The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  George Louis’s decision to believe his servant above his son indicates the collapse of good relations following his return from Hanover in December 1716. Politics provided the short-term cause. ‘How like the English to come between father and son,’ wrote Liselotte, after noting with understatement, ‘it seems there is trouble between the King of England and the Prince of Wales’.216 Other irritants were of maturer vintage.

  In 1717 a schism had unfurled at the heart of government. Townshend and Walpole opposed Sunderland and Stanhope over policies devised by George Louis to gain for Hanover the Swedish territories of Bremen and Verden, partly through the costly deployment of the Royal Navy in the Baltic. After extensive contact during the previous summer, and in discussion with Caroline, George Augustus chose to side with Walpole and Townshend. Accordingly, members of the prince’s household voted against measures proposed in Parliament by Stanhope and Sunderland, while George Augustus himself pointedly stayed away from cabinet meetings.

  Such overt opposition within his own family inevitably unsettled George Louis, who did his best, during the early months of 1717, to persuade his son to a reconciliation. To the same end he made approaches to Caroline too, through a series of intermediaries, including Stanhope and his mistress Madame Schulenburg. Neither husband nor wife yielded. Amiably but politely Caroline resisted Melusine’s plea that she encourage George Augustus to change his mind. She gave the same response to Stanhope, whose angry reaction to her stonewalling included threatening to persuade Parliament that the prince’s income of £100,000 be made dependent on George Louis’s acquiescence. Coolly Caroline countered this bluster with teasing. Once Stanhope had chosen to overlook her; now he lost his temper and presumed to threaten her. But she lacked neither courage nor quick thinking. Of the hot-headed minister, lately married to the daughter of the wealthy merchant Thomas Pitt, she requested, as a further incentive for George Augustus, that he add his father-in-law’s magnificent diamond.217

  If all this resembled calculated defiance, the couple do not seem to have meant to alienate the king completely. Instead they acted naïvely in anticipating tolerance on George Louis’s part of a course of action so contrary to his own best interests. George Augustus’s obstinacy matched his father’s, but the fate of Sophia Dorothea was proof of the ruthlessness of the older man’s response to challenge. Headstrong, impulsive and listless – in the words of one courtier ‘so little master of Himself’ – in the spring of 1717 George Augustus correctly hazarded government weakness.218 What he failed to see – and Caroline failed to impress upon him – was the impossibility of George Louis allowing him to make political capital from the crisis.

  In this climate of uncertainty and mistrust, Stanhope and Sunderland persuaded George Louis to abandon a second trip to Hanover. Instead, like the prince and princess the previous year, he spent the summer at Hampton Court, where George Augustus and Caroline joined him. Caroline’s behaviour suggested emollience, walking in the palace gardens with her father-in-law; George Augustus routinely avoided his father. George Louis expressed his displeasure by refusing to invite George Augustus to share his table when he dined in public; George Augustus retaliated by declining to attend George Louis’s shoot. Of the famous ‘water party’ in July 1717, at which fifty musicians in a barge premiered Handel’s Water Musick, Prussian diplomat Friedrich Bonet noted, ‘Neither the Prince nor the Princess took any part in this festivity.’219 The atmosphere could not have been more different from twelve months earlier, when even the weather had seemed to shine on the efforts of the prince and princess to assert themselves as sovereigns. As if to erase memories of their former sway, George Louis had exerted himself to provide a programme of court entertainments more splendid than anything since his accession.

