The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  Instead husband and wife made political capital by alternative means. Unlike George Louis, his mistress Madame Schulenburg, created Duchess of Kendal in 1719, and half-sister Sophia Charlotte, Countess of Darlington from 1722, George Augustus and Caroline emerged largely unscathed that year from the collapse of the South Sea Company. Established in 1711 to secure government borrowing at a fixed rate, the company had become an El Dorado scheme offering investors the profits on a trade monopoly with South America as a means of servicing the national debt. Serendipitously, in 1718 the disgraced George Augustus had lost his position as governor of the company, to be replaced by his father. George Louis’s holdings of South Sea Company stock represented at least £20,000. Bribes of shares worth £15,000 apiece netted support from Melusine and Sophia Charlotte, while two of Melusine’s daughters were each given shares worth £5,000. But the fabled trade with South America was virtually non-existent. Stoked partly by the company’s association with George Louis, Melusine and members of the ministry, the manic speculation of the summer of 1720 was founded, as one commentator marvelled, ‘upon the machine of paper credit supported only by imagination’.188 Share prices rocketed almost tenfold. The fortunate profited mightily. And the inevitable bursting of the South Sea Bubble in September reduced others, including John Gay, to beggary.

  The involvement of monarch, mistress and ministers in so catastrophic a financial fraud shattered confidence in government probity. Allegations of corruption centred on leading players. Lady Cowper borrowed money secretly to acquire stock that swiftly plummeted. It is in this context that we ought to measure her claim that Walpole had won Caroline and George Augustus’s support for reconciliation with bribes of share handouts: ‘pleas[ing] the Princess … by making her a Stockjobber in the South Sea’.189 If this statement is true, the gift represented a change of heart on the part of politician and princess, according to a letter written by Caroline late in 1719: ‘I can assure you upon my honour that Walpole is sincere & has not entered into that ugly scheme,’ she insisted. ‘He is furious in the affair & violent against all those who have bought.’190 In February 1720, Walpole had attacked government plans to make use of the South Sea Company to lessen the national debt; in December he won parliamentary support for proposals to deal with consequences of its collapse. Although he was not the sole architect of the government’s response, it was Walpole who, politically, would benefit most from recovery efforts that included shielding George Louis from censure. The aftermath of the crisis sealed his pre-eminence. Ditto the death from a cerebral haemorrhage of Stanhope in 1721, and that of Sunderland from pleurisy the following April. Neither man had proved himself a friend to George Augustus and Caroline. For the moment their successor was George Louis’s first minister, and distasteful to George Augustus for this reason; he called him ‘rogue and rascal without much reserve, to several people, upon several occasions’.191 Caroline’s response was surely mixed. For Lady Cowper, at whose expense Walpole had achieved his ascendancy over Caroline, the relationship between mistress and bedchamber lady would not recover.

  Meanwhile, in 1722 Walpole embarked on the rebuilding of his family home at Houghton in Norfolk to designs by Colen Campbell. The work was funded by profits of his South Sea Company stock, of which Caroline apparently knew nothing. Like Caroline at Richmond Lodge, he employed as landscapist Charles Bridgeman. And Caroline maintained a polite interest in the after-effects of speculating. In July 1729, hapless equerry Peter Wentworth recorded her ‘ask[ing] me if I was not in the Bubbles. With a sigh I answered: “Yes, that and [other mishaps] had made me worse than nothing.” Some time after, when I did not think she saw me, I was biting my nails. She called to me and said: “Oh, fie! Mr Wentworth, you bite your nails very prettily.”’192 Later still, a Colonel Graham is recorded as delivering to Caroline an account of George Louis’s South Sea stock, compiled by Sir Charles Vernon.193

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described the pastoral revelry of Richmond Lodge: racing boats on the Thames, outdoor entertainments in the new gardens Caroline had commissioned from Bridgeman following her garden-makers ‘summit’ in 1719, and, as summer gave way to autumn, ‘His Royal Highness hunts in Richmond Park, and I make one of the Beau monde in his Train.’194 ‘On Monday night last,’ reported the Daily Post on 23 August 1721, ‘Mr Penkethman [sic] had the honour to divert their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales, at his theatre at Richmond, with entertainments of acting and tumbling, performed to admiration; likewise with his picture of the Royal Family down from the King of Bohemia to the young princesses, in which is seen the Nine Muses playing on their several instruments in honour of that august family.’195 Undoubtedly Caroline was better pleased with this flattering dynastic tableau vivant than with any amount of acting and tumbling, however admirably performed.

