The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  Overwhelmingly the young women she chose as her maids of honour were vivacious, flippant, pretty and pert. Despite an age gap of more than a decade, Caroline took pleasure in the robust charms, ‘merry pranks’ and vigorous flirtations of Molly Lepell, Mary Bellenden, Mary Meadows, Sophy Howe, Mary Howard and their colleagues, whose enticements Alexander Pope celebrated in his ‘Court Ballad’ of 1717.109 Mary Wortley Montagu expressed surprise at ‘a virtuous Princesse with a Court so lewd’; another contemporary described Caroline’s relationship with the young women as that of ‘Mistress, Friend and (I may say) a Parent’.110 In those around her Caroline prized liveliness of spirit, virtue and intelligence, but not necessarily all three in combination, and she valued those companions able to entertain her. ‘You know me, & know that I love people of wit & merit,’ she admitted.111 Save when their behaviour threatened her own reputation, she avoided interference in her maids’ lives.

  In accordance with the diktats of etiquette, the women of Caroline’s household performed countless small acts of public reverence. Each curtsey, every bowed head and bob offered visible proof of her status as pre-eminent royal female. Their daily duties were bookended by her dressing and undressing; they accompanied her outings, served her at the dining table, attended her at formal assemblies, read and talked to her in the privacy of her rooms; they handed her the cups of chocolate of which she was so fond and the ‘long hoop petticoats’ of crimson linen, stiffened with whalebone, that gave her heavy silk underskirts their distinctive silhouette.112 On occasion they represented Caroline in public, as in the autumn of 1725, when Lady Pomfret stood royal representative at the christening of one of Lord and Lady Hertford’s children.113 Their tasks were trivial, menial, repetitive; alternatively decorative and undemanding. Unfettered access was their reward.

  An account supplied to Caroline of the contrasting but complementary duties of ladies of the bedchamber and women of the bedchamber in the reign of Queen Anne indicates the nature of their tasks and the difference in status between the two groups of attendants, as well as Caroline’s determination to be guided by royal precedent.

  If her Majesty shifted [put on her clothes] at noon, the Bedchamber-Lady being by, the Bedchamber-Woman gave the shift to the Lady without any ceremony, and the Lady put it on. Sometimes, likewise, the Bedchamber-Woman gave the fan to the Lady in the same manner, and this was all the Bedchamber-Lady did about the Queen at her dressing.

  When the Queen washed her hands, the Page of the Backstairs brought and set down upon a side-table the basin and ewer; then the Bedchamber-Woman set it before the Queen, and knelt on the other side of the table over-against the Queen, the Bedchamber-Lady only looking on. The Bedchamber-Woman poured the water out of the ewer upon the Queen’s hands.

  The Bedchamber-Woman pulled on the Queen’s gloves when she could not do it herself.

  The Page of the Backstairs was called in to put on the Queen’s shoes.

  When the Queen dined in public, the Page reached the glass to the Bedchamber-Woman, and she to the Lady-in-Waiting.

  The Bedchamber-Woman brought the chocolate, and gave it without kneeling.114

  Every action and gesture was regulated and prescribed. In her role of lady of the bedchamber, Lady Cowper recorded an occasion when ‘the Duchess of St Albans put on the Princess’s Shift, according to Court Rules, when I was by, she being Groom of the Stole’, the lower-ranking countess deferring to her superior.115

  While women of the bedchamber served on bended knee, pouring water over Caroline’s hands for washing, ladies of the bedchamber were of loftier status. The bedchamber women dressed the princess’s hair under the supervision of the bedchamber ladies, who discussed with Caroline her choice of jewellery. Even in the latter’s case, intimacy need not extend beyond the handing from attendant to mistress of a fan. But intimacy was not the point. Each permission was symbolic, each arcane distinction a means of enacting royal superiority and enforcing loyalty. It sounds an irksome business for all concerned, but was not universally regarded as such. Caroline understood that its effectiveness depended on its wholeheartedness and the strength of her own relationship with the women involved.

  For Caroline, who believed unshakeably in the sanctity of royalty and the gulf between those of royal blood and ‘mouse droppings in the pepper’, traditional court ceremonies, accomplished with the willing cooperation of an aristocratic household, confirmed her own legitimacy and maintained appropriate dignity for the crown. She saw that her attentiveness to precedent suggested a continuum encompassing both Hanoverian and later Stuart rule. She was also afforded opportunities for patronage among her new countrywomen.