  In 1714, Melusine’s brother had written that George Augustus ‘behaves in such a manner that the king has good reason to complain’, a reflection of the view of George Louis’s inner circle.220 Three years on and George Louis’s attitude had hardened. In the aftermath of the unhappy baptism, he investigated George Augustus’s challenge to a senior member of his household testily. At the same time, abandoning compromise, he placed his son under house arrest. Barricaded for days in his apartments by armed yeomen of the guard, George Augustus wrote his father two submissive, apologetic letters. Less submissively, he told the king’s emissaries that it was the right ‘of every subject in England to chuse who should be Godfathers to their Children’.221 A distressed Caroline sought reassurance from Liselotte: ‘The Princess assures me that her husband did everything in his power to conciliate the King’s good graces; he even begged his pardon, and owned that he had been to blame as humbly as if he had been addressing himself to God Almighty.’222 It was not enough. Encouraged by ministers who saw in George Augustus’s downfall a means of robbing their opponents of a figurehead, George Louis decided to banish his son from St James’s Palace. To make clear his fall from grace he stripped him of his royal guard. The younger man obeyed only when the command was put in writing: ‘The Vice Chamberlain is ordered to go to my Son, and to tell him from me, that he and his Domesticks must leave my House.’223

  To Caroline, George Louis offered a choice: ‘Notwithstanding the order sent to my Son, she may remain at St James’s, until her health will suffer her to follow her Husband.’ But that was not all. Once before he had been party to a settlement that forbade Sophia Dorothea contact with her children; now he claimed possession of Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline, and their baby brother too: ‘It is my Pleasure, that my Grandson and Granddaughters remain at St James’s, where they are, and that the Princess is permitted to come to see them, when she has a Mind; and that the Children are permitted from Time to Time to go and see her and my Son … In the present Situation of my Family, I think, that whilst she stays at St James’s, she would do well to see no company.’224 It was an impossible choice, as George Louis knew, and a shaken Caroline declined to remain under the royal roof on such terms. Again she confided her predicament to Liselotte.

  Of course she followed her husband. Her position depended upon him, and she, who understood too well the fragility of women’s security, would not jeopardise this certainty. George Louis was an old man, and such unprecedented rage within the royal family must surely abate. Caroline told him she was ‘under the highest obligations to [George Augustus] for having made her the happiest woman in the world; and that though her children were entirely dear, they were not as a grain of sand to her, in comparison of Him’.225 Her stand, as she understood, had a bravura quality. In abandoning to George Louis’s arbitrary pleasure her daughters and the infant son who was still only weeks old, she ensured that popular sympathy rested with George Augustus at his father’s expense. It was a point scored at inestimable cost to all concerned.

  Let Liselotte’s verdict stand for the response of Caroline’s contemporaries, even if she underestimated the extent of Caroline’s involvement in George Augustus’s defiance: ‘The King of England is really cruel to the Princess of Wales. Although she has done nothing, he has taken her children away from her. Where could they be so well and carefully brought up as with a virtuous mother?’226

  In March 1718, George Louis invested the Duke of Newcastle with the Order of the Garter. The following month he conferred an earldom on Stanhope.

  II

  Leicester House

  ‘Not a Day without Suffering’

  ‘A very handsome large square, enclosed with rails and graced on all sides with good built houses, well inhabited and resorted to by the gentry,’ Leicester Square – still, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, in some accounts referred to as Leicester Fields – lay north-west of Charing Cross, within walking distance of St James’s Palace.1 In the north-east corner of the square, behind a courtyard screened from the public way, stood early-seventeenth-century Leicester House – in Sutton Nicholls’s view of around 1720, a large brick-built structure of unremarkable aspect with views over formal gardens, small shops and
rows of genteel townhouses, its own gatehouse and tall gates.2 Behind it lay a modest formal garden of statues and clipped yews, and a ribbon of deciduous trees offering spreading shade. In Alexander Pope’s account it boasted green-painted doors. It suffered infestations of bedbugs.3

