The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  Dismissals balanced appointments. On 26 September the Whitehall Evening Post announced that the king had dispensed with the hated Lady Portland as royal governess. It was a symbolic rejection by George Augustus and Caroline of the decade-long family split. Amelia’s continuing correspondence with her former governess suggests the feelings of parents and daughters were at variance. The elderly countess nevertheless took to heart her new sovereigns’ antipathy. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described her at the coronation as ‘fall’n away since her dismission from Court’. Her funereal appearance ‘represented very finely an Egyptian Mummy embroider’d over with Hieroglyphics’.83 Her place was taken by Mary, Countess of Deloraine, until her marriage Caroline’s maid of honour Mary Howard, a woman of nugatory intellect – Horace Walpole castigated her as ‘a pretty idiot, with most of the vices of her own sex, and the additional one of ours, drinking’.84 She attracted George Augustus sexually, developed a handful of shared interests with Caroline, and apparently treated her royal charges kindly. A painting by William Hogarth of 1732 shows her with Mary, Louisa, William Augustus and her own daughters, Georgiana and Henrietta, watching a children’s performance of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor at the house in Great George Street of Isaac Newton’s nephew by marriage John Conduitt. In the audience are members of Caroline’s household, Sarah, Duchess of Richmond and the Earl of Pomfret. Recalling court theatricals at Lützenburg, it was an activity of the sort Caroline approved, performed to an audience of whom she also approved.85

  George Augustus dismissed the bulk of his father’s court servants. These included George Louis’s German staff – in Swift’s ‘Lilliputian Verse’, ‘Strange pack/sent back’.86 This may have arisen after discussion with Caroline as part of the couple’s policy of public ‘Britishness’, although the decision was made easier by the family rift, which meant that George Augustus was unfamiliar with many of the old king’s servants; a number would be re-employed by Frederick on his arrival in London. On the other hand, redundancies among royal clergy apparently arose by accident. George Augustus meant to retain both his own and George Louis’s court chaplains. An account by Mary Dering, dresser extraordinary to Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline, suggests his decision was reversed by his lord chamberlain, the Duke of Grafton, either deliberately or as a result of a misunderstanding, probably without George Augustus’s immediate knowledge.87

  As in 1714, Caroline’s household choices were made from among members of the traditional landowning and political elites. In some cases she employed more than one member of the same family, like her appointment of Thomas Fermor, Earl of Pomfret to the lucrative post of master of the horse. At the request of his wife Henrietta, one of Caroline’s ladies of the bedchamber, Pomfret owed his preferment to the intervention of Charlotte Clayton – though he would prove his worth in the summer of 1729, when he ‘discharged one of the Queen’s chairmen, upon his being strongly suspected of having too good an understanding with some highwaymen’.88 The earl’s suitability notwithstanding, his wife rewarded Mrs Clayton for her pains with the gift of a pair of diamond earrings worth the considerable sum of £1,400.

  Mrs Clayton’s recommendation, at the request of the Dowager Lady Granville, also lay behind Bridget Carteret’s place as maid of honour. Bridget’s fellow maid Penelope Dive was a third Clayton appointment, a member of the bedchamber woman’s own family. The extent of Charlotte Clayton’s influence in the composition of Caroline’s household is proof of the esteem in which Caroline held her, and of the key role played by personal recommendation in the process of obtaining positions at court. The paucity of Caroline’s connections among the British aristocracy as a German princess inevitably increased Mrs Clayton’s room to manoeuvre. Caroline’s contemporaries focused on the queen’s influence over her husband. It is clear that she in turn was influenced by others.

  Not everyone shared in the good fortunes of the Clayton protégés. Among those thwarted in their ambitions were Mary Pendarves, the future Mrs Delany, whose long period of place-seeking at Caroline’s court ended only with her remarriage in 1743. Her failure recalled the fruitless twelve-year vigil of John Gay. Since 1714, Gay had followed Caroline from Hanover to St James’s, Leicester House and Richmond Lodge. Calculatedly lavish in his verse effusions, at the end of 1726 he prepared for publication ‘a collection of Fables entirely of my own invention to be dedicated to [the five-year-old] Prince William [Augustus]’.89 With inadvertent irony he wrote, ‘Princes, like beauties, from their youth/Are strangers to the voice of truth;/Learn to contemn all praise betimes;/For flattery’s the nurse of crimes.’90

