For his part, as time passed, George Augustus derived scarcely more satisfaction than she from his relationship with the woman Caroline labelled his ‘trull’.223 To his credit, in an unusual act of generosity, in 1724 he gave Henrietta the enormous sum of £11,500. She would use it to build Marble Hill House, a Palladian villa close to Pope’s house in Twickenham, on the opposite bank of the Thames from Richmond Lodge, a two-hour barge journey from central London. Like Caroline, Henrietta employed Charles Bridgeman as landscapist. In October 1728 she heard from Lord Chesterfield of an ‘extreme fine Chinese bed, window curtains, chairs, etc, to be sold for between 70l and 80l: if you should have a mind to it for Marble Hill’.224 Lady Hervey refers to Henrietta stealing nights away from court at Marble Hill in 1729.225
Condemned to enforced intimacy with husband and mistress, the smooth running of her household periodically shattered by Charles Howard’s malign bluster, Caroline can hardly have avoided the dampening effect of their shared disaffection. Yet she relied on Henrietta for respite from George Augustus – the hours he spent in his mistress’s rooms each evening, their walking together in the morning – and she did not intend to relinquish her. In this difficult atmosphere her children provided distractions, so too the interior life she stimulated with ‘the reading of choice authors … always one of her greatest pleasures’.226 ‘When I had the honour to see [the Princess of Wales] She was Reading Gulliver, & was just come to the passage of the Hobbling prince, which she Laughed at,’ Dr Arbuthnot wrote to the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, on 5 November 1726.227
In the same letter, Arbuthnot indicated the success of Swift’s recent present to Caroline of Irish plaid: ‘The princess immediately seizd on your plade for her own use, & has ordered the young Princesses to be clad in the same.’228 Still separated from her elder daughters, Caroline could enjoy nevertheless the affinity of dressing alike. Testament to her considerable physical girth by this stage, she ordered twenty-five yards of Swift’s Irish silk for her own dress, and twenty to provide dresses for her three elder daughters.229 Behind her back, she learned, the corpulent Walpole described her as ‘a fat old bitch’.230
Caroline’s marking time ended on 11 June 1727. In the early hours of the morning, in the town of Osnabrück where he had been born, George Louis died. He had broken his journey en route to Hanover, following a stroke brought on by indigestion from the surfeit of strawberries or oranges or melons he had eaten two nights earlier at a hefty supper in the Dutch town of Delden. For the sixty-seven-year-old monarch it was a straightforward, unheroic death.
Too straightforward in the event to escape the lurid impulses of romancers. Legend attributes George Louis’s death to fear. A letter, it was rumoured, was handed to him in his travelling coach. Its author was his estranged wife Sophia Dorothea, whose death on 13 November 1726 George Louis had marked by going to the theatre on two consecutive nights. He had forbidden court mourning for her in London or Hanover, and prevented George Augustus from acknowledging in any manner his unhappy mother’s demise. So slow were his orders concerning her burial that the River Ahler surrounding the dismal manor house of Ahlden had overflowed its banks in winter storms by the time his instructions arrived. Logged with water, the manor garden could provide no burial place for the lead coffin, which threatened to float away. For want of an alternative it was removed to a church in the town of Celle, where the simplest of plaques commemorates this unfortunate princess.
Perhaps those responsible for the story of a letter from beyond the grave imagined that Sophia Dorothea had anticipated just such an ignominious end. In the bitterness of her final days she reminded the man who had destroyed her happiness of a prophecy that within a year of her death, he too would die.
Flaming torches lit the procession that bore George Louis’s body into Hanover. Trumpeters ‘rest[ed] their trumpets bottom upward’, silent in respect. Even at one o’clock in the morning ‘a great concourse of people from all parts [of the electorate]’ had gathered to witness, ‘with tears in their eyes, this last honour paid to their late sovereign, once the joy and delight of his subjects’.231 He was buried in the church within the Leineschloss, close to his mother Sophia. Sixteen colonels of the Life Guards carried his coffin.
