The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  She allowed Clarke a degree of frankness in their dealings. According to one anecdote, Caroline ‘once pressed … Dr Clarke strongly to acquaint her with her faults. After evading this delicate business as long as he could without giving offence, he at length said; “As I am compelled, your Majesty must pardon me for saying that when people come from the country to St James’s chapel for a sight of the royal family, it is not a very edifying example to them, to see your Majesties talking during the whole time of divine service.” – The Queen blushed: told the Doctor he was right, and a hearty laugh ensued.’103 And Caroline was candid in her dealings with Leibniz. In the month of the ‘extraordinary light’, she described herself to him as ‘nearly converted’ by Newton’s theories on the ‘reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light’; in May she explained, ‘I am in on the experiments, and I am more and more charmed by colours.’104 For Leibniz, such admissions were so much wormwood and gall.

  The triangular dialogue of Leibniz, Caroline and, in the role of Newton’s amanuensis, Clarke, continued until Leibniz’s death in November 1716. A year later, when the letters were published as A Collection of Papers which Passed between the Late Learned Mr Leibnitz and Dr Clarke in the Years 1715 and 1716 Relating to the Principles of Natural Philosophy, they bore Clarke’s statement that their publication was validated by Caroline’s patronage. Her participation in this altercation, which was complex and contentious, demonstrates her excitement at developments in contemporary thought. It also indicates the longevity of the influence of Figuelotte and Sophia. Caroline understood the critical importance of appearing to embrace Anglican orthodoxy, particularly given Queen Anne’s public record of wholehearted and rigorous piety. ‘As she knew she had the reputation of being a little heterodox in her notions, she often … denied herself the pleasure of seeing and conversing with men who lay under that imputation,’ recorded Lord Hervey; consistently she questioned religious truisms.105 In line with current thinking, her curiosity blurred distinctions between science, theology and philosophy. She enjoyed the company of those who shared her interests. In 1716 she granted audiences lasting up to three hours to Benjamin Hoadly, absorbed by the ideas on authority within the Church of this controversial Low Church bishop and his unwavering support for the Hanoverian succession.106 In turn, her own enthusiasms inspired those around her. Lord Hervey mocked Lady Deloraine’s absorption in philosophy in 1731, writing, ‘she has taken of late into the sweet fancy to study philosophy and talks all day, and I believe dreams all night of a plenum and a vacuum. She declares of all philosophers Dr Clarke is her favourite and said t’other day if there was any justice in Heaven, to be sure he took place there of the twelve apostles.’107 It was recognisably one of Caroline’s fancies.

  Caroline’s earliest encounters with the Anglican priesthood date from the beginning of George Louis’s reign. Diligent in demonstrating the level of religious devotion she knew was expected of royal women, she nevertheless engaged in exchanges of views with priests of wide-ranging outlook. As a result of her Lutheranism, her instinctive sympathies were for Low Churchmen and Latitudinarians – those within the Church of England who favoured a liberal approach to liturgy and doctrine, like Clarke, Hoadly, who edited Clarke’s Sermons, and Robert Clayton. She also included among her circle High Churchmen: Archbishop Wake, who aspired to closer relations between Anglicans and French Catholics; leading Tory Churchman Dr Thomas Sherlock, Dean of Chichester, reported in 1727 as having ‘oftner access [to Caroline] in private than anyone of the clergy’; and the cleric who became her chaplain, Joseph Butler.108 For the remainder of her life, at Leicester House and beyond, Caroline continued to explore aspects of theological debate within informal conversation and in her reading. Lord Egmont concluded, ‘she reads and converses on a multitude of things more than [her] sex generally does’.109 It was a further instance of the continuing legacy of her first mentors.

  As with his contempt for ‘boets’ and ‘bainters’ (poets and painters), George Augustus did not share his wife’s interest in religion. The couple were closer in their political outlook and their attitude to George Louis.

