The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  Soon after his accession, with Walpole’s assistance, George Augustus formalised the value he attached to Caroline in the document of financial provision he made for her for his lifetime and after. This jointure, dated 10 August 1727, recognised the insolubility of the royal marriage in the new king’s eyes. It celebrated ‘the Sincere and Perfect Love and Affection which his Majesty bears to Her Majesty’; it nodded to her intelligence: ‘a Constancy and Greatness of mind peculiar to herself’. But its tenor was that of acclamations which had greeted Caroline on her arrival in Britain in 1714. In its focus on her motherhood and steadfast Protestantism – the ‘long succession of Princes derived from her Majesty’ and ‘her zeal for the Protestant Religion’ – the record of Caroline’s jointure clearly implied, at the outset of George Augustus’s reign, a traditional interpretation of the role of queen consort.24

  It was the message of Carmen Corunarium: or, a Gratulatory Poem on the Coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline, in which, in October 1727, Caroline was addressed as ‘QUEEN, Bride, and Fruitful Mother All in One/Surrounded with your Bright and Royal Train’.25 It was the same message repeated by Welsh poet Jane Brereton, with an added emphasis on Caroline’s imagined absorption in domesticity: ‘O Wife! More happy in thy Lord alone/Than in the Pow’r, and Splendor, of his Throne./O Mother! blest in your illustrious Race,/The Guardian Angels of our future Peace’; and by the author of Verse 43 of the Verses on the Coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline, who described Caroline as ‘more proud her Monarch’s Heart than Throne to share’.26 It was the message of a silver coronation medal by John Croker, on which a flatteringly wasp-waisted Caroline is depicted between figures of Religion and Britannia framed by the motto ‘hic amor haec patria’ (this my love, this my country), indicating her appropriately queenly double allegiance to piety and patriotism.27 It was the message of an essay to Caroline, in which the author reminded her that ‘to enjoy, together with the highest state of publick Splendor and Dignity, all the retired Pleasures and domestick Blessings of private life; is the perfection of human Wisdom, as well as Happiness’.28

  Six months later, Caroline’s first birthday as queen was marked by William Bisset in a poem of uncompromising title: Verses Compos’d for the Birth-Day of our Most Gracious Queen Caroline: The First Birthday of a Protestant Queen Consort for One Hundred and Ten Years. Bisset’s poem was read aloud ‘the same Day in the Great Drawing-Room before Several of the First Quality’, including Caroline herself. Caroline was never at liberty to define her role exclusively in line with her own inclinations. She could be in no doubt concerning the expectations of her contemporaries, nor the limited compass of a queen consort’s sphere of activity. In January of that year she had proved her understanding of popular requirements. To twelve persecuted French Protestants who had escaped from gaol and crossed the Channel to begin new lives in Britain, she gave £1,000. To a ‘deserving’ cause it was largesse on an appropriately regal scale.29

  By contrast, muscular concepts of kingship were central to the opera Handel premiered on 11 November 1727, his first of the new reign. Riccardo Primo, Rè d’Inghilterra, with a libretto by Paolo Rolli, celebrated in romantic fashion the life of Richard the Lionheart. Italian master to Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline, Rolli wrote a dedicatory sonnet linking the Crusader king to George Augustus. Rolli’s Richard was soldier and amorist, much as George Augustus liked to consider himself.30

  Despite poets’ careful separation of the relative spheres of husband and wife, submission and self-effacement played no part in the version of Caroline recognised by many of her contemporaries. Nor is this the version history has preferred. The best-known published sources, notably recollections of Walpole and the memoirs of George Augustus’s lord of the bedchamber and, from 1730, vice chamberlain, John, Lord Hervey, depict a woman determined in her ambition and skilful in manipulating appearances and a foolish husband. ‘Her power was unrivalled and unbounded,’ wrote Hervey. ‘His Majesty lost no opportunity to declare that the Queen never meddled with his business, yet nobody was simple enough to believe it; and few besides himself would have been simple enough to hope or imagine it could be believed, since everybody who knew there was such a woman as the Queen, knew she not only meddled with business, but directed everything that came under that name, either at home or abroad.’31 In a similar spirit, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, invited in 1727 to draw up a list of Whig clergy meriting preferment, concluded that the invitation was ‘no less ye Queen’s motion because it comes immediately from ye King’.32 Visual sources are equally clear. In a satirical print of March 1737 called The Festival of the Golden Rump, it is Caroline who inserts into the anus of a satyr-like George Augustus enema-style injections of a flavoured brandy that will restore him to her guidance, while Walpole and Bishop Hoadly look on approvingly.33