Days later, the news reached London. Roused by Robert Walpole from his afternoon nap at Richmond Lodge, his breeches in his hands, his mood discouraging, George Augustus succeeded his father as George II in a vignette that lacks dignity. His accession was proclaimed at Leicester House, Charing Cross, Temple Bar, Cheapside and the Royal Exchange. And Caroline became queen. Among the new king’s first actions, according to Horace Walpole, was to hang at Leicester House two portraits of his mother, against walls draped in purple and black. He placed the larger portrait in Caroline’s dressing room – out of sight of the crowds of politicians and place-seekers who Lord Hervey described as rapidly thronging George Augustus’s house until it resembled the floor of the Royal Exchange in the middle of a busy trading day.232 ‘All the nobility of both sexes now in town attended at Leicester House and had the honour to kiss their Majesties’ hands,’ wrote Lord Polwarth.233 It was in stark contrast to the doldrums of the royal split.
III
Queen
‘Constancy and Greatness’
Caroline’s sentiments on George Louis’s death were those of Swift’s ‘Lilliputian Verse’, A Poem to his Majesty King George II on the present State of Affairs in England, with Remarks on the Alterations to be expected at Court, after the Rise of the Parliament: ‘Smile, smile,/Blest Isle./Grief past/At last./Halcyon/Comes on./New KING,/Bells ring,/New QUEEN,/Blest scene!’ Like Henry Newman witnessing ‘a vast Concourse of Boats’ accompany George Augustus and Caroline down the Thames weeks later, she allowed herself a moment of optimism: ‘nothing will be wanting in so gracious a Prince to endear himself to his People’.1
She could hardly feel differently. Since 1705, George Louis’s acrid relationship with George Augustus had coloured every aspect of her life. In 1714 she had been forced to leave behind in Hanover her seven-year-old only son. Three years later she had lost her home, her remaining children and a handful of those trappings of rank by which she set such store. Reconciliation had failed to restore her daughters to her, and George William’s brief life had ebbed its fleeting course beyond his mother’s reach. More than a match for her father-in-law’s stolid intellect, Caroline had been condemned to obedience nevertheless, compelled by her own pride to endure with unruffled public calm whatever indignities he reserved for her. She was not consumed by poignancy at his death. During the days of black bombazine at Leicester House, her thoughts dwelt instead on possibilities.
Caroline’s coronation portrait by Enoch Seeman registers few changes in the eleven years since Kneller’s official likeness of 1716. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough had derided what she regarded as the inane happiness of Caroline’s expression during the service at Westminster Abbey that represented for her, after almost a quarter of a century of waiting, a personal apotheosis; nastily she referred to Caroline’s hair ‘clotted all over with powder’.2 Seeman’s portrait, and its many copies by Charles Jervas, offers an alternative narrative. His Caroline’s fixed expression lacks the sweetness of Kneller’s serenely smiling princess, but avoids inane happiness or complacency. She has a high colour. Her eyebrows are heavier, as are the shadows beneath her eyes. There is a fullness to the legendary embonpoint that tactfully suggests struggling corsetry. But this Caroline has become the quintessence of magnificence, and the hand that in Kneller’s portrait toys with a single ringlet of hair, in Seeman’s refuses to relinquish the consort’s crown on the table beside her. It was exactly as Caroline intended.