  George Louis, by contrast, at first dispensed altogether with the position of groom of the stole. He dressed in private with the assistance of two Turkish valets brought with him from Hanover, Mohammed and Mustapha. Two years after his accession he ennobled the former, allowing him to select his own title. Mohammed’s choice of ‘von Königstreu’, meaning ‘true to the king’, suggests his loyalty to George Louis and George Louis’s ability, like Caroline, to inspire partisanship when he chose to do so. Although George Louis added to the number of his bedchamber attendants over time, responsibility for his wigs, hats, shirts and other clothing remained Mohammed’s. Despite difficulties of distance and with no idea of patronising British manufacturers, Mohammed continued to place orders with the same suppliers he had used in Hanover.116

  By contrast Caroline’s private account books indicate that, if her patronage was not exclusively British, she at least obtained Continental goods through British sellers, like her purchases of ‘Black frinch Lace’ from ‘E Tempest, Milliner’, and a ‘compleat head of Brussels point’ from lace merchant John Denay.117 In other instances, including purchases from Mr Stockers and Mr Reeds, both provincial lace-makers, she bought British goods direct from the manufacturer.118 Her participation in a formalised dressing ritual, assisted by her English waiting women, may also have helped to ‘anglicise’ her clothes choices. Liselotte described the ‘peculiar headdresses’ worn by Caroline’s daughters in 1715 as looking ‘exactly like the folded table-napkins which are produced at German Courts when company is expected’.119

  Caroline’s letters to Charlotte Clayton, and Mary Cowper’s account of her treatment by Caroline, prove that her conviction of royal superiority did not preclude warmth or bonds of affection between mistress and ladies. Thoughtful in her present-giving, she ‘sent for Amber out of Germany, for Boxes for her Ladies’. To Mary Cowper she gave ‘a fine gold Box … with Words which far exceeded its Value’.120 As Lady Cowper concluded following her first waiting, ‘I am so charmed with her good Nature and good Qualities, that I shall never think I can do enough to please her.’ Two years later she described Caroline as ‘a most charming, delightful Friend, as well as Mistress’.121 Similar opinions would be repeated. Caroline’s charm – both instinctive and diligently cultivated – was a powerful tool in her armoury. By employing a majority of women with personal links to George Louis’s government she ensured, insofar as she was able, that their desire for the regime’s success matched her own.

  As mistress and attendants would discover, Caroline soon had need of all the friendship she could muster.

  The portrait of Caroline by Thornhill in the coved ceiling of the Queen’s Great Bedchamber at Hampton Court was George Louis’s commission. His choice of a scheme of painted decoration, incorporating portraits of three generations of the new dynasty, followed a visit to the Thames-side palace with George Augustus in November 1714. Completion of the Queen’s State Apartments, unfinished since Mary II’s death twenty years earlier, would provide the prince and princess with accommodation appropriate to their rank. In addition, Thornhill’s decoration promised a piece of powerful visual propaganda in a handsome new setting for the ceremonial levée, which George Louis himself avoided. He approved the painter’s preparatory sketches personally.122

  This inclusive mural iconography was not a sign of fam
ily unity. In 1714, Leibniz received a letter from Melusine von der Schulenburg’s brother Frederick William informing him that ‘the father treats the son with excessive rigour, not wishing to satisfy his most insignificant wish’.123 By the end of the following year, rumours of a rift had reached Versailles. ‘People say here,’ Liselotte wrote, ‘that the Prince [of Wales] is on very bad terms with his father, and that they won’t speak to one another.’124 A cousin of George Louis’s, a former confidante of Sophia’s and a correspondent of Caroline’s, she did not express surprise.

