by the role of his German advisers. ‘From the top to the Bottom,’ wrote courtier Peter Wentworth, ‘they have a great stroak in recommend[ing] Persons that are fit to serve his Majesty. Most, nay All the Addresses are made to Mons[ieur] Bothmar [George Louis’s Hanoverian envoy to Britain]. He having been so long in England is suppos’d to know all the English.’89
In line with their policy of cultivated ‘Englishness’, Caroline and George Augustus were careful to avoid providing grounds for such accusations (added to which, Caroline’s only German attendants, the Countess of Bückeburg and Baroness von Gemmingen, were as ill-versed as she in British aristocratic society, and incapable of venturing pertinent opinions); George Augustus openly criticised his father’s dependence on his German advisers. Past behaviour and political allegiance, rather than the intervention of Bothmer, appear to have governed the choices made by husband and wife. George Augustus’s appointment of the 2nd Duke of Argyll
as groom of the stole recognised the duke’s long-term support for the Hanoverian succession, as well as a war record that included, like George Augustus’s, fighting at the battle of Oudenaarde. By contrast, Mary Granville ‘had been brought up with the expectation of being a maid of honour’ to Queen Anne. Thanks to her family’s suspected Jacobite sympathies and despite an influential uncle who had served as Anne’s treasurer, she found herself ineligible for the same position in Caroline’s household. Lady Nottingham’s ambition to become royal governess foundered on her husband’s Tory loyalties and her own occasionally theatrical High Church sympathies, which jarred with Caroline’s Low Church outlook.90 Maid of honour Sophy Howe owed her place to a connection to the electoral family: she was a great-great-niece of Sophia’s through the electress’s brother, Prince Rupert. Personal regard also played its part. Lady Cowper reported the brief ceremony of kissing hands on accepting Caroline’s invitation, and ‘the Princess when I had done it took me up and embraced me three or four times and said the kindest things to me far beyond the value of any riches’.91 On Caroline’s part it was characteristic effulgence. To Charlotte Clayton she wrote, ‘I know your good heart is join’d with an infinite wit accompany’d with all the good sense in the world, things and qualities that are very rare, particularly found together.’92
Three days after finalising her choices, Caroline attended Lord Mayor’s Day in the City, in company with George Louis, George Augustus, Anne, Amelia and a handful of her ladies. The previous day, Lady Cowper recorded, had been ‘passed in Disputes amongst us Servants about the Princess’s kissing my Lady Mayoress, and quoting of Precedents … Queen Anne not having kissed her when she dined in the City, my Mistress did not do it either’.93 It is a telling detail. On this, one of her first public appearances, Caroline sought advice on correct procedure. That she chose to model her behaviour on that of Queen Anne and did not kiss the lord mayor’s wife on meeting can be interpreted variously. Anne was her most recent female role model; unlike Caroline, she was a reigning monarch. Invited by Caroline to offer guidance, the Duchess of Marlborough had suggested that appropriate protocol for the new Princess of Wales was that outlined for a royal princess. Ignoring the duchess, Caroline preferred the more exalted model, a clear indication of how she viewed her position and intended to be treated.