  The reward he anticipated for such dainty compliments was anything but their being ‘contemned’. It never materialised. Instead that year Caroline offered him an honorary position in the household of her youngest daughter, two-year-old Princess Louisa. Gay dismissed the sinecure as unfitting. His mood plummeted. ‘My Melancholy increases, and every Hour threatens me with some Return of my Distemper,’ he told Pope.91 Disappointed to embitterment, he withdrew from court. ‘I was appointed Gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa, the youngest princess,’ he wrote the following October. ‘Upon account that I am so far advanc’d in life, I have declin’d accepting; and have endeavoured in the best manner I could, to make my excuses by a letter to her Majesty. So now all my expectations are vanish’d; and I have no prospect, but in depending wholly upon my self, and my own conduct … As I can have no more hopes, I can no more be disappointed.’92 With the Fables published, and encouraged by friends including Pope, Gay returned his attention to the stage. Like moonshine his admiration for Caroline vanished overnight. Henrietta Howard commiserated, but her friendship with Gay is one explanation for what may have been a deliberate snub on Caroline’s part.

  In part due to Caroline’s support, in 1724 The Captives had earned Gay £1,000. His Beggar’s Opera of 1727, produced by John Rich the following year with tunes by John Christopher Pepusch, gained him £800 and a place in the theatrical canon. Famously it made Gay rich and Rich gay, Gay’s earnings equivalent to four years’ salary as gentleman usher to the infant princess. Among early audiences were Caroline and George Augustus. Sniffily Mary Pendarves wrote, ‘the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque’.93 Time would show that it was a taste George Augustus and his family were well able to satisfy.

  Henceforth Gay’s self-appointed role as poet-apologist would be seized by lesser practitioners Stephen Duck and ‘the Volunteer Laureat’ Richard Savage. Yet to experience Gay’s disillusionment, Savage acclaimed Caroline as ‘Supreamly Lovely, and Serenely Great!/Majestick Mother of a kneeling State!’ Not for the last time in the history of royal women, he hailed her as ‘Queen of a People’s Hearts’.94

  From Archbishop Wake, George Augustus had received a copy of his father’s will at the first privy council meeting of the reign. Contrary to customary practice, he declined to open it, and did not publicise its contents. Instead, he devoted considerable energies to reclaiming two other copies of the document.

  Of the three copies made of his will, George Louis had placed one in safekeeping at Lambeth Palace. A second he entrusted to the court of his cousins, the Dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and the third, as an elector of the Empire, to the imperial court in Vienna. Although it would take him a decade and significant expenditure of British government funds, George Augustus received, retrieved and suppressed all.

  Included in his father’s will were plans for the future inheritance of the British throne and the Hanoverian electorate. Despite discussion between father and son, it was an issue on which George Augustus had again found grounds for disagreement. Again Caroline had supported him in his opposition. Almost a decade before George Louis’s death, husband and wife had conceived a radical revision of his proposals, an inversion of the hereditary principle. It was proof of their detachment from the son they had not seen since 1714: Frederick.

  On 31 January 1730, the future Earl of Egmont reported a
telling incident. ‘I was told today that the King, jesting with the Duke his son [William Augustus], and asking him which he would rather be, a king or a queen, he replied: “Sir, I never yet tried; let me be one of them a month, and I’ll tell you.”’95

  Given his position as second son, William had no hereditary expectation of a crown. Discussions begun in 1716, five years before his birth, for a time encouraged his parents to think otherwise.

  Quick-witted and lively, from infancy William was a favourite child with both prince and princess: George Augustus later described himself to him as ‘a father that esteems and loves you dearly’.96 William shared his father’s military enthusiasms. According to a biography published in 1766, at the age of five he ‘raised a company of young boys, much about his own age, whom he marshalled and trained up according to the method which at that time appeared to him most convenient’.97 His tutor described him as ‘not only diligent but diligence itself’, and courtiers like Egmont noted ‘very early marks of quickness and parts’.98 His birth had provoked a tepid rapprochement between his parents and the king. With Frederick in Hanover until 1728, William spent his first seven years as an only son, praised for his intelligence and predilections certain to find favour with ‘Young Hanover brave’. He would resent the return to the family fold of his ‘German brother’.99 This petulant response suggests that his parents had failed to make clear to him the gulf between Frederick’s constitutional position and his own. Subsequent events – and testimony like Egmont’s – indicate reluctance on the part of mother and father to confront this unalterable disparity.