  The tension between father and son was of long standing, a dark penumbra over Caroline’s marriage from the outset. If George Louis had intended Tommaso Giusti’s fresco cycle at Herrenhausen, based on the story of Aeneas, to promote respect between father and son – the ‘pietas’, or devotion to family, of Virgil’s Aeneid – he was to be disappointed. The fault was in large measure his own. His cuckolding by Sophia Dorothea and the collapse of family life following her disgrace stamped George Louis for the rest of his life. Physical similarities between George Augustus and Sophia Dorothea have been noted. Despite a loving relationship with his own father, and the influence of Sophia with her highly developed sense of family and dynasty, George Louis does not appear to have attempted to rebuild his fractured relationship with his only son. From his accession as elector in 1698, he excluded George Augustus from any approach to power; he restricted his military experience to a single campaign in 1708. In doing so, he consigned him to a life of aimlessness: an excessive fondness for hunting and a preoccupation with princely genealogy and convolutions of etiquette. Resentment was the inevitable consequence. St James’s Palace afforded fewer opportunities for separate living than Hanover, where, at least once, Caroline and George Augustus had chosen to remain at the Leineschloss while George Louis and his court removed to Herrenhausen. In London enforced proximity intensified family friction. Caroline’s role as wife included providing George Augustus with an outlet for the recurrent frustrations that dominated his relationship with his intractable parent.

  George Louis’s behaviour did not alter following the move to Britain. In October 1714 he created George Augustus Prince of Wales – ‘our most dear son, a Prince whose eminent filial piety hath always endeared him to us’, an acclamation that would swiftly gain in irony.125 He allowed him to attend meetings of the privy council and the cabinet, both bodies of key ministers with important decision-making powers. In May 1715 he agreed to Parliament’s financial settlement of a £700,000 annual civil list payment (made up of customs, excise and postal duties). He did not refuse Parliament’s suggestion that £100,000 of this sum be earmarked for the Prince of Wales and his family, a portion for Caroline’s use, the whole sum set aside for Caroline in the event of George Augustus’s death.126 None of these concessions translated into either purpose or patronage for George Augustus, who was barred from the king’s private audiences. In March 1715 he took his seat in the House of Lords. Caroline’s journey to Westminster with her daughters to witness this spectacle, which husband and wife had anticipated even in the last reign, was widely reported. Together they sat in state on chairs placed to the right of the throne. George Louis regarded the ceremony as empty rigmarole, without implications for the younger man’s profile. He made clear his displeasure at Caroline’s keen interest in politics. Undeterred, she attended parliamentary debates whenever she considered the issue sufficiently pressing. In April 1716, for example, despite George Louis’s disapproval, she watched the progress of the Septennial Act, by which the Whig ministry gathered around the king prolonged its term in office from three to seven years.127

  A crumb from the royal table, George Louis permitted his son and daughter-in-law to receive foreign ambassadors on his behalf. Neither was hoodwinked that their role was more than decorative. With his impatience of ceremony, his taciturnity and something frigid in his manner, George Louis disdained the formalities of diplomatic receptions. Caroline embraced the opportunities offered for regal condescension, and performed her part with warmth and conviction. In 1717 the Irish-born estranged wife of the Portuguese ambassador, Catherine da Cunha, a Catholic Jacobite, was disarmed by the easy charm of Caroline’s welcome: ‘I’ve been three times at Court and alwayes the Princesse has treated me with a more than ordinary distinction; in short to soe great a degree that its a shame to repeat al the kind and obligeing things she sayes to me, and were she my mother she coud not doe more.’128 A diplomatic memorandum records Caroline’s attentiveness to the wife of the Venetian ambassador: ‘After the Ambassadress had been brought to bed a fortnight, Her Royal Highness sent a message that she would come to see her, which the ambassadress excused herself from at that time, her House not being yet in Order to receive that Honour.’129 Opportunities for Caroline to showcase her charm did not amount to meaningful employment for the restive George Augustus.

  In north and south-west England and across Scotland in the autumn of 1715 the anti-Hanoverian feeling apparent at the time of the coronation erupted into an uprising. In York, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had observed, ‘all Protestants here seem unaminous [sic] for the hannover succession’; others were less convinced.130 The observant had noted the signs: mourning clothes worn on George Louis’s birthday, skirmishes and window-breaking on the anniversary of Anne’s coronation, an efflorescence of scurrilously disrespectful balladry. ‘A Sacred Ode to King George’ denounced George Louis’s accession as offensive to God and a usurpation: the balladeer addressed the king as ‘thou who sits upon the Throne/Of STUART’s Ancient Race,/Abandoning thy Rightful own,/To fill another’s Place’.131 In ‘An Excellent New Ballad’ the king appeared as ‘a Turnip-Hoer … [who] reap’d where [he] ne’er sow’d’.132