  Such accounts represent distortions and exaggerations. The forcefulness of Caroline’s character lent them credence, like her description of dealing peremptorily with doctors treating Princess Amelia: ‘these animals have propos’d a flannel shift to make her sweat, upon which I dismissed them’.34 The truth is inevitably more complex. A report compiled for the French government early in 1728 by Johann Daniel Schöpflin identified Caroline’s sphere of activity as the equivalent of public relations. Schöpflin described her chief role as contributing to George Augustus’s popularity, like Thomas Tickell in his poem ‘Kensington Gardens’ and Richard Savage in The Bastard, written the same year as Schöpflin’s report, in which he claimed that a people ‘who ne’er before/Agreed – Yet now with one Consent adore!’35

  Within this role Schöpflin evidently included diplomatic activity on Caroline’s part, which far outstripped that which George Louis had once allotted her and George Augustus jointly. It was Caroline, for example, who in late September 1727 received the Prussian envoy Wallenrodt at Kensington Palace and for two hours discussed plans begun by George Louis for a double marriage between the two reigning families: that of Caroline and George Augustus’s son Frederick to his Prussian cousin Wilhelmine, and of Wilhelmine’s brother, another Frederick (the future Frederick the Great), to one of Caroline and George Augustus’s elder daughters. In October, Caroline received on the king’s behalf Count Conrad von Dehn, the Wolfenbüttel special envoy. The import of this meeting outweighed the duchy of Wolfenbüttel’s territorial insignificance, thanks to provisions of George Louis’s will, which George Augustus intended to overrule. Afterwards, it was Caroline who acted as her husband’s mouthpiece in an hour-long interview with the elector of Saxony’s envoy, Jacques Le Coq. On that occasion she explained to Le Coq George Augustus’s hopes, as elector of Hanover, for a Saxon alliance.36 The possibility of hostility towards Hanover on the parts of his brother-in-law, Frederick William of Prussia, and the Emperor Charles VI troubled George Augustus; he had begun making noises about a defensive alliance of German states. To Caroline he entrusted a role in preliminary negotiations. Like her meeting with von Dehn, it was a clear statement of his faith in her skills.

  Throughout her marriage, Caroline’s concern with power had emerged in large- and small-scale actions. In 1712, Sophia had described her voraciously consuming pamphlets debating the Hanoverian succession, acquainting herself with the political outlook of the country she and George Augustus would inherit. Two years later, Caroline had requested from John Gay a copy of his verses The Shepherd’s Week. Her interest in this instance was not English pastoralism, or even Gay’s advancement. Her aim was the visible espousal of a culture, and the promotion of her own interest in that culture as a means of establishing her fitness – and by extension that of her husband – to occupy a position of eminence in Gay’s country. She meant to win Gay’s plaudits, and for a while succeeded. Caroline’s skill during the long years of waiting was to exploit the means available to her in a political climate and within a family structure that offered her limited access to power on grounds of her sex. Her acts of patronage and her attempts to understand Whig, Tory
and Jacobite arguments about the Act of Succession indicate the extent to which she actively involved herself in George Augustus’s prospects. They suggest a wife clearly aware of her husband’s future position. In themselves they do not inevitably reveal an intention to encroach on the power that position entailed.