  ‘The Prince, and everybody but myself, went last Friday to Bartholomew Fair; it was a fine day, so he went by water,’ wrote one of Princess Amelia’s maids of honour on 31 August 1725. ‘After the Fair, they supped at the King’s Arms, and came home about five o’clock in the morning.’196 For her part Caroline was described as ‘walk[ing] about there all day’ when at Richmond Lodge.197 Indoors she indulged the taste for ceramics, including Chinese and Japanese porcelain, that she shared with Mary II. On 12 June 1724 Lady Hertford reported the East India Company making ‘the Princess a present of Japan which they say cannot be equalled by any in the world. It is indeed the finest that, I believe, ever came to England.’198

  In a contemporary engraving of the house by Joseph Goupy, it appears a Watteau-esque backdrop to holiday diversions. Gate piers frame long views over lawns that are swept and raked by gardeners. Pockets of courtiers disport themselves languidly. High walls and banks of trees shelter decorous enclosures and, behind the matchbox house, with its steep roof and heavy triangular pediment, sunlight washes suggestively. ‘Nothing can be pleasanter than this place. Every field looks like a garden,’ Lady Hertford wrote to her mother.199

  Intimations of princely bliss were only partly misleading. Future sovereigns, George Augustus and Caroline retained influence and consequence. ‘I write to you at this time piping hot from the Birth night, my Brain warm’d with all the Agreeable Ideas that fine Cloths, fine Gentlemen, brisk Tunes and lively dances can raise there,’ wrote Lady Mary to her sister after the ball to mark George Augustus’s fortieth birthday in 1723.200 Celebration of Caroline’s forty-first birthday the following spring was equally enthusiastic. In honour of her position as Princess of Wales, representatives of the Society of Antient Britons presented leeks at Leicester House. The Weekly Journal described the formal birthday reception as ‘the most splendid and numerous that has been known, the concourse being so great that many of the nobility could not obtain admittance and were obliged to return without seeing the Prince and Princess’.201 A roster of bishops, judges and ambassadors from as far afield as Morocco offered congratulations. ‘At one o’clock the guns in the park proclaimed the number of her Royal Highness’s years, and at two their Royal Highnesses went to St James’s to pay their duty to his Majesty, and returned to Leicester House to dinner, and at nine at night went again to St James’s, where there was a magnificent ball in honour of her Royal Highness’s birthday.’202 A year later, at his house near Greenwich the Duke of Leeds marked Caroline’s birthday with night-time illuminations. Bonfires, fireworks and flaming obelisks provided a setting for toasts drunk to royal family and government.

  It was not only royal birthdays that provided diversion. The endowment of a Royal Academy of Music in 1719, the list of subscribers headed by George Louis and George Augustus, made London for a decade the operatic centre of the world. To a succession of new operas by Handel were added works by the newly resident Giovanni Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti; Caroline had encountered both composers previously at Figuelotte’s court in Berlin. In February 1724, Handel’s librettist Nicola Francesco Haym dedicated to Caroline the word-book to the composer’s latest opera, Giulio Cesare i
n Egitto, with its contrasting feminine paradigms: Pompey’s faithful widow Cornelia and the ambitious seductress Cleopatra. Haym praised Caroline’s ‘perfetta e giudiziosa conoscenza della Musica’ (‘perfect and judicious knowledge of music’), which he attributed to Pistocchi’s early teaching.203 Notwithstanding the period’s perfidious flattery, it is clear that Caroline had maintained her early interest in music. The royal dedication in this instance was happier than Handel’s dedication to George Augustus, three years previously, of Floridante. This middling work dramatises the challenges of a Thracian prince whose jealous father attempts to strip him of his rights to the throne.204