  From the beginning, each understood the conditions necessary for ending the royal quarrel. Without an apology on George Augustus’s part, they recognised that reconciliation would remain impossible. The king was determined on control. Sunderland reported him as asking, with biblical rhetoric, ‘Did you not always promise to bring me the Prince bound hand and foot?’110 As early as February 1718 one journal pointed out that, without the prince’s submission, ‘’tis absurd to think of healing the breach’.111 The same publication identified Caroline as the ideal mediator, on the grounds of her ‘consummate conduct and goodness’ as well as her particular interest in the issue. A petition from ‘several loyal subjects, Englishmen and Protestants’ proposed ‘none so proper as your Royal Highness to assuage these jealousies and reduce both parties to a reunion’.112 And far from being damaged by the ongoing schism, Caroline’s popularity remained high: she was widely regarded as an innocent victim in the conflict between father and son, her task of intermediary a delicate one. In April 1719 a Catholic sedan-chair carrier, or chairman, called Moore insulted Caroline in her sedan chair. According to the report in the Weekly Journal of his trial and its aftermath, he found himself jeered by angry crowds, who followed him from Somerset House to the Haymarket. ‘The respect her Royal Highness has among all parties was remarkable in the general cry there was all the way he pass’d of “Whip him”, “Whip him”; and by the great number of people that caressed and applauded the executioner after his work was over.’113 In the event, however, it was not Caroline, working alongside her husband, who brought about the uneasy truce unconvincingly enacted on St George’s Day 1720, but a go-between of a different complexion.

  Throughout the winter of 1719, ‘every Day … once, if not twice’, Caroline had been visited at Leicester House by Robert Walpole.114 Walpole was the political leviathan of the age, an abrasive, opportunistic Norfolk squire of redoubtable intellect, excluded from office since his quarrel with Stanhope and Sunderland but still a dominant presence in the House of Commons. In 1719 he helped defeat a government Peerage Bill meant to prevent George Augustus from creating new peers after his accession and thus perpetuate indefinitely the ministry’s own political hegemony.115 Displays of oratorical mastery, however, were not enough for Walpole, nor were George Augustus’s best interests his primary motive. He intended a full return to power and saw the long-term political dangers of a continuing royal rift. Assiduously he cultivated Caroline’s good opinion. Defeat of the Peerage Bill lay close to her heart. ‘The Prince & I work like dogs, & perhaps to as little purpose,’ she wrote as the Commons debate approached, a statement that indicates both the extent of the couple’s political engagement and their partnership.116

  Walpole’s intervention ensured the outcome Caroline wanted. He avoided the mistakes of other politicians in paying court to Henrietta Howard or, like Stanhope, personally berating and offending Caroline. Instead, day after day through that long winter, in his own words he took the ‘right sow by the ear’. His behaviour included its measure of flattery. Through Caroline he was confident he could bend George Augustus to his will. For all Caroline’s initial misgivings – her dismissal of Walpole’s ‘gros corps … jambes enflées, et … villain ventre’ (fat body, swollen legs and vile belly) – politician and princess had much in common. Both inclined to coarseness of expression and strength of purpose; both were earthy, bold, determined. To Walpole, Caroline represented a shortcut to the future king. He was not a man to consume his energies looking backwards. It was another trait they shared.

  Walpole successfully persuaded Caroline of the overlap in their interests. By the spring of 1720, a resentful Lady Cowper lamented that ‘Walpole has engrossed and monopolised the Princess to a Degree of making her deaf to Everything that did not come from him.’117 Walpole’s planned reconciliation between the royal combatants included a proposal f
or repaying George Louis’s £600,000 civil list debt and George Augustus’s debts of around £100,000. As immediately appealing to Caroline was the prospect of a politician at the heart of government sympathetic to prince and princess and the possible return of her daughters.

  Walpole recommended the dispatch of a letter from George Augustus to his father. It was an idea the prince had previously rejected: a sufficient expression of contrition and a guarantee of future obedience. For Lady Cowper, who found herself summarily supplanted as Caroline’s adviser, it smacked of self-serving: ‘all this to procure Walpole and Townshend the Benefit of selling themselves and their Services at a very dear Rate to the King’.118 Caroline’s pragmatic response acknowledged that Walpole’s gain was likely to prove her own. She understood the vulnerability of her own and her husband’s position. She described herself as ‘oblig’d to the lower house for all the Prince enjoys of his possessions’, recognising Parliament’s power over them financially.119 To Charlotte Clayton she wrote of the proposal to cancel George Augustus’s debts, ‘You can easily judge … what I feel upon this head both as the wife and the mother of the persons who will reap the fruit.’120 Correctly she surmised that a quarrel at the heart of the royal family would ultimately benefit only the regime’s opponents, chief among them trouble-making Jacobites.121 ‘The Reputation of a Quarrel,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘is allways so ridiculous on both sides.’122