  This was not the verdict of many of those closest to Caroline, or of journal writers or caricaturists. They interpreted her ‘masculine’ interests and the influence she exercised over her husband as automatically tending to a personal agenda. This is the vision of Caroline preserved in Hervey’s memoirs, with their cruelly forensic portrait of the royal marriage and woodpecker-style belittling of a pettifogging, pernickety George Augustus. Similar impressions emerge from surviving statements by Walpole. In the case of vice chamberlain and leading minister, who both enjoyed Caroline’s favour and support, their partly fictionalised versions of her served their own ends, proof of the extent of their intimacy with the king and queen. Observers further from the political hub contented themselves with acknowledging something redoubtable in their new queen. The Earl of Middlesex was reminded of Elizabeth I: ‘Your honour’d Name shall each revolving Year,/The Muses’ Tribute with Eliza share./For Gloriana does again appear.’37 Middlesex conjured memories of the Tudor virgin of a vanished golden age, married to her kingdom: a secular goddess inspiring poets, artists, courtiers. The comparison recalled a letter written by Leibniz more than a decade earlier. Beyond artistic patronage, Middlesex did not suggest that Caroline shared Elizabeth’s sovereign power.

  On 3 June 1727, a week before George Louis’s unexpected death, Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal had sounded a prophetic note. To ambitious politicians it offered a warning: ‘as their power only depends upon the breath of their sovereigns, an angry blast of that flings them at once from the summit of their glory and the height of their ambition; or at most their authority generally determines with the life of their Prince, it being very rarely found that the most expert statesman can continue a favourite to two Princes successively’.38

  Foremost among expert statesmen in the summer of 1727 was Robert Walpole. Predictably, George Augustus dismissed him with some dispatch on that June afternoon at Richmond Lodge when the reluctantly woken prince greeted his father’s minister with irritable disbelief, clutching as tenaciously to old grievances as to the pair of breeches in his hands. Instead George Augustus placed the government in the hands of his trusted treasurer, Spencer Compton.

  It was as the wary had anticipated. ‘Everybody expected, that Mr Compton the Speaker would be the Minister, and Sir Robert thought so too, for a few days,’ noted MP Arthur Onslow, in an account transcribed by his son four decades later. ‘The new king’s first resolution … was certainly for Mr Compton … who had long been his Treasurer, and very near to him in all his counsels. It went so far as to be almost a formal appointment, the king, for two or three days, directing everybody to go to him upon business.’39

  For days Walpole tasted the invisibility of the ex-favourite. Meanwhile Compton floundered under responsibility he had not sought. He enlisted Walpole to draft the new king’s accession speech; at his request Walpole scripted amendments too. Each morning, as speaker of the Commons, Compton attended to parliamentary business. In these daily absences Walpole waited on the new sovereigns, so that it was he, not Compton, who shortly won George Augustus’s confidence. Caroline nailed her colours to the mast at one of the first drawing rooms of the reign by singling out Walpole’s wife for special attention.

  Walpole reassured the new king of his willingness to serve. Discussion touched on the civil list. Walpole offered George Augustus £800,000 a year. It was £100,000 more than George Louis had received, and his settlement of £100,000 for Caroline was double the grant to any previous queen consort (and the figure suggested by Compton). Implicit was Walpole’s ability as chancellor of the exchequer to steer this settlement through Parliament. A new reign necessitated new elections. These returned a significantly enlarged majority of Walpole’s supporters. Rewarded with a peerage for fleeting ineptitude and promoted to the House of Lords as Baron Wilmington, Compton discovered he had lost the glittering prizes. Walpole would remain George Augustus’s first minister until Caroline’s death and beyond.

  Contemporaries attributed Walpole’s rapid ousting of the new king’s loyalist to Caroline. Swiss visitor to London César de Saussure recorded what was evidently a widespread view that Caroline, who ‘possesses many qualities, amongst them prudence’, was the more politically sagacious of the royal couple.40 Arthur Onslow concluded, ‘by the Queen’s management, all this was soon over-ruled’, an impression Walpole was happy to confirm. In conversation he traced the source of ‘the great credit’ he had with the king to ‘the means of the Queen, who was the most able woman to govern in the world’.41 It was a self-serving conceit, this suggestion that his authority derived from Caroline, a source of power therefore denied his opponents or any outside the golden circle of her approval. It gained currency from the belief already common of Caroline’s influence over her husband, the doggerel that taunted ‘You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain;/We know ’tis Caroline, not you, that reign –/… if you would have us fall down and adore you,/Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.’42