  Caroline witnessed an undignified spat between supporters of rival sopranos Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni at a performance of Bononcini’s Astianatte on 6 June 1727. The British Journal reported that ‘on Tuesday-night last, a great Disturbance happened at the Opera, occasioned by the Partisans of the Two Celebrated Rival Ladies, Cuzzoni and Faustina. The Contention at first was only carried on by Hissing on one Side, and Clapping on the other; but proceeded at length to Catcalls, and other great Indecencies: And notwithstanding the Princess Caroline was present, no Regards were of Force to restrain the Rudenesses of the Opponents.’205

  On 16 April 1726, Jonathan Swift noted a new resident at Leicester House. In the words of less enlightened commentators ‘more of the Ouran Outang species than of the human’, the feral child offered as a gift by George Louis to Caroline walked on all fours, laughed, snorted and whinnied and, publicly and unconcernedly, soiled himself. He was called Peter. Villagers had discovered him in woodland close to Hanover, a child of twelve or thirteen who lived among the trees, fending for himself and foraging. He spoke no German and gave no evidence of previous exposure to humans. On George Louis’s orders he had been brought to St James’s Palace. There, at a crowded drawing room on 7 April, he encountered Caroline, resplendent in black velvet and heavily jewelled. Entranced, he listened to her ‘gold watch that struck the hours … held to strike at his ear’.206 She was equally entranced, this princess absorbed by science, philosophy and religion. Peter had no soul, observers insisted; he was a savage, accustomed to eating acorns and moss. He had leapt, Daniel Defoe commented, ‘from the woods to the court; from the forest among beasts … to the society of all the wits and beaus of the age’.207 There is no indication that George Louis’s courtiers identified Defoe’s irony.

  At Leicester House, Caroline invited Dr Arbuthnot – physician, satirist, mathematician, philosopher and a ‘character of uncommon virtue and probity’ – to educate Peter.208 The boy resisted. Arbuthnot diagnosed him as mentally handicapped; courtiers tired of antics that ceased to charm. So Peter was lodged in Hertfordshire with a family paid for their surrogacy. For sixty years he worked as an agricultural labourer, spared the scarlet stockings royal courtiers had wrestled him into. At Caroline’s intervention and thanks to the efforts of Dr Arbuthnot he avoided a return to the house of correction in Celle where he had first been brought to George Louis’s attention. His reign as court jester was brief.

  Briefly Peter’s misrule had recalled the high spirits of the first years of Caroline and George Augustus’s court. His departure was one of several from Leicester House. By the mid-1720s the households of the middle-aged prince and princess lacked their former effervescence. Maids of honour Mary Bellenden and Mary Lepell had left Caroline’s service on marriage, the latter to fellow courtier Lord Hervey. Sophy Howe had lost her post in 1720 after an ill-judged elopement, disguised as a boy, and an illegitimate pregnancy. Appointed in Miss Howe’s place in February 1721, Mary Howard was beautiful but foolish – Hervey refers to her ‘wretched head’ – and failed to inspire the admiration her predecessors had excited. Caroline’s later appointments, although she continued to value intelligence, suggest her primary requirement from her ladies was seamless integration into the increasingly domestic court circle. Of a new lady of the bedchamber, Henrietta, Countess of Pomfret, she wrote in October 1725, ‘I am very well satisfied with Lady Pomfret. She seems as if she lov’d me, & has wit & the experience of the world, & the advice of a good friend will make her a real woman of quality. She behaves wonderfully well in the family, & everybody is satisfied with her.’209

  Among remaining royal attendants there were murmurs of dissent. As early as November 1714, ‘ill from standing so long upon my feet’, Lady Cowper had protested against the physical strain of court appointments.210 After 1720 her resentment of Walpole, attributable to his part in the royal reconciliation, corroded her admiration for Caroline. Relations between the women were further strained by Caroline’s choice of the Countess of Dorset as the Duchess of St Albans’s replacement as groom of the stole.211 Mary Cowper had coveted the position herself; she considered herself slighted. Certainly Caroline’s handling of the new appointment lacked transparency. Following Lord Cowper’s resignation in 1718 against George Louis’s will, Lady Dorset was a less contentious choice than Cowper’s wife for the senior position in Caroline’s household, and perhaps, given pressure on her from George Louis to reinstate the duchess, Caroline’s only alternative. Lady Cowper remained at court until her death in 1724; a rancorous note colours her later diary entries. ‘Nothing was more evident than the Transports of Joy in which the Princess was with this new Accession of Flatterers, and Mr Walpole had so possessed her Mind, there was no room for the least Truth,’ she wrote on 20 May 1720.212 Inevitably such all-consuming sourness tarnished the atmosphere of the royal bedchamber.