  In the second week of April, Walpole made Caroline his ‘Offers of Reconciliation’. To Lord Cowper he explained, ‘the Princess was to have her Children again, and … the Prince was to write to the King … and should return to live again at St James’s; that Lord Sunderland had promised to come into all Measures of the Court, and in particular that of raising [£600,000] to pay the Debts of the Civil List, and that this was the only Opportunity for the Prince to make an advantageous Bargain for himself’.123 Despite Walpole’s daily and twice-daily visits to Leicester House, neither Caroline nor George Augustus accepted these assurances as certain. George Augustus insisted ‘he would write Nothing that should tie his Hands’, prepared to voice the bare minimum by way of apology.124 Nor did the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of Norwich, Charles Trimmell, sway either husband or wife. ‘The Bishop of Norwich offered to swear upon his Knees to the Prince and Princess that all terms should be made good and satisfactory to them; that all the Princess’s Friends were to be restored.’125 George Augustus remained sceptical, and Caroline correctly, upsettingly and frustratingly estimated her powerlessness in the whole process. According to Lady Cowper, she ‘cried and said, “I see how all these Things must go; I must be the Sufferer at last, and have no Power to help myself.”’126

  And so it was. So it had been for Eleonore, so too for Sophia Dorothea and, save in the patronage she exercised at Lützenburg, for Figuelotte. If Lady Cowper’s account is trustworthy, both she and her husband implored Caroline’s resolution in insisting on the return of her children; behind the scenes Lord Cowper investigated the possibility of dismissing Lady Portland and replacing her with a governess of Caroline’s choice. Mary Cowper reported Caroline as telling Walpole, ‘This will be no jesting Matter to me; you will hear of me and my Complaints every Day and Hour, and in every Place, if I have not my Children again.’127 Walpole persuaded her that nothing could be gained from George Louis through demands; instead she must trust.128 On 15 April the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, visited Caroline. That she ‘said Nothing of the Affair to him’ proved to concerned courtiers the extent of Walpole’s influence over her: ‘the Archbishop … was entirely kept out’.129 Encouraged by Walpole and Caroline, George Augustus wrote to his father. Lady Cowper described him as ‘governed by the Princess as she is by Walpole’, a verdict that would persist.130

  Lady Cowper considered the couple had been ‘half frighted, half persuaded’ by Walpole, but the letter Caroline wrote to Charlotte Clayton on the eve of George Augustus’s formal reception by his father indicates both excitement and relief: ‘I give you, my dear Clayton, the good news that the reconciliation will be made today, & that I shall soon have the satisfaction of naming you, my dear Clayton, without constraint mine.’131 Three years was a long time to have been separated from virtually everyone bar George Augustus of whom she was fondest. The prospect of closure, even without gain, was a welcome one for Caroline.

  By contrast, George Louis’s response does indeed suggest ‘half’ persuasion. He received his son coldly, Caroline not at all. In return for his pains, on his departure for Leicester House George Augustus was once again attended by beefeaters, ‘drums and guards and fine things’, as Walpole commented dismissively.132 With some vehemence – and to the relief of George Louis – he refused to move back into St James’s Palace. Caroline’s tears notwithstanding, and despite the warnings of the Cowpers and Walpole’s asseverations, mother and father were not reunited with their children, and Lady Portland continued as governess. Four days earlier, Princess Anne had been diagnosed with smallpox, ‘in such a dangerous way that I very much feared for her life’, wrote royal physician Sir Hans Sloane.133 George Louis allowed Caroline to visit her daughter, but no part in her treatment. ‘Every Day, from Eleven to Three, and from Six to Eleven’, Caroline sat at Anne’s bedside until she recovered.134 Her illness, with its attendant anxieties, exposed just how unsatisfactory for Caroline Walpole’s compromise was, particularly when a letter from Archbishop Wake to Lord Sunderland, requesting permission to visit Caroline, ‘not knowing how soon he might be sent for to do his Duty to the afflicted Mother in her comfortless State’, found its way accidentally into Caroline’s hands. It was proof of the very powerlessness she had bewailed. A reflection of her resignation, ‘the Princess said Nothing but “Voyez quel Homme!”’135

