The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  In this instance Caroline would prove more fortunate in her pregnancy. Her thoughts, however, dwelt on her two last births. A letter written by Lady Cowper shows Caroline questioning the right of members of her household to entry to her bedchamber for the delivery. ‘I spoke to [Lord Cowper] last night, according to the Princess’s command, about the people proper to be present at the labour; he bids me say that the Princess is at her perfect liberty in that point to do as she pleases, neither the law, nor any rule or custom, having fixed upon anybody to be present.’147 On 15 April 1721, without attendant duchesses, Caroline gave birth to her fourth baby boy.

  On this occasion no opposition met her decision to call him William Augustus, nor her choice of godparents: husband and wife Frederick William and Sophia Dorothea of Prussia and, as previously, George Louis’s brother Ernest Augustus. Sophia Dorothea learned of the compliment from her father. In a letter written at the beginning of May, George Louis communicated news equivalent to that which, four years earlier, had provoked the royal rift. That he did so may point to a softening – however mild – in his attitude to George Augustus and Caroline.148 For their part the royal couple’s names for their son indicate anything but conciliation.

  At best the news of her pregnancy was a distraction from Caroline’s disappointment at the outcome of events in April, described by the Duchess of Marlborough as ‘deficien[cies] in the late reconcilement’.149 To British representatives at foreign courts and foreign ministers at St James’s, George Louis had sent notice of the restoration of family harmony. Stubbornly, with a zeal born of love, Caroline had held out for the return of her daughters, only to be thwarted by Walpole and George Louis.

  At least the nursery regime devised by Lady Portland was in accord with Caroline’s own priorities. Surviving exercise books belonging to Princess Anne point to ambitious aspirations in the royal schoolroom: extracts from Plutarch, Herodotus and Thucydides translated into French, German transcriptions of theological texts, the history of the Roman Empire rendered in Italian.150 To the music lessons for which Handel received £200 a year were added lessons in drawing and painting from artist Philippe Mercier, afterwards responsible for the best-known image of Caroline’s children, The Music Party of 1733. Crucially, however, and devastatingly for Caroline, the girls remained in their grandfather’s care, in apartments close to his own, or with access to those of Madame Schulenburg, at St James’s, Kensington and Hampton Court. George Louis required control over the princesses; more than that, he expected their affection. To Anne, he wrote, ‘all that I wish my dear granddaughter is that you further nurture your friendship towards me’.151 From an early age, Anne, Amelia and Caroline struggled to balance conflicting loyalties. Forgiveness or no forgiveness, apologies accepted or otherwise, family ‘unity’ would remain elusive.

  After William, there would be two more children for Caroline and George Augustus: Mary, born in February 1723, and Louisa in December 1724, when Caroline was forty-one. A letter written by maid of honour Bridget Carteret after Louisa’s birth demonstrates the extent to which Caroline’s principal function continued to be seen as securing the royal line: ‘It is with great pleasure that I congratulate dear Mrs Clayton upon her Royal Highness’s safe delivery. We think it such a blessing her being safe and well, that we do not repine at not having a Prince at some proper time.’152

  By 1724 there would be no ‘proper time’ left for Caroline: William was the couple’s last son. Caroline’s recovery from Louisa’s birth was unusually protracted. More than a month later, George Louis described her as almost ready to leave her bedroom, following an unspecified ‘violent attack’ either of pain or of illness.153 Like even those closest to Caroline, he had no idea that his daughter-in-law had suffered an umbilical rupture following Louisa’s delivery. It was a secret Caroline would guard determinedly, concealed from all but George Augustus, who agreed never to mention it, and one for which she paid dearly. Six months later, in July 1725, her eleventh and final pregnancy ended in another miscarriage. A letter of 27 July from the Countess of Pomfret to Charlotte Clayton highlights concern among her female attendants about her health in the aftermath.154