  In the wake of their expulsion it was here, on 25 March 1718, that George Augustus and Caroline installed the remnants of their court, after a short but unsatisfactory interval of homelessness spent partly at Grantham House, in nearby Dover Street. It remained their London home until George Louis’s death, the setting for the rival court they assembled in opposition to the king. For the house that had briefly belonged to his paternal great-grandmother, the ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth of Bohemia, George Augustus paid £6,858; he set in train year-long alterations supervised by architect Nicholas Dubois.4 Its immediate surrounds, altered by new building since Elizabeth’s death in 1662, were the haunt of footpads, ruffians and hoydens, noisy during waking hours, a lively, dark-seamed neighbourhood of night-time menaces. ‘Here lives a Person of high Distinction; next door a Butcher with his stinking Shambles! A Tallow Chandler shall front my Lord’s nice Venetian window and two or three brawny naked Curriers in their Pit shall face a fine Lady in her back closet and disturb her spiritual Thoughts,’ wrote a correspondent of the journal Old England about London in 1748.5 So it was three decades earlier in the vicinity of Leicester Square. Less charitable observers noted the proximity to Leicester House of middling shopkeepers’ premises, the row of lock-up shops at its gatehouse entrance.6 For its new incumbents, the house’s association with Elizabeth outweighed nicer drawbacks. It was to Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of James I, that George Louis traced his claim to the throne. In her later collecting, Caroline underlined the significance of this connection. Her purchases included a painting of 1634 by Bartholomeus van Bassen, The King and Queen of Bohemia Dining in Public.7

  Caroline was thirty-five years old. Nearly four years had passed since she last saw her eldest child. Since December she had been parted from her daughters. In leaving behind St James’s, she even lost access to the royal library, a greater deprivation for this princess than many; George Louis had forbidden prince or princess to remove from their apartments in the palace a single piece of furniture. One month ago, husband and wife had sat at the bedside of baby George William and helplessly watched as life slipped away from the tiny child whose birth had occasioned so much anger. ‘His illness began with an oppression upon his breast, accompanied with a cough, which increasing, a fever succeeded with convulsions,’ one newspaper reported.8 As his condition worsened, George Louis had ordered the baby’s removal from smoke-lagged St James’s to the cleaner air of Kensington Palace. From the end of January he had relaxed his severity to the extent of granting Caroline permission to visit all four children. In the case of baby George William it was too late. There was no consolation for Caroline in his night-time burial in Westminster Abbey, accomplished with the full panoply of yeomen of the guard and a procession of royal coaches – ‘in Royal Tomb The little Bones you’ll find’, lamented one balladeer.9 Nor in the autopsy ordered by George Louis to prove that the child’s death could not be blamed on separation from his mother.

  It was an older, sadder, grieving Caroline who set about establishing at Leicester House a setting for a princely court she modelled in part on Figuelotte’s lively Lützenburg. Less than two years earlier she had sat for Kneller’s official portrait, contentment in the smile that gently plays about her lips in that otherwise stiff and formal image. For the moment, equanimity failed her. In the aftermath of George William’s death, public sympathy was strongly in George Augustus and particularly Caroline’s favour. George Sewell’s Verses to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, Occasion’d by the Death of the Young Prince blamed political factionalism for the family rift, the children’s separation from their parents and the loss of the infant prince: ‘the Royal Infant bleeds;/The Royal Mother weeps for British Deeds’.10 Of little solace to Caroline, such sentiments reverberated across the Continent, where memories of George Louis’s vengefulness towards Sophia Dorothea persisted. Liselotte was predictably unconstrained. ‘My God, how I pity our poor dear Princess of Wales!’ she wrote on 24 February. ‘I heard from England yesterday that her last-born little prince died of catarrh on the chest. She saw him at Kensington just before the end. I wish she hadn’t seen him, for it will be even more painful for her now. God grant that this Prince’s death may extinguish all the flames kindled at his christening! But alas, there is no sign of that yet.’11

  Signs would remain scant. Four months earlier, neither husband nor wife had anticipated the scale of George Louis’s anger and implacability. If she regretted at all failing to dissuade George Augustus from opposing his father, it was a chastened though unrepentant Caroline who, in Leicester Square, began the process of rebuilding the couple’s lives in the face of private suffering and public humiliation. At the same time, and without encouragement from George Louis, she kept up a sporadic attendance at the king’s drawing rooms.