  George Louis’s response to the Jacobite uprising of 1715 had been to consider means of denying his opponents grounds for dismissing the new regime as ‘foreign’. His solution was a separation of Britain and Hanover. He outlined this first in a will made in February 1716. Four years later, he added a codicil. In the event of two male heirs in the same generation, he stated his wish that the elder inherit the British throne while the younger succeed to ‘His Majesty’s Dominions in Germany’, namely the electorate.100 Since both George Louis and George Augustus then had only a single son, his plans envisaged a future family of Frederick’s. George Louis discussed his proposal with his grandson during his visit to Hanover in 1720.

  He also revealed this aspect of his will to George Augustus, who inevitably discussed it with Caroline. The stillbirth of a baby boy in the autumn of 1716, and the early death of George William two years later, had seemed to restrict the king’s plans, as he intended, to the next generation. Everything changed, however, with the birth of a healthy baby boy in 1721. At a stroke the hypothetical became concrete: robust William Augustus in the nursery at Leicester House enabled the implementing of George Louis’s scheme a generation sooner than anticipated.

  Exactly when George Augustus and Caroline first decided this, or when they chose to point it out to George Louis, is not clear, although discussion was probably prompted by Frederick’s eighteenth birthday in 1725, when William was three. Crucially, the couple’s suggestion reversed the order of George Louis’s codicil. As the lord chancellor noted in his diary, ‘The Prince of Wales and his wife were for excluding Prince Frederick from the throne of England, but that after the king and prince, he should be Elector of Hanover, and Prince William his brother King of Great Britain.’101 On George Louis’s orders Frederick had spent his whole life in Hanover, a focus for loyalty in the king-elector’s absence and the centre of court ceremonial, familiar with the electorate’s physical, cultural and political landscapes. By contrast, William’s upbringing would be as exclusively British as his German parents could make it. Despite the coolness in their relations and his fondness for his eldest grandchild, the king appears to have received his son and daughter-in-law’s scheme favourably. He made a single stipulation. He ‘said it was unjust to do it without Prince Frederick’s consent, who was now of an age to judge for himself, and so this matter now stood’.102

  No record survives of George Augustus or Caroline consulting Frederick, and George Louis made no further amendments to his will or to the codicil of 1720. Since 1716, when he was granted a British peerage as Duke of Gloucester, Frederick had received English lessons from a tutor called Jean Hanet, who introduced him to Joseph Addison’s satirical journal the Spectator. He also received lessons in ‘artillerie’; he learned the genealogies of the leading princely families of the Empire. Such preoccupations ought to have commended him to his father.103 He was in regular receipt of official reports from Parliament, like the ‘Parcell of Speeches and Replies’ that diplomat George Tilson reported him receiving on 6 August 1723.104

  Whatever his parents’ misapprehensions, time would show that Frederick’s interest in his British prospects, cultivated long-distance from childhood and enlarged during George Louis’s biennial visits, was considerable. In July 1726 George Louis conferred on his grandson a second award of titles, including the dukedom of Edinburgh. At the same time he made a secondary grant to William, who became ‘Baron of the Isle of Alderney, Viscount of Trematon in the County of Cornwall, Earl of Kinnington in the County of Surrey, Marquis of Berkhamsted in the County of Hertford, and Duke of the County of Cumberland’.105 ‘Though Prince Frederick wants no addition to make him more valued & beloved,’ Tilson wrote to Frederick, overlooking William’s similar elevation, ‘yet this new mark of the King’s affection, with Titles known among us, will endear your Highness more to the Nation.’106 More realistic in their assessment of likely outcomes than the boys’ parents, British officials took pains to promote Frederick’s loyalty and to assure him of their own, like secretary of state Lord Townshend’s description of himself in a letter to Frederick as the prince’s ‘très humble, très obligant, & très fidelle Serviteur’.107

  Strangers to the eldest son whom they had not seen for more than a decade, George Augustus and Caroline clung to their alternative plan with characteristic obduracy. Certainly their decision to leave Frederick in Hanover after George Louis’s death suggests that their own minds were made up: for his parents, Frederick’s destiny lay with the electorate. With disastrous consequences, they failed to relinquish pipedreams conceived in the Leicester House nursery, even after their own accession to the throne. Witnesses of Caroline’s unhappiness following her parting from Frederick in 1714 surely expected his recall soon after George Louis’s death. Yet more than a year passed with no invitation from parents to child.