  The absence of the three eldest princesses, added to Frederick’s continuing residence in Hanover, divided Caroline’s family permanently. Not only age but location separated the children of Leicester House from their older siblings. William, Mary and Louisa were a decade younger than Frederick, Anne, Amelia and Caroline. They had no experience of electoral life in Hanover, and lived full-time with their parents. Frederick’s upbringing had been entrusted to courtiers and George Louis’s Hanoverian ministers: his governor, Johann Friedrich Grote, was the brother of a treasury minister.155 Attempts by George Augustus in 1718 to secure Frederick’s transfer to London had predictably failed. For Anne, Amelia and Caroline, regular visits from their mother contrasted with constant exposure to a court environment in which their father was regarded with contempt, Caroline with suspicion. For each princess George Louis provided a gentleman usher, dresser, chambermaid, page of honour and page of the back-stairs. All were his own appointments.156 While the regime’s adherents would continue to celebrate George Augustus and Caroline’s royal ‘family’, the togetherness of siblings and parents was illusory. Inevitably it was Caroline’s happiness that suffered most.

  With no alternative, she responded pragmatically. She visited her elder daughters as often as she was able, and took a close interest in the upbringing of her ‘second’ family of William, Mary and Louisa. According to Stephen Philpot’s Essay on the Advantages of a Polite Education joined with a Learned One, published in 1747, Caroline was usually present at the children’s lessons; on other occasions she requested a report from their tutor.157 The younger princesses’ routine was based on that of their sisters, and included an hour-long walk each morning between seven and eight, and regular prayers.158 George Augustus shared aspects of his wife’s involvement. At Leicester House, according to Sir Hans Sloane, husband and wife ‘always took most extraordinary, exemplary, prudent and wise care of the health and education of their children’.159 An associate of Isaac Newton’s commended Caroline’s ‘singular Care for the education of the Royal Issue, and earnest desire to form their minds betimes, and lead them into the knowledge of Truth’.160 Unsurprisingly, the woman whose own handwriting was disastrously self-taught employed a writing master for her youngest daughters, a Mr Palairet.161

  The input of Caroline and George Augustus extended to discipline, as Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough discovered on a visit to Leicester House. The duchess’s arrival coincided with Caroline physically punishing one of her daughters. When the visitor attempted to console the child, George Augustus responded by remarking, ‘Ah, see there, you English are none of you well bred because you were not whipped when young.’162 Momentarily overlooking the couple’s habitual masquerade of Britishness, he identified Caroline’s parental severity as distinctively German. But British childhood too contained its measure of brutality. The cause of death of a four-year-old girl in the family of diarist John Evelyn was identified as her corset: the child’s ribs were broken by over-tight lacing. She died when her broken ribs pierced her lungs.163 And George Augustus shared Caroline’s strictness. In 1751, he remembered, ‘I know I did not love my children when they were young: I hated to have them running into my room.’164

  Set against this severity, Caroline and George Augustus commissioned a third portrait from Martin Maingaud soon after the reconciliation. Completed in 1721, Maingaud’s image of Anne, Amelia and Caroline, aged eight to thirteen, depicts the princesses as the Three Graces in a composition that points to a degree of parental pride.165 A letter from Caroline to the youngest of the princesses shows a mother’s concern for good behaviour, coloured by the mildest asperity: ‘Caroline, I pray you quit your indolence which prevents you from expressing your pretty thoughts and makes you act as if you had neither feeling nor reason.’166 In addition, a verdict of the Duchess of Buckingham, illegitimate
daughter of James II, concerning ‘the little care and regularity that is taken in the prince’s family’ with regard to the tidiness and arrangements of Leicester House, points to parents more interested in family life than the appearances of rooms or a visitor’s good opinion.167

  With some success, Caroline took pains to encourage the six siblings in Britain to think of themselves as a single family. A letter translated by Mary from Latin into English as part of a series of exercises set by the royal tutor Jenkin Thomas Philipps reports, ‘The Duke, your Brother [William], has this morning caught a great Fish two foot long, which he gave to his sister Amelia for her Dinner.’168 In another letter in the same series, Mary translated ‘His serene Highness William, your most dear Brother, has turned the Roman History of Sextus Rufus into English, which he designs to dedicate to your Highness, that it may be a Monument of his Brotherly love towards you.’169 Family togetherness is a constant theme of the ‘letters’ William and Mary exchanged under Philipps’s tuition – the emphasis surely arose at Caroline’s request. ‘I pray God that it may not rain tomorrow, but be a fine day,’ Mary translated, ‘that your Highness may go out in the Coach with the Queen and your Sisters, to catch a great Buck, who is swift of feet, but the Dogs are swifter.’170 A similar emphasis on the siblings’ good fortune, although conventional enough, may also have arisen at their parents’ request. ‘You live a very happy life, you see horse races,’ Mary translated, in a letter that contrasted the blessings of her own life with the ‘privations’ of her tutor’s. ‘I am forced to stay at home for I have no Coach nor horse, & I cannot walk, because it rains very fast.’171