  Her own reconciliation with her father-in-law took place on 24 April, in a small closet off her daughter’s sickroom. Unlike George Augustus’s five-minute exchange with his father, their conversation lasted an hour and ten minutes. To Lord Cowper, Walpole reported that ‘the King was very rough with the Princess – chid her very severely in a cruel Way. He told her she might say what she pleased to excuse herself; that she could have made the Prince better if she would, and that he expected from henceforward she would use all her Power to make him behave well.’136 Caroline’s response has not survived. With her customary concern for appearances, as well as her pride, she ‘came out transported at the King’s mighty kind Reception, and told the Doctors and Everybody how mighty kind he had been to her’.137 ‘The Germans used to say,’ Lady Cowper noted, ‘the Princess of Wales was “grandissime Comédienne” [a great actress].’138 At her mother’s knee, Caroline had learned that royalty was a performance art. On 24 April 1720, maintaining the dignity of her rank demanded dissimulation. She had no intention of advertising her humiliation, nor would she acknowledge publicly any justness in Lady Cowper’s argument that prince and princess had been made a ‘cat’s foot’ by Walpole to serve his own ends. Instead she wrote to George Augustus’s sister Sophia Dorothea in Berlin, informing her of her pleasure in the happy outcome.139

  She did not attend the premiere of Handel’s Radamisto at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, three days later. King and prince made what was probably a carefully orchestrated first public appearance together, albeit in separate boxes.140 Popular excitement ran high. Inside the theatre the crowd was sizeable, proof of public interest in the royal peace-making. ‘Many [women], who had forc’d their way into the house with an impetuosity ill suited to their rank and sex, actually fainted through the excessive heat and closeness of it,’ remembered Handel’s biographer Mainwaring in 1760. ‘Several gentlemen were turned back, who had offered forty shillings for a seat in the gallery, after having despaired of getting any in the pit or boxes.’141

  If they hoped for visible signs of affection between monarch and heir, the eager audience was as thoroughly disappointed as the courtiers who had thronged George Louis’s drawing room two nights earli
er, when ‘the King spoke not to the Prince nor none of his Friends’.142 George Louis had recently answered a letter from his daughter. As Caroline had known she would, Sophia Dorothea had reported Caroline’s expressions of joy at the royal reconciliation. The king’s reply betrays the full ambivalence of his feelings for Caroline by this stage. ‘I do not know if the joy the Princess has indicated to you is sincere,’ he wrote. He explained his conviction that, had she been of a similar mind previously, there were several occasions when she could have taken care not to have made things worse.143 It was a clear apportioning of blame, and accurate insofar as it recognised Caroline’s support for George Augustus’s opposition to his father. This view was shared by others among George Louis’s intimates. Mary Wortley Montagu claimed that Caroline ‘never resented anything but what appeared to her a want of respect for [George Augustus]’, the light in which she presented to the prince his father’s intransigence.144 In truth, in their mutual mistrust and antipathy, there was little to choose between the feelings of all three senior royal figures. George Louis suspected that Walpole and Townshend had forced his son into a reconciliation; George Augustus and Caroline knew they had been manipulated. At least George Louis’s dislike fell short of Sunderland’s. The minister, George Louis’s groom of the stole since 1719, toyed with plans for having George Augustus transported overseas.

  ‘I fear I am with child,’ Caroline wrote simply to Charlotte Clayton that July.145 She was thirty-seven years old, and greeted the discovery with mixed emotions. Two years had passed since her miscarriage at Richmond Lodge; still vivid were her memories of George William’s death and the protracted labour that had resulted in a stillborn son the year before that. Referring to the unhappy outcome of all three recent pregnancies, she added, ‘the accidents which have lately happen’d give me noe encouragement’. As ever, gossip in Caroline’s household uncovered the news almost before the princess herself was aware of it. ‘I hear she is a-breeding,’ wrote one of her ladies, ‘but I believe nobody knows she is, so that at most it is but suspicion.’146