  Frederick arrived at St James’s Palace without fanfare soon after seven o’clock on a dark December evening in 1728. Lord Hervey described his return to the bosom of his family as forced upon the king and queen by an impatient Parliament and ‘the voice of a whole nation’; he described George Augustus as giving in to this pressure ‘as children take physic, forc[ing] himself to swallow this bitter draught for fear of having it poured down his throat in case he did not take it quietly and voluntarily’.108 Their reunion lacked tears or euphoria, lacked ceremony, lacked even warmth. The Daily Post recorded Frederick’s arrival at St James’s ‘privately in a hackney coach’.109 From the outset, forgetful Caroline and George Augustus resented Frederick’s failure to fall in line with their plans for William Augustus.

  Marriage plans had also played their part in prompting Frederick’s crossing of the Channel.

  Since the early 1720s, George Louis had pursued a scheme to perpetuate into a third generation a recent tradition of coupling Hanoverian daughters with Prussian sons. His sister Figuelotte and his daughter Sophia Dorothea had married in turn an elector and a king of Prussia. With Frederick, Anne and Amelia on the brink of marriageability, George Louis proposed two further unions: that of Anne to his Prussian grandson Frederick, born in 1712, and of Hanoverian Frederick to Sophia Dorothea’s daughter Wilhelmine, who was two years his junior.

  Ambitious, haughty and with the Hanoverian regard for dynasty, Sophia Dorothea agreed readily. Her capricious, psychopathic, unpredictable husband Frederick William, whose abuse of his wife and children was physical
as well as verbal, wavered in his consent. For the most part, George Louis and Sophia Dorothea confined their plotting to George Louis’s visits to Hanover, when Sophia Dorothea joined him. Having taken pains in 1718 to legitimise his right to ‘the Care and Approbation of [his grandchildren’s] Marriages when grown up’, George Louis did not initially disclose his wishes to George Augustus or Caroline, and Frederick almost certainly discovered his grandfather’s plan before his parents. Death, however, prevented George Louis from clinching the long-drawn-out deal. George Augustus predictably disdained a scheme cherished by his father. Bluntly he dismissed it: ‘Grafting my half-witted [son] upon a madwoman would not mend the breed.’110

  Frederick’s decision late in 1728 to send to Berlin a picturesquely named associate, Lieutenant Colonel August de la Motte, ‘proved’ to some that, in the absence of communication from his parents, he had decided to take matters into his own hands. De la Motte’s purpose, it was rumoured, was to short-circuit diplomatic sloth, prosecute Frederick’s suit for Wilhelmine’s hand with Frederick William, and fulfil George Louis’s purpose. This argument soon acquired specious credence. Apparently on George Augustus’s orders, Frederick was all but kidnapped at a masquerade ball in Hanover. On a ship called the Diligence, inadequately attended by a single valet de chambre, he was secretly hurried to London and the cold indifference of his parents.111

  In fact it was reports of another marriage plan that forced George Augustus’s hand. Unlike her husband – and contrary to what Wilhelmine herself would later claim – Caroline the dynast favoured Frederick marrying his Prussian cousin. Her objections in December 1728 focused on her own family in Ansbach. The princess for whom, at Frederick’s instigation, de la Motte negotiated with the King of Prussia was not Wilhelmine but her younger sister Frederica, the intended husband not Frederick but his maternal cousin, Caroline’s nephew, Margrave Charles of Ansbach. Charles was the son of Caroline’s brother William Frederick, who had died in 1723 at the young age of thirty-six. In his clandestine interference in the affairs of his mother’s family, Frederick embarked on a perilous course. It was not de la Motte who betrayed him. That part most likely fell to spies at the court of Ansbach or Berlin.