  The education of the younger royal children also included specific sops to their mother’s predilections. On 5 December 1727, Philipps set six-year-old William the following translation: ‘When first I knew you, you seemed to have a great Quickness of Wit & you was not born for Trifles, as other Boys are, but for learning. Yesterday you asked me a very curious Question but hard to be explained, for Instance you asked me if everything could return to Nothing?’172

  This was precisely the sort of philosophical speculation Caroline had encountered at Lützenburg and Herrenhausen, a question of the sort debated by the mixed company at Leicester House. It was a question she might have asked herself, this Princess of Wales at odds with her king, denied the company of her older children, still – when the formalities of reconciliation were done – exiled to Leicester Square.

  Caroline’s affection for her children was shortly tested by an undertaking that engrossed and appalled her contemporaries. In April 1722, at their mother’s instigation, ten-year-old Amelia and eight-year-old Caroline were inoculated against smallpox.

  Two years earlier, Caroline had kept an anxious bedside vigil as Anne battled the disease that she herself had suffered early in her marriage. So serious was Anne’s condition that the Archbishop of Canterbury anticipated her death; her recovery left her badly scarred. The following year, in February, began a two-month smallpox epidemic in London. One doctor reported that it seemed ‘to go forth like a destroying Angel’; it was ‘epidemical and very mortal’.173

  Its terrible toll among acquaintances and her extended family galvanised into action Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, recently returned from Turkey, where she had encountered the process of inoculation that she described as ‘engrafting’. Into the skin of a healthy patient, matter from the pustules of a smallpox victim was inserted; the recipient, in subsequently succumbing to a mild dose of the disease, acquired lasting immunity from its severer forms. Lady Mary’s four-year-old son Edward had been inoculated in 1718. In 1721 her infant daughter Mary was also successfully treated.

  Little Mary’s inoculation was performed by Charles Maitland and witnessed by a handful of members of the College of Physicians, as well as ‘Several Ladies, and other Persons of Distinction’.174 Inevitably the procedure attracted public attention. Physicians petitioned George Louis for permission to experiment with the miraculous process on condemned inmates of Newgate Gaol; royal physician Sir Hans Sloane directed the king’s attention to the breakthrough. For her part, Lady Mary attributed the medical men’s interest to Caroline. She claimed the princess ‘was her firm support and stood by her without quailing’.175

  At George Louis’s agreement, Sloane oversaw the inoculation by Maitland of six prisoner volunteers at the end of August. Five survived. (The sixth was already ill at the time of the inoculation.) Their reward was a royal pardon. Maitland wrote an Account of Inoculating the Small Pox, but deferred publishing. Inspired by Sir Hans and Lady Mary, Caroline had conceived a plan to inoculate ‘all the Orphan Children belonging to the Parish of St James’s, Westminster’.176 Opposition was widespread – from an incredulous public, sceptical physicians, and clergymen who considered the disease ‘a divinely instituted check against sin’.177 In the event only six charity children were inoculated, and Maitland published his account in February 1722. Caroline consulted Hans Sloane following the successful treatment of his own grandchildren. Cautiously, the doctor refused to commit himself. ‘The Princess then asked me if I would dissuade her from it,’ he recorded, ‘to which I made answer that I would not, in a matter so likely to be of such importance.’178 Added to the Wortley Montagus, Newgate prisoners and Westminster orphans, it was endorsement enough for Caroline. With George Louis’s permission, Princesses Amelia and Caroline were inoculated on 17 April. Caroline’s response to what happened next has not survived, but any anxiety she may have felt was soon dispelled by her daughters’ full recovery. Lady Mary described herself as ‘so much pull’d about and solicited to visit people’ due to fashionable interest in the experiments, ‘that I am forc’d to [run] into the Country to hide my selfe’.179

