The previous year, Liselotte had written from Versailles, ‘From what I hear of the air in London, I don’t believe I could last there for twenty-four hours without falling ill. I’m told there is a constant smell of coal; I couldn’t stand that, and the air is said to be quite thick.’175 Thomas Tickell referred to ‘the Town [that] in damps and darkness lies’.176 Not at Hampton Court. Throughout August 1716 the sun shone day after day, and the huge palace provided an idyllic setting for the extended fête champêtre that Caroline oversaw with George Augustus. It was not their first visit. Surviving accounts, including Mr Brinkman’s bill of October 1715 for ‘A proportion of Table linen to serve Their Royall Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales and Family for fourteen days as the service was at Hampton Court’, suggest they lived there in some style.177 Lady Cowper referred to a summer of ‘great Splendour’, the most glittering that Caroline and George Augustus would enjoy in George Louis’s lifetime; maid of honour Molly Lepell remembered an interlude of ‘a thousand agreeable things’.178 For entertainment courtiers took to the river in a flotilla of velvet-lined barges. There were balls and drawing rooms and gambling at cards and, as at Herrenhausen, lengthy walks in the gardens, which provided a concourse for flirtation – in court argot of the period, ‘frizzelation’.
It was to be a season of contrasts. Prince and princess set about establishing a court utterly at odds with George Louis’s cloistered existence and fustian-clad reserve. Lavishly they celebrated the second anniversary of the king’s accession at the beginning of August. They ‘dined in public every day in the Princess’s apartment. The Lady in Waiting served at table,’ a spectacle visible to anyone sufficiently tidy in their dress to gain admission to the palace, ‘even of the lowest sort and rank in their common habits’, and, according to the Countess of Bristol, ‘a most glorious sight’.179 Whatever the truth of the couple’s feelings, government ministers and their adversaries were received with equal warmth. ‘The King was no sooner gone, than the Prince took a Turn of being civil and kind to Everybody, and applied himself to be well with the King’s Ministers, and to understand the State of the Nation,’ wrote Lady Cowper.180 Even distracted by court ceremonies, George Augustus was not consumed by fripperies. He demonstrated a keen interest in politics, ‘very intent upon holding the Parliament, very inquisitive about the revenue’; he asked ‘daily for papers’.181 The couple’s guests included the Duke of Argyll, no longer a member of George Augustus’s household.
Lady Cowper described the course of Caroline’s days. ‘In the afternoon the Princess saw company or read or writ till the evening, and then walked in the garden, sometimes two or three hours together, and then went into the pavilion at the end of the bowling green and played there [at cards].’182 At Caroline’s invitation, small supper parties took place in the Countess of Bückeburg’s rooms. Her guests included members of her household – the Duchesses of St Albans and Shrewsbury, Lady Cowper and the countess; politicians’ wives and the octogenarian Duchess of Monmouth, widow of Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth, who had died in 1685 for his part in an armed rebellion against James II. Encouraged by Caroline, the elderly duchess regaled her companions with ‘stories of King Charles’s Court and Death’ and his last mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, a ‘tool [of] the Court of France’.183 Courtiers not invited held supper parties of their own. Among Henrietta Howard’s guests in her rooms on the floor above Caroline’s were Alexander Pope and George Augustus himself. In the summer of 1716 the prince’s immediate target was not Henrietta but his wife’s pretty maids of honour, in particular Mary Bellenden. Happy in her pregnancy, Caroline did not dwell on his dalliances, actual or imaginary.
She made no concessions to her condition save the time set aside for quietly writing letters and ‘reading such Books as are rarely attempted but by persons of much leisure and retirement, whose thoughts are not taken up with any of the cares or solicitudes of the world’.184 Reading was George Augustus’s least favourite of her pastimes, and Caroline confined it to that part of the afternoon when he slept off his midday dinner. With the exception of continuing unhappiness over Frederick, her cares and solicitudes were diminished by the king’s absence: she did not share her ladies’ fear that excessive walking in the palace gardens jeopardised her unborn baby or threatened miscarriage, although she humoured their concerns to the extent of ‘tak[ing] some good things [her doctor] Sir David Hamilton gave her’.185 Even George Augustus’s heavy-handed flirtation failed to ruffle her equanimity.