  As the turnip-hoer’s daughter-in-law, Caroline was not exempt from the fluctuating popular mood, nor an object of affection among Jacobites. In April 1715, Liselotte reported Jacobites lobbying her: ‘The Princess of Wales is supposed to have received a sort of petition asking her to consider, just and God-fearing as she is known to be, that the only rightful heir to the kingdom is the one known as the Pretender, as he was King James II’s son as surely as her husband was Count Königsmarck’s. How unspeakably insolent, if this really was said to the Princess! England is a mad country.’133

  The insurrection provided an obvious opportunity for a member of the new dynasty to join government troops and serve as a focus for loyalty. Given George Louis’s age and position as king, and Frederick’s absence, George Augustus was the only candidate. Instead, command of government forces was entrusted to his groom of the stole, John, Duke of Argyll, gazetted the previous September as ‘Generall of our Foot in Scotland’, while George Augustus continued to chafe in London.134

  The Scottish duke’s suppressing of the uprising demonstrated afresh his commitment to George Louis’s family. He described Jacobite forces as ‘ten times more formidable than our friends in England ever believed’, and their ‘vigilance and furious zeal’ as ‘inexpressible’.135 As a result, although Argyll claimed victory, the outcome of the battle of Sheriffmuir in November was regarded as ambiguous, both sides suffering losses, both initially believing they had won. To Lord Townshend, secretary of state for the Northern Department, Argyll explained the impossibility of pursuing a later offensive: ‘The weather here is extremely severe; the frost is great; and there is deep snow upon the ground.’136 Neither his equivocal ‘victory’ nor this failure to seize any subsequent initiative impressed George Louis, and Argyll was replaced as commander by William Cadogan.

  All too soon, the king vented his disappointment in a manner calculated to goad George Augustus to fury. He voiced no sympathy for his son’s enforced inertia at so critical a juncture, nor for the Jacobite peers condemned to death for their part in the rebellion. Caroline, by contrast, petitioned on behalf of the youthful traitor Lord Carnwath at an evening entertainment at St James’s Palace, ‘hasten’d out of ye drawing room into her owene rooms and cryed’ – grounds for later celebrations
of her compassion like that of the poet Richard Savage, who wrote of her as queen, ‘Your heart is woman, though your mind be more’, and Walter Scott’s fictional Caroline, who in The Heart of Midlothian promises to intercede with George II to obtain a pardon for the sister of Jeanie Deans for a wrongful conviction of murder.137 Other appeals begged Caroline’s intervention for those who had ‘the misfortune to engage in unnatural rebellion against their rightful and lawful sovereign … and now have an unfeigned sorrow and abhorrence for so Unnatural an Attempt’.138 The warm-heartedness remarked on by her ladies-in-waiting was not simply a matter of calculation.

  It was not yet the case that George Louis’s treatment of George Augustus amounted to unrelieved hostility, rather that the father discounted the son’s claims to greater responsibility or prominence. Coolness, observers noted, obtained on both sides. ‘The late King,’ remarked the politician Robert Walpole in 1730, ‘did not like that his son should be preferred to him.’139 Confining George Augustus to trivialities was George Louis’s means of denying him opportunities for popularity in a period before the development of those civic and charitable duties that subsequently constituted royal engagements.

  In this the king reckoned without Caroline. Her charm offensive, ‘the warmth and goodness of her Heart [that] irresistibly broke out on every occasion, and on subjects of every kind’, ranged from learning country dances to winning over the wife of the Portuguese ambassador and crying at the fate of condemned Jacobite nobles, and reaped dividends for husband as well as wife.140 As early as 1705, requesting the new English edition of Saint-Evremond’s essays, she had indicated her commitment to her husband’s British prospects; within those essays she encountered Saint-Evremond’s dictum that ‘he who sets out to write the History of England must write the History of Parliaments’, with its clear warning note.141 Caroline’s anglophilia is too consistent and wide-ranging to be other than deliberate. It was a policy forged in Hanover, in an atmosphere of uncertainty over the likelihood of the electoral family’s succession. Publicly she had never wavered. Her first motives were to prove, in the only way available to her, the family’s fitness to rule. Only in Britain, where the difference between Caroline’s approach and George Louis’s became clear, did this outlook appear to challenge the monarch.