She was still recognisably the flaxen-haired, pink-and-white princess with whom George Augustus had fallen in love in disguise at Triesdorf in the summer of 1705. For the moment of Caroline’s crowning, Handel – like his predecessor Henry Purcell at Mary of Modena’s crowning in 1685 – composed a setting of
words from Psalm 45, ‘My Heart is Inditing’, performed on instruments including the large new organ specially installed in the abbey at a cost of £130 by Christopher Shrider. ‘Upon thy right hand did stand the Queen in vesture of gold/And the King shall have pleasure in thy beauty,’ sang the combined choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, supplemented by ‘Italian Voices’ from the opera house.3 And so it was. Caroline wore a dress of silver and gold tissue. Its underskirt was embroidered in gold and scarlet with exotic blooms and scrolls of swirling foliage. Swathes of velvet, including the lengthy train carried in the coronation procession by her three elder daughters, were edged in deep bands of ermine and densely wrought embroidery of gold metallic thread. Eyewitness accounts describe ‘royal robes of purple velvet’, though in surviving portraits the colour is blue.4 Festoons of pearls threaded her pale, powdered hair; in heavy bunches they hung from the shoulders of her dress. On her velvet sleeves, outlining her décolletage, ornamenting her bodice and in tiers across her sparkling kirtle trembled brooches of large diamonds, their flat, dark facets magnets for every ray of sunshine or candlelight, so that she appeared to glitter from head to foot. Bar carping Sarah Marlborough, spectators were literally dazzled. ‘The Golden Tissue veil’d the dazling [sic] Air/Of Light, too strong for vulgar Eyes to bear,’ wrote the author of ‘To the Queen’, published in Verses on the Coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline.5
It was, in every particular, the costume Mary II had chosen for her coronation in 1689, save that, in Caroline’s case, the gewgaws that contributed so materially to her splendour were mostly borrowed. Hervey claimed she was ‘as fine as the accumulated riches of the city and the suburbs could make [her] … for she had on her head and shoulders all the pearls she could borrow from the ladies of quality at one end of the town and on her petticoat all the diamonds she could hire of the Jews and jewellers at the other’.6 At George Louis’s coronation, Caroline had been forced to content herself with Sophia’s Hanoverian pearls. Her father-in-law’s generosity in the meantime towards his mistress and his half-sister had done little to replenish the royal jewel box. Remembering with a courtier’s cynicism, Hervey unravelled a metaphor in Caroline’s pillaged finery, a ‘mixture of magnificence and meanness not unlike the éclat of royalty in many other particulars when it comes to be nicely examined and its sources traced to what money hires or flattery lends’.7
Hervey missed the deeper symbolism of Caroline’s imitation of Mary. Mary had been crowned joint ruler with her husband William III, the parity of their public partnership recognised in their double sovereignty. But Caroline was George Augustus’s consort, not his equal. Her behaviour throughout their marriage had demonstrated her understanding that her eminence derived from him. In the design by William Kent for a temporary triumphal arch for Westminster Hall, setting for the coronation banquet, which George Augustus approved personally, a carved medallion tops the pediment. It features bust portraits in profile of husband and wife. Uppermost is George Augustus’s image; Caroline’s lies half-obscured below. The arrangement of the portraits identified the relative status of both players. The double image nevertheless suggests a partnership, shared purpose, echoed in the inscription ‘Georgius II Rex et Carolina Regina’, and this celebration of royal marriage marked a contrast with George Louis, his divorce, rapacious Madame Schulenburg and a cabal of Hanoverians and Turks. As the choir sang at Caroline’s anointing, ‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers/And queens thy nursing mothers.’ Among coronation addresses to Caroline were verses by the professor of poetry at Oxford University, Thomas Warton the elder. The verses’ title – To Her Majesty Queen Caroline on her Accession to the Throne – appeared to accord Caroline’s ‘accession’ significance equal to George Augustus’s.
As with her earlier espousal of etiquette devised for Queen Anne, and her rejection of Sarah Marlborough’s advice that she follow ceremonial guidelines for a princess rather than a reigning queen, Caroline’s coronation day appearance revealed twin ambitions: her desire to imply continuity between Stuart and Hanoverian regimes as a means of underlining her own legitimacy, and to establish her intention to be treated beyond doubt as the highest-ranking woman in her husband’s kingdom. Deliberately she excelled herself in splendour. In May, ‘a merchant had sent for a very rich silk and gold brocaded cloth from France, and had offered it to the Princess of Wales, who refused to purchase it, finding it too brilliant and costly’.8 On 11 October, brilliance was her aim, costliness disregarded.