Amid lavish entertaining, the royal couple also indulged philanthropic instincts. For the children of the locality they organised running races with prizes of smocks, petticoats and scarlet stockings provided from the royal purse. The gates of the palace gardens stood open to any who chose to enter. The result, as one visitor noted, was the presence of ‘all sorts of people’, granted ‘free admission to see [the prince and princess]’.186 In this way, Saturday’s Post reported, George Augustus and Caroline encountered ‘numerous Crowds of Country People’. All delighted in the ‘easie Deportment and Affability of the Princess of Wales, who would even condescend to talk to a Country-Lass, in a Straw-Hat, with the same gracious Air her Royal Highness entertains Persons of the first Distinction; and yet, at the same time, lose nothing of her native Grandeur’.187 Such ease and affability, added to the couple’s deliberate visibility, won widespread approval. As a shrewd observer noted, ‘they gain very much upon the people by that means’.188 Among courtiers a fashion for straw hats sprang up, inspired by these encounters and the informality of the late-summer days.
Of course George Louis received detailed reports of goings-on at Hampton Court. Instructed ‘to give an Account of Everything that was doing’, Bothmer made sure of that.189 The absent monarch’s chief concern was not with country sports or millinery. George Augustus and Caroline’s open-handedness in their treatment of Whigs and opposition Tories made them a magnet for the disaffected. Leading Whig ministers Lord Townshend and chancellor of the exchequer Robert Walpole sensed danger. Walpole objected to the private audiences both prince and princess continued to grant the Duke of Argyll. In Caroline’s ostentatious friendship with the disgruntled Scotsman, anger at what she considered George Louis’s unreasonable request undoubtedly played its part. ‘Coldly’, averse to criticism or instruction, she defied the Duchess of Richmond’s plea that she behave with greater circumspection. These audiences, Walpole told Townshend, ‘have such an effect … as draws the tories from all part of the neighbourhood, gives such a disgust to the Whigs as before Michaelmas I may venture to prophecy the company here will be two to one of the King’s enemies’.190
Townshend responded by assiduously cultivating George Augustus. His was an uphill task. Caroline regarded him as ‘the sneeringest, fawningest Knave that ever was’, an impression he shortly consolidated through a foolish error of judgement.191 He assumed that the fastest route to George Augustus’s favour was through Henrietta Howard or Mary Bellenden’s commendation. Accordingly he decided to ignore Caroline, even to show her ‘all the Contempt in the World’.192 Caroline, Lady Cowper judged, ‘had too much Quickness not to feel this as much as possible’; unshakeable was the lady-in-waiting’s conviction of ‘how much it was for [Townshend and Walpole’s] Interest and Advantage to get her on their Side’.193 Hastily, Townshend ‘quite altered his Conduct to the Princess’. For her part, a cynical Caroline chose to accept his blandishments at face value. And unsurprisingly, Lady Cowper concluded, the change in his behaviour ‘brought the Princess into perfect Tranquillity’.194
If accurate, this is a revealing view of Caroline’s determination not to be sidelined. She had repeatedly asserted her compliance with George Augustus’s will – as Walter Scott’s fictional Caroline tells the Duke of Argyll in The Heart of Midlothian, ‘I can only be the medium through which the matter is subjected to [my husband’s] superior wisdom.’195 Her sway was considerable nevertheless; at no point in he
r marriage did a mistress’s influence exceed her own. Other men would repeat Townshend’s miscalculation. None of Caroline’s waiting women ever did so. To Charlotte Clayton, Lady Cowper suggested the summer’s struggles had taken their toll. ‘The Princess has been mightily out of order,’ she wrote on 18 August. ‘She was in great danger of miscarrying.’196
In the last week of September, while Caroline rested in anticipation of an October confinement, George Augustus made a four-day trip to Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire. He visited leading statesmen at home, the Earls of Dorset and Scarborough and the Duke of Newcastle; he attended military and naval reviews in Portsmouth; buoyant civic receptions greeted him in Farnham and Guildford; he took the waters in Tunbridge Wells. In every public encounter ‘bounty and charity … was very liberally bestowed’.197 Such regal junketings had not been George Louis’s intention. He deplored what he considered his son’s deliberate pursuit of popularity. Privy not only to Bothmer’s reports but to the conviction of his private secretary Jean de Robethon that George Augustus ‘only wanted Power to displace Everybody the King liked, and dissolve the Parliament’, he suspected his political intentions.198 Cautiously he had restricted George Augustus’s temporary power; he could not regulate long-distance against the younger man’s influence on either public opinion or the voting habits of members of his household. As peers or MPs, several of George Augustus’s household were eligible to vote in Parliament – against the government if persuaded to. George Louis’s concerns were acute. They were shared by Walpole, who told Stanhope that he worried George Augustus planned ‘to keep up an interest of his own in Parliament independent of the King’s’.199 The gaiety and splendour of George Augustus and Caroline’s summer court masked entrenched mistrust between political factions as well as royal generations. Wittingly, husband and wife had set sail on dangerous seas.