  Her challenge was considerable. Pressure of space at Grantham House had prevented prince and princess from holding court in their customary style. This, combined with George Louis’s order that anyone who wished to work or be received at his own court sever all connection with the households of George Augustus and Caroline, had eventually robbed their gatherings of any but their closest friends and the neediest hangers-on. ‘Many waited on them at their first going to Lord Grantham’s,’ it was noted, ‘but few since.’12

  The Duchesses of St Albans and Montagu, both married to men close to the king, were first to leave Caroline’s service. The hastiness of their departure appeared akin to abandonment. The Countesses of Bristol and Pembroke replaced them. Lady Cowper, wife of the lord chancellor, and Mrs Clayton, married to a treasury official, shortly followed, in both cases reluctantly, Mrs Clayton, compelled by financial exigency, dependent on her husband’s exchequer salary of £1,500. For the wealthy Duchesses of St Albans and Montagu Caroline conceived a lasting enmity.

  Caroline’s circle shrank accordingly, but she was not left wholly alone. William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury since January 1716, defied George Louis’s proscription and continued to visit both prince and princess in his role as spiritual mentor. Edmund Gibson, dean of the Chapel Royal, referred to Wake’s ‘intire interest in the prince and Princess’ – Wake himself had attributed a decisive role to Caroline in his promotion to the archbishopric.13 Throughout her marriage, Caroline had taken care to maintain amiable relations with Melusine von der Schulenburg. Now, pressed by the Cowpers, the king’s mistress intervened on Caroline’s behalf. Informally Lady Cowper was advised that she might continue to see Caroline until the princess was fully restored to health. This concession lasted only until December, when she was instructed ‘not to attend her any longer, having had leave to do it only during her illness’.14 Princess and bedchamber lady contrived to meet discreetly. Among Lady Cowper’s surviving papers is an undated letter detailing arrangements for one such secret meeting.15 Happily this cloak-and-dagger deception was of short duration. In April Lord Cowper resigned as lord chancellor, enabling his wife to return to Leicester House. From the country he urged her in vain to encourage ‘that good and serious disposition you found in ye Prince and Princess during your last waiting to submit to his Majesty and to live as becomes ye most dutiful children’.16

  A similar leniency to that temporarily granted Mary Cowper was not extended to others of Caroline’s ladies, and Caroline resorted to further subterfuges. ‘The Princess … loves you mightily, and desires you would not come hither unless you find you can do it with safety,’ Lady Cowper wrote to Charlotte Clayton. ‘She has ordered me to tell you, that if you do think of coming, she desires … that you would be here by nine o’clock in the morning, and if you will give her notice of the day you will come, she will meet you in the garden-house, at the end of the terrace, that nobody may see you.’17 Caroline’s response to
such an assignation suggests her longing for former companionship. On 30 July 1719 she wrote to Mrs Clayton, ‘the four hours you was with me past as two, I long for the time that will give me the satisfaction of seeing you without constraint as often as I can’.18

  To both women Caroline continued to write regularly. In adversity she proved the sincerity of that affection she had expressed in happier times. She described Charlotte Clayton as ‘the best friend I have, whom I shall love as long as my heart has sense or motion’.19 A circumspect note colours several letters. Soon after leaving St James’s Palace, she requested of Mrs Clayton information from her husband about George Augustus’s financial position. ‘Your letters shall be burnt,’ Caroline reassured her, ‘you may send it by my son’s nurse who comes sometimes to see Geminghen [Baroness von Gemmingen].’20 A much-needed spark of humour was added by Mrs Clayton finding herself unable to decipher Caroline’s letters. ‘I laugh’d heartily that you could not read one of my letters, the Prince said to me, You write like a cat,’ Caroline replied to her.21

  Of her women who remained eligible to visit St James’s Palace, or Kensington Palace, where George Louis had embarked on a programme of improvement and renovation, including apartments for Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline, the girls’ mother begged that they ‘goe & see my children’ and pass on to her all the news they could, much as she quizzed visitors to Hanover about Frederick.22 Her need of such reassurances redoubled following George Louis’s decision in May to replace as royal governess Caroline’s friend the Countess of Bückeburg with his own appointment, Jane, Dowager Countess of Portland, noted in court circles for her intelligence and the mother of a large family. George Augustus expressed the couple’s disapproval of the switch by offering Lady Bückeburg an annual pension of £500.