Sarah Marlborough scoffed at the pretensions of ‘a little German princess … that some people called Madam Ansbach’, but her own pretensions – of such magnitude that Caroline later referred to the Marlboroughs as ‘the imperial family’ – make her an unreliable witness.94 Self-importance was unquestionably a facet of Caroline’s character, so too an attachment to convolutions of etiquette. Her decision that peers’ daughters at court kiss her hand rather than being kissed by her in greeting inspired resentment among those on the receiving end of a ‘lessening … of their privileges’: ‘All the Lords’ daughters were much dissatisfied with this alteration in the Honour they used to have in former courts, and it made a great noise in the Town,’ the duchess suggested.95 On 3 January 1716, Lady Loudoun described the princess’s response to a satirical poem by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Monday; Roxana or the Drawing Room’. Caroline failed to recognise the poem’s irony, which transformed it from criticism to endorsement of the new princess and her court. As a result she was decidedly not amused.96
Caroline’s elevated sense of her royal status was a characteristic of German royalties, with their exaggerated absorption in bloodlines, and at one with George Augustus’s. Lord Hervey would note that ‘the pageantry and splendour, the badges and the trappings of royalty were as pleasing to the son as they were irksome to the father’, etiquette and ceremony a clear substitute for influence or responsibility.97 Praise for Caroline’s refusal to convert to Catholicism invariably suggested that she ‘preferr[ed] a sound faith to the pomps of the world’.98 In truth she shared George Augustus’s predisposition, which had also been Anne’s: the late queen was described as mindful of ‘very little besides ceremonies and customs of courts and suchlike insignificant trifles’.99 Prince and princess embraced key aspects of Anne’s court ceremonial, including, in George Augustus’s case, the minutely choreographed ritual of dressing in the presence of privileged attendants, a morning meeting of the main household officers known as the levée.100 For the moment Caroline’s ardour kept pace with her husband’s: he ‘had not more at heart all the trappings and pageantry of sovereignty than she the essential parts of it’.101 Like much of the couple’s policy of anglicisation, the levée – offering an exclusive forum for informally expressing opinions and requests – asserted continuity between Stuart and Hanoverian practice: it deliberately adhered to precedents established in Anne’s reign.102
In German courts, royal women typically balanced the political and military pursuits of their menfolk by shaping their cultural and social lives; they played their part in court ceremonies which upheld the unique status of royalty. Jointly the roles of husband and wife comprised twin aspects of royal ‘leadership’. Even Figuelotte, dismissive of Frederick’s absorption in protocol, provided for chosen members of his court lively entertainments and inspiring cultural direction at Lützenburg. At Hampton Court and Kensington Palace, Mary II had adopted a similar role in relation to the chilly (and frequently absent) William III, shaping the structure of day-to-day court life.103 Insofar as she was able, living under her father-in-law’s roof, Caroline pursued a similar agenda. Vigorously she reignited a court calendar moribund since the dull days of Queen Anne’s continuing ailments, beginning with the appointment of her household, the entertainments she provided in George Louis’s stead, and her decision to be treated with the kind of formalised deference previously restricted to reigning queens. The change was rapid. Lord Chesterfield reported in 1716 that ‘the gay part of the town’ was ‘much more flourishing’: ‘balls, assemblies and masquerades have taken the place of dull formal visiting days’. A new liveliness coloured fashion and behaviour, even attitudes to sex. ‘Women,’ he added ‘are become much more agreeable trifles than they were designed … Puns are extremely in vogue and the license very great.’104
Few women merited the label of ‘agreeable trifles’ more than Caroline’s maids of honour. Her tolerance of their frivolous behaviour points to the same open-mindedness with which she regarded George Augustus’s philandering. As in other aspects of their lives, in determining the tone of their court husband and wife acted together, and George Augustus’s approval can be assumed. Caroline took pleasure in her female household. Her ladies partnered her at cards and dice games like hazard, at which she and the Duchess of Montagu won £600 on Twelfth Night 1715. Complacently she wrote to Leibniz that her ladies ‘served her with all the attention in the world’.105 Letters to Liselotte about etiquette at Versailles indicate her fascination with royal ceremony at its grandest and most prescriptive.106
Her women’s usefulness to Caroline was comprehensive. In most cases connected to the political establishment by ties of marriage or family, they offered her a channel of information and, potentially, influence. Her friendships with elite women built bridges between the monarchy and aristocratic society, and helped maintain a political dimension to court life. ‘Mama is so impatient about the business that is in the house [of Commons] today that she desires your opinion about the turn it will take,’ Princess Anne wrote on Caroline’s behalf in 1730, to a lady-in-waiting who was married to a government minister.107 This process also worked in reverse, with ladies able to request favours of the princess on behalf of husbands, brothers and remoter connections. In addition, in 1714, to a newcomer in a foreign city, Caroline’s attendants supplied companionship and, occasionally, guidance. Supportive female friendship had been a feature of her life since the years with Figuelotte in Berlin. Naturally warm, she craved and excelled at such closeness. ‘I wait for that moment with impatience, that I may with my own mouth assure you how very tenderly I am yours,’ she told Charlotte Clayton during an illness of the latter’s. ‘I
am easy on my part if I can have you preserv’d, & if you always are the same to me, as I shall be to the last moment of my life wholly yours.’108
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