The service followed the format of James I and Anne of Denmark’s crowning more than a century earlier. In Caroline’s case, the peeresses who customarily carried a queen’s train were replaced by Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline: ‘with equal Steps attendant on the Queen/Three Royal Virgins in the Train were seen’.9 In keeping with this impulse to grandeur – which may also have been meant for a public show of restored family unity following a decade-long separation between parents and daughters – records at the College of Arms preserve Caroline’s wish that, in medieval fashion, her styles and titles be proclaimed alongside those of George Augustus at the coronation banquet.10
Foreign guests marvelled. They considered that the service exceeded in magnificence the coronations of Louis XV and Caroline’s first suitor, Archduke Charles, since 1711 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI.11 At £8,720, expenditure was modest compared with future celebrations, notably the £238,000 frittered on George IV’s behalf in 1821, but the increase of £1,500 on the cost of George Louis’s coronation in 1714 was in line with George Augustus’s desire for a service of appropriately regal fandangle.12 In the unremitting focus on George Augustus and Caroline’s royalty there was nothing pinchpenny. Thomas Kingsman of Westminster School referred to ‘a magnificence, than which the Roman Capitol never boasted greater’.13 Caroline’s role in embodying majesty was key. In Caroline of England, Peter Quennell records a story that her jewel-encrusted skirt was so heavy ‘that it was found necessary to contrive a sort of pulley that enabled her to raise the hem when she knelt down’.14 The value of those weighty jewels was estimated at £100,000, equivalent in 2017 to £13.5 million.15 In the venerable spaces of Westminster Abbey, the image of the glittering queen, her attendant princesses and ladies-in-waiting recalled the women of the court of the Emperor of Lilliput described by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels: ‘The Ladies and Courtiers were all most magnificently clad, so that the Spot they stood upon seemed to resemble a petticoat spread on the Ground, embroidered with Figures of Gold and Silver.’16 Little wonder John Evelyn rated it ‘the finest Coronation that ever was in England’.17
Caroline had consistently emphasised her subsidiary role to George Augustus’s. Even in letters to her closest attendants she outlined his primacy, writing for example to Charlotte Clayton in May 1719, ‘He [George Augustus] will look over your letters himself not trusting me.’18 Yet she had never disguised her enjoyment of the prospect of power, or her relish for elevated rank. A letter written by Swift to Henrietta Howard in 1730 refers to conversations with Caroline in the summer of 1726 at Richmond Lodge. Irishman Swift had explained to the princess the problems of his native country, as he saw them. She ‘ordered me’, he wrote to Henrietta four years later, that ‘if I lived to see her in her present Station [that of Queen], to send her our Grievances, promising to read my letter, and do all good offices in her power for this miserable and most loyall Kingdom, now at the brink of ruin’.19 Since 1714, Caroline’s individual acts of charity had demonstrated her compassion: her donations to river boatmen suffering in the great freeze of 1716; her grant to Samuel Clarke of an allowance to cover the costs of sedan-chair hire. Her interest in the smooth running of every aspect of British government, including Ireland, was equally strong, albeit coloured by dynastic opportunism. And the rhetoric of authority, as recorded by Swift, undoubtedly appealed to her.
As throughout her marriage, Caroline would be forced to circumspection if she meant to realise the implications of her coronation dress preserved
in Seeman’s portrait, or the will to power implicit in her response to Swift. To date, her marriage had been markedly successful by princely standards. What Sophia had described in 1708 as ‘the loving friendship between newlyweds’ had been replaced by less rosy illusions, but neither husband nor wife doubted the depth of their affection for one another, and Caroline remained George Augustus’s closest confidante.20 Snapshots like Lady Hertford’s memory of Caroline reading aloud to George Augustus ‘when he lay down after dinner’ from Rabelais’s gutsy scatological romp, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, highlight the comfortable intimacy of their mature relationship, and the prevailing view of Caroline’s ‘most extravagant fondness for [George Augustus’s] person’ testifies to the strength of their shared physical attraction.21
For twenty-one years, from George Augustus’s battlefield exploits at Oudenaarde in 1708 to his first return to Hanover in 1729, husband and wife were seldom separated. Long proximity, aided by Caroline’s dominant character and the need she recognised of flattering George Augustus’s vanity, had served to align their thoughts on many subjects. Hervey recorded a discussion about Whig loyalty with Caroline. ‘During the conversation the King came in, and the Queen telling him what she had been talking of, the whole came over again, the King repeating almost word for word what the Queen had urged before.’22 When husband and wife sat for portraits by Zincke, Caroline advised the artist, out of earshot of George Augustus, ‘to make the King’s picture look young, not above twenty-five’.23 In an identical clandestine impulse, George Augustus instructed Zincke to paint Caroline as if she were no more than twenty-eight.
The First Iron Lady Page 24