  From Versailles, where medical practice was bungling even by contemporary standards, Liselotte expressed concern. ‘I must confess that I worried a great deal about the Princess of Wales and the two Princesses. I am not so brave, and if my children were quite well I couldn’t possibly steal myself to make them ill, even though it was for their own good.’180 Hers was the prevailing view of the times, that of Caroline and George Louis, who took an active interest in scientific research promoted by the Royal Society, considerably in advance.181 ‘God grant … that the dear little Princesses are protected for the rest of their lives from this horrible disease,’ wrote Liselotte. ‘My doctor doesn’t think this remedy is safe, he says he doesn’t understand it.’182

  In 1723 Maitland travelled to Hanover to inoculate Frederick, whose indifferent health, including glandular pains and ‘fevers’ treated by bleeding and a diet of asses’ milk, was a further cause of Caroline’s concern. For his efforts Maitland received handsome payment of £1,000. The younger royal children were inoculated in 1726. ‘A great Part of the Kingdom follow’d her Example, and since that Time ten thousand Children, at least, of Persons of Condition owe in this Manner their Lives to her Majesty,’ Voltaire wrote in 1733.183 Acknowledging the vital importance of royal sponsorship in overcoming objections, in 1724 James Jurin of the Royal Society dedicated to Caroline his Account of the Success of Inoculating the Smallpox.184

  The formalities of reconciliation accomplished, George Louis had returned to Hanover in the summer of 1720. In his absence, he allowed the three elder princesses to rejoin their parents. It was a lone concession, made with Caroline in mind. For all his reservations, George Louis did attempt to rebuild his relationship with his daughter-in-law, greeting her at a drawing room in May with the unequivocal ‘Je suis ravi de vous voir ici’ (‘I am delighted to see you here’) and, on another occasion, singling her out for conversation when he ‘said not a Word to the Prince, nor any Soul belonging to him’.185 Lady Cowper recorded a conversation between Caroline and Archbishop Wake’s wife at the beginning of July: ‘“Our Children we shall have, and the Regency they promise us, but the Last I don’t believe; and I tell you naturally, my dear Mrs Wake, I will venture my Nose we shan’t have it.” I was pulling on her Gloves, and said, “Yes, Mad
am; if your Highness had thirty Noses you might venture them all without the least Danger to them.”’186

  For three years during the courts’ split, George Augustus and Caroline had provided a focus for opposition politicians. With Walpole, along with Townshend, restored to the ministry, the couple’s closest political associate returned to George Louis’s service. The king’s visit to Hanover was the first of four he would make before his death; on each occasion he denied his son powers of regency or guardianship. Mistrustful of Walpole on account of his part in the reconciliation, George Augustus turned instead for political advice to his treasurer Sir Spencer Compton, speaker of the House of Commons. But Compton was an ally of Walpole’s: he cautioned compromise. Caroline’s mistrust of Townshend predated the family split.

  Compton’s advice was intended for both prince and princess, and was probably unnecessary. For Caroline, as well as George Augustus, stark lessons emerged from their three-year estrangement from the king. Both understood the futility of continuing opposition. After April 1720, a number of disaffected politicians renounced Leicester House for St James’s Palace, their defection proof of the real centre of patronage and influence. To George Augustus’s lasting chagrin, Walpole and Townshend headed the stampede. Lacking an alternative, and with his father embarked on his seventh decade, the heir to the throne settled down to play a waiting game in the unlikely company of Walpole’s Tory opponents, Lords Bolingbroke and Bath. At Richmond Lodge each summer George Augustus put behind him the politics of the capital for up to six months at a stretch, returning in late autumn for official celebrations of his birthday on 30 October. The retirement of the couple’s life in Richmond, in an environment of family and friends without courtly ceremonial, reflected their efforts at increasing detachment. Few official images of either George Augustus or Caroline survive from this period. With retirement came a decline in their public profile. There was some comfort for Caroline in the return to the ‘publick’ days at Leicester House of those courtiers George Louis had forbidden to visit either prince or princess. In May 1720 Sir John Evelyn noted ‘a great deal more company than used to be here before ye reconcilement of ye King and Prince’.187