  From the political jockeying in the first months of George Augustus’s reign – before Hervey embarked on his memoirs or Horace Walpole published recollections of his father – emerged the idea of the new king as Caroline’s puppet that has coloured so many subsequent accounts. It rapidly became an idée fixe as prevalent among politicians like Onslow as among the readers of broadsheets in London coffee houses. ‘As soon as ever the Prince became King the whole world began to find out that [Caroline’s] will was the sole spring on which every movement in the Court turned,’ Hervey wrote later, in a typically grandiloquent vision of Caroline as the new regime’s presiding genius.43 With partial veracity he claimed, ‘it was now understood by everybody that Sir Robert was the Queen’s minister’; he reduced the contest between Walpole and Compton to a matter of queenly whim.44

  But the outcome of the Walpole-brokered royal reconciliation of 1720, which had failed to win for Caroline the return of her daughters, had proved how little Sir Robert was ‘the Queen’s minister’, for all Lady Cowper’s mutterings at the time. Instead, it had demonstrated to Caroline the firmness of the grip on power of the man she labelled ‘le gros homme’. George Augustus, she knew, represented her sole legitimate access to influence. In the summer of 1727 she saw in Robert Walpole, who had misled her, broken his promises to her and alienated her husband, a politician capable of wielding and retaining power, and as such a potential asset to the crown and a conduit for her own and George Augustus’s views and wishes. Walpole’s success at Compton’s expense – personally pleasing to Caroline – forced from her a pragmatic response. Over time, queen and minister would find common ground in apparent mutual admiration. Carefully Walpole flattered Caroline. He encouraged in her a belief in her own power, telling her, ‘Madam, I can do nothing without you. Whatever my industry and watchfulness for your interest and welfare suggest, it is you must execute. You, Madam, are the sole mover of this Court.’45 They did not always agree, and their tussles more often ended in victory for Walpole. It was a reflection of the balance of power in their relationship, and, by and large, that of crown and Parliament.

  In the account of Compton’s fall from grace written by the lord chancellor Peter King there is no mention of Caroline. Instead Lord King attributes Walpole’s success to his cunning: ‘By his constant application to the King by himself in the morning when the Speaker, by reason of the sitting of the House of Commons, was absent, he so worked upon the King, that he … established himself in favour with him.’46 Historians have pointed additionally to pressure on George Augustus from abroad, particularly France and the Dutch United Provinces, to retain his father’s ministry to ensure continuity of foreign policy. Correctly, Hervey concluded that
Walpole manipulated Caroline rather than the other way round. He saw that she, in turn, won George Augustus’s agreement to Walpole’s plans: ‘that whoever [Walpole] favoured, she distinguished; and whoever she distinguished the King employed’.47

  Even this assessment overlooks any suggestion that George Augustus, a man peppery in defence of his own prerogatives, intended to exercise power personally. The Earl of Strafford reported the new king ‘talk[ing] of ruling by himself’. Another account claimed, ‘all that can be gathered for the present is that, whatever side be uppermost, they will not have the same authority, that the last ministry had, since the King seems resolved to enter into all manner of affairs himself’.48 Neither king nor queen was easily manipulated. Hervey and Walpole agreed on ‘the difficulty there is in persuading either of them to get the better of their pride in most cases’.49 Both he considered ‘unmanageable and opinionated’.50 Neither tolerated opposition. To disagreement, Hervey claimed, Caroline returned ‘very short and very rough answers’.51

  A picture coalesces of a triad at the centre of royal government: king, queen and minister in a courtly ballet of overlapping interests, prickly egotism and routine mutual hoodwinking. In 1733 an opposition newspaper called the Craftsman explained their relationship using a metaphor drawn from chess, with Walpole as the knight: ‘see him jump over the heads of the nobles … when he is guarded by the Queen, he makes dreadful havoc, and very often checkmates the King’.52 So skilfully was this managed that George Augustus came to commend Walpole as ‘a brave fellow’. Walpole and Caroline devised secret signs for conversations in the king’s presence as a means of directing him to their ends: Walpole taking snuff, playing with his hat, fidgeting with his sword.53