While his father fulminated at Herrenhausen, George Augustus’s focus was Caroline. Her confinement would take place at St James’s Palace. From Hanover her former midwife was summoned. Again Caroline appears to have mistaken her dates. A letter written by Lady Cowper on 9 October suggested her labour was imminent, but nothing happened, and the court did not return to London until the 28th.200 By then, there had been troubling warning signs. To Liselotte Caroline stated ‘she had suffered from bleeding and such pains’.201 More bleakly, she was described as ‘extremely weak and subject to continual faintings’.202 Inevitably her doctors were at a loss to help her. She made the return journey to London by barge, accompanied by George Augustus and her ladies, on a day of bright autumn sunshine.
The first of Caroline’s children born in Britain was a stillborn son. Her five-day labour was dominated by squabbling over the manner of delivery. Prince and princess preferred to trust again to the ministrations of the German midwife. Familiarity and modesty probably swayed Caroline’s viewpoint. Her British attendants, including Lady Cowper, who had recommended his appointment, argued in favour of the physician Sir David Hamilton. Since Hamilton spoke no German and the midwife no English, and each side regarded the other with suspicion bordering on hostility, cooperation proved impossible. ‘The good Princess had symptoms of labour on Sunday evening, and, tis thought, might have been safely delivered of a living son that night, or any time before Tuesday morning, if Sir David Hamilton … might have been admitted to her,’ wrote clergyman White Kennett with patriotic loyalty. ‘But the Hanover midwife kept up the aversion of the Princess to have any man about her … notwithstanding the importunity of the English ladies, and the declared advice of the Lords of the Council.’203
At length, fractiousness gave way to panic as Caroline succumbed to ‘a shivering Fit, which held her a good While, and violently’.204 For an interval her position was precarious. ‘Hurly-burly’ between the warring factions continued nevertheless, and ‘the Midwife … refused to touch the Princess unless she and the Prince would stand by her against the English “Frows”, who, she said, … had threatened to hang her if the Princess miscarried’.205 Meanwhile Caroline’s suffering persisted. She was not the first princess whose wellbeing was sacrificed to disagreements between antagonistic attendants. Only George Augustus’s angry intervention resolved the impasse. In ‘a passion’, he ‘swore that he would fling out of Window whoever … pretended to meddle’. His threats were too late for Caroline’s baby. ‘The poor Princess continued in a languishing Condition till Friday Night, when she was delivered of a dead Prince’ – in White’s account ‘between one and two, when the midwife alone delivered her of a dead male child, wounded in the head’.206
For days afterwards, Caroline continued to languish. ‘Ye backstairs’, Mrs Boscawen told Lady Evelyn, were ‘always soe crowded’ with well-wishers.207 In bed she distracted her grief by reading letters. Belatedly contrite, her ladies-in-waiting took fright at her glancing encounter with death. Their reactions reveal fondness for their mistress, and more: a view of Caroline’s central place within the new regime. To Lady Cowper, Anne Paulet wrote on 10 November, ‘ye happyness of England depends upon her life’.208 Only Caroline, it seemed, could bridge an ever-widening gulf between the king and his heir.