  Lady Cowper was not alone in her disenchantment. After George Augustus’s birthday in 1726, the Honourable Mrs St John wrote a poem to Caroline’s lady of the bedchamber, the Countess of Hertford: ‘My rambling thoughts are strayed from home, –/Why need they farther than St James’s roam?/When now perhaps, you’re stifled in the crowd,/On hearing P[rince]’s jokes so coarse and loud;/Or else retired behind the Chair of State,/Where you’re compelled to praise what most you hate,/Or listen to some idle page’s prate/Till midnight strikes.’213 In the same year the Duchess of Shrewsbury died. Caroline’s account of her death, which she attributed to the incompetence of royal physician Sir John Shadwell, indicates dry humour: ‘He gave her something very strong to ease her stomach, & when that was too strong, he gave her laudanum, which laid her asleep for this world.’214 The death of the spirited, louche-tongued duchess further diminished the stock of cheer at Caroline’s court.

  Henrietta Howard, described as ‘much in the vapours’, felt it sooner than most. As early as 1722 Mary Bellenden, now Mrs Campbell, had written to her, ‘I was told before I Left London, that somebody that shall be nameless, was grown sour & crosse & not so good to you as usual.’215 The relationship of Caroline’s bedchamber woman and George Augustus was built on flimsy foundations: Henrietta’s desire to escape her dislikeable husband and the prince’s need, via the face-saving measure of a mistress, to counter suggestions of an emasculating attachment to Caroline. In sensibility, outlook and motive mistress and prince were misfits. Even George Augustus’s sexual attraction to Henrietta failed to rival the earthy passion Caroline still inspired in him. Recent events had not altered him. He remained of a testy, exacting nature, preoccupied with what Figuelotte had once dismissed as ‘littleness’, ‘calm when great points go as he would not have them … but when he is in his worst humours and the devil to everybody … it is always because one of his pages has powdered his periwig ill or a housemaid has set a chair where it does not use to stand’.216 His ‘love’ was a routine matter. He ‘was the most regular man in his hours: his time of going down to [Henrietta Howard’s] apartment was seven in the evening: he would frequently walk up and down the gallery, looking at his watch, for a quarter of an hour before seven, but would not go till the clock struck’.217

  In letters to her friends, Henrietta expressed her longing to escape her life at court and a position she had embraced through expediency; she described herself as ‘Jealous for Liberty and property’.218 Ongoing, occasionally violent attem
pts by Charles Howard to reclaim his wife, his motives pecuniary, malevolent, trouble-making, added to her strain. He involved Caroline in his threats – in April 1726 he warned her that George Louis commanded that Henrietta ‘immediately retire from her employment under Your Royal Highness’.219 For reasons of her own, namely her determination that George Augustus retain this mistress she controlled, Caroline stood her ground. Later Henrietta described the ‘malicious pleasure’ with which Caroline showed her a letter from Archbishop Wake, urging her to relinquish Henrietta to her lawful husband, an instance of Caroline making clear to her rival her power over her.220

  First impressions long abated, the women cherished little warmth for one another. Caroline was not above reminding Henrietta ‘that it was in my power, if I had pleased, any hour of the day, to let her drop through my fingers – thus –’.221 Unsurprisingly, Henrietta felt the indignity of her role as bedchamber woman. Her less congenial tasks included holding a bowl of water on bended knee while Caroline washed her hands or cleaned her teeth. Henrietta minded enough to investigate past precedents to provide her with grounds for refusal. In her frustration she chose, Caroline wrote, to ‘quarrel with me about holding a basin of ceremony at my dressing, and to tell me, with her fierce little eyes and cheeks as red as your coat, that positively she would not do it; to which I made her no answer in anger, but calmly, as I would to a naughty child: “Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will; indeed you will.”’222 Precedents went against Henrietta, and Caroline’s calm patronising did little to win her rival’s affection.