In the evening of 2 November 1717, the sound of cannon fire ricocheted through St James’s Park and at the Tower of London. One year on from her stillbirth, Caroline was safely delivered of a son, her first child successfully born on British soil. In keeping with royal precedent the baby emerged into a crowded bedchamber. Alongside George Augustus, the Duchesses of St Albans, Shrewsbury, Montagu and Monmouth, Ladies Dorset, Hinchinbrooke, Grantham and Cowper, the Countess of Bückeburg and the Archbishop of Canterbury availed themselves of their right to be present at the birth. With greater felicity than the previous autumn, British and German doctors worked side by side. George Augustus reacted with ‘transports’ of joy to this second male heir. George Louis shared his elation to the extent of a £1,000 reward for the messenger who conveyed the news to him at Hampton Court; afterwards, to ‘[see] the child suck’, he visited the royal nursery.209 When the news was made public, the London Gazette reported ‘a universal joy … among all sorts of people throughout London and Westminster, of which the greatest demonstrations were shown by ringing of bells, illuminations and bonfires’.210 ‘Universal joy’ proved as short-lived as the fireworks. In the words of one ballad, the ‘royal babe’ was ‘born of Blood,/Which some call good,/Yet much ill Blood created’.211
A disagreement over the baby’s godparents resulted in a rift between George Augustus and his father that, formally resolved in 1720, never properly healed. The parents chose a trio of godparents: aside from George Louis himself, the king’s unmarried brother Ernest Augustus, and George Augustus’s sister Sophia Dorothea, Queen of Prussia. Royal christenings took place in the mother’s bedchamber, with courtiers or family members standing proxy for absent godparents, the royal mother still in her bed, as at Frederick’s christening in Hanover a decade earlier. Protocol provided no outlet for anger that, on George Augustus’s part, had attained explosive proportions.
George Louis’s decision, at the insistence of his ministers, to name his grandson George William, proved a tinderbox assertion of power. So too his replacement of Ernest Augustus as godparent with his lord chamberlain, the Duke of Newcastle, and of Sophia Dorothea with Caroline’s groom of the stole, the Duchess of St Albans, wife of the captain of the band of gentlemen pensioners in George Louis’s own household. On the surface the king followed recent precedent in including his lord chamberlain among the baby’s sponsors; he was well aware of animosity between Newcastle – ‘as jealous of his power as an impotent lover of his mistress’ – and George Augustus.212
Caroline shared her husband’s irritation at her father-in-law’s heavy-handed meddling. Like him she understood the convention in relation to the lord chamberlain as a matter of tradition rather than a requirement. She had almost certainly anticipated material benefits from her choice of godparent, an important consideration in the case of a second son unlikely to
inherit the crown. Her request that Newcastle merely stand proxy for Ernest Augustus was firmly rebuffed, as was her suggestion that the service be postponed to allow time to reach a compromise. She was exasperated that her preferred name of William, held by three English kings, including the hero of the Glorious Revolution, was to be preceded by ‘George’, which she considered unhelpfully German. Unusually, given her pride in her own rationality – her legacy from Figuelotte, Sophia and Leibniz – she was also troubled by an unhappy prediction about the name.213 Both husband and wife suspected George Louis of deliberate antagonism.
As it happened, intemperate behaviour on George Augustus’s part gave his father the opportunity for which he was apparently looking. At the service of baptism on the evening of 28 November, the prince stood opposite his father. Caroline’s ladies-in-waiting flanked him on one side of her bed, the Duke of Newcastle shadowed the king. The miasma of resentment between them erupted following George Louis’s departure. ‘No sooner had the Bishop closed the ceremony, than the Prince crossing the feet of the bed in a rage, stepped up to the Duke of Newcastle, and holding up his hand and forefinger in a menacing attitude, said, “You are a rascal, but I shall find you.”’214 Or in the words of a ballad-writer: ‘the Prince did wax full wroth,/E’en in his Father’s hall: “I’ll be reveng’d on thee (he cry’d),/Thou rogue and eke rascal!”’215 He accused the statesman of dishonesty. Unnerved by the force of his anger and confused by the thickness of his German accent, the duke claimed George Augustus had challenged him to a duel: ‘I shall fight you.’ It was this that he reported to the king. ‘The Peer thus provok’d in a high indignation/Limpt forthwith away to the Head of the Nation;/To complain of the abuse shew’d to one of his Station.’
The First Iron Lady Page 17
