The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  Townshend’s interjection served only to consolidate Caroline’s dislike. As early as 1716 she had labelled him one ‘who ever strove to put on a Mask, which is no better than an Ass’s Face’.185 All too soon, forced to resign from office in 1730 on account of apparently irreconcilable differences with Walpole, the minister would identify a role for Caroline in his political downfall. Accompanying George Augustus to Hanover, ‘Townshend [had] attempted to make a separate interest with the King … independent of the Queen. It is unnecessary to say that her Majesty on the return of the King overthrew the whole fabric.’186 Townshend wrote that ‘it was my fate to be often in a very different way of thinking from her Majesty’s, which was ye chief reason that induced me to retire’.187 His resignation served only to increase Walpole’s hegemony.

  In her response to news of George Augustus’s arrival in London in September, Caroline demonstrated her genius for public gestures and the sureness of her wife’s touch. On foot she set off from Kensington with her children. Through the palace gardens, across the park, along Piccadilly to St James’s they walked. They met George Augustus in his carriage. He alighted. In view of the waiting crowds husband and wife embraced. For Peter Wentworth, this skilfully improvised scene of comfortable domesticity shed all its lustre on Caroline: ‘I find virtue no more retires to cottages and cells, but secure of public triumph and applause, she makes the British Court her imperial residence.’188

  It was the very role identified for Caroline on her arrival on British shores in October 1714.

  Her decade as queen offered Caroline unprecedented opportunities for self-fulfilment. Hitherto there had been so many hindrances. She had put behind her the aimlessness of her early married years in Hanover, lived in Sophia’s shadow; the focus on her childbearing that lifted only in her mid-forties; George Louis’s repressive proscriptions; the emotional strain of family divisions; even financial anxieties. In the last ten years of her life, she discovered opportunities to spread her wings.

  Regencies granted her legitimate access to the political arena. Through her jointure of 1727 she acquired property in her own right, including Richmond Lodge. She had learned enough to exercise patronage with discernment, although the deaths of Leibniz and Newton, her rejection by Pope and Swift and her alienation of John Gay meant that a number of those associated with Caroline as queen were undoubtedly lesser practitioners. That this is particularly true of men of letters arose from Caroline’s faulty command of English and her close association with Walpole. Every leading poet of the period opposed the ‘gros homme’, nicknamed ‘Bob the poet’s foe’; gamekeeper’s reports from Houghton, they sneered, were all he read with pleasure. Lord Tyrconnel’s view that ‘the best judges of poetry … are the Queen and Mr Pope’ won few adherents, least of all – in its claims for Caroline – Pope himself.189 He castigated literary mediocrity in The Dunciad, published in 1728. Its chief sponsor in Pope’s poem is the Goddess of Dulness, an unflattering image of Caroline: ‘Laborious, heavy, busy, bold and blind,/She ruled … the mind.’

  In gardening and architecture Caroline remained loyal to Bridgeman and Kent. In the summer of 1727 the Daily Journal reported her plans for a new royal library. A decade would pass before construction of Kent’s handsome neo-Palladian design adjoining St James’s Palace.190 Kent also carried out artistic commissions for Caroline, including decoration of the Queen’s Staircase at Hampton Court; his scheme included trompe l’oeil architectural details and a scene of Britannia’s coronation by Neptune. He painted a trio of scenes from the life of Henry V, proof that Caroline’s enthusiasm for Britain’s royal history was not confined to the Tudors. The Battle of Agincourt, The Meeting between Henry V and the Queen of France and The Marriage of Henry V, delivered to Caroline in 1730 and 1731, contributed colourful notes of cod-medieval romance to her dressing room at St James’s Palace. She commissioned portraits of herself and her children from Jervas, Amigoni and Kneller’s pupil John Vanderbank, the son of a Huguenot tapestry weaver. She was probably responsible for Amigoni’s introduction to Charlotte Clayton, whose portrait he also painted. She obtained portraits of Newton and, following his death in 1729, Samuel Clarke, which she hung at Kensington Palace. In 1726 Saussure wrote that Caroline had embarked on further improving the setting of Richmond Lodge: ‘the princess takes a great interest in the gardens, which are spacious and she has greatly embellished them’.191 Dismissed by George Augustus and others as ‘childish silly stuff’, her ‘embellishments’ would continue through the mid-1730s, and served by extension to associate Caroline with a broader interest in natural history, especially botany. At an audience in 1729 she received from naturalist Mark Catesby the first twenty plates in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, then British colonies.192 Two years later, Catesby dedicated the first of its two volumes to her. And she continued to support Handel, whose fortunes fluctuated. In 1733 the word book to his grandiose oratorio Deborah was dedicated to her by its author Samuel Humphreys.

  Caroline’s decision soon after the accession to install in two rooms at Kensington Palace, previously used as a library by George Louis, her cabinet of curiosities – a collection she had begun as Princess of Wales – showed the continuing influence of her upbringing in German courts. As a child in Dresden she may have seen renowned collections of naturalia and objets d’art belonging to the Saxon electors. She was present when, in 1703, Frederick III oversaw the relocation of his collections of antiquities and natural curiosities to rooms specially fitted up in the town palace in Berlin.193 In Hanover she had admired the collections assembled by Sophia. She had revelled in the joys of acquisition in letters to and from Liselotte: in both women’s cases their collections extended into traditionally masculine areas, including coins and medals, of which Caroline eventually amassed nearly a thousand. Her collection also included the two ‘eggs of tortoise’ given to her by Liselotte in 1717. There were narwhal tusks, called ‘unicorn horns’, reputedly magical in their properties. Like Sophia, Caroline owned hardstone and enamel jewels and elaborate bibelots made from coral, agate and onyx. She acquired paintings, especially portraits. A series of cameo portraits of Tudor sovereigns – Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots – combined the excitement of recondite craftsmanship with Caroline’s particular interest in the earlier dynasty and her desire to create a visual record of Britain’s monarchy culminating in George Augustus.

  Horace Walpole would claim of Caroline as collector that she took ‘great pleasure in collecting and preserving the dispersed remains of the collection belonging to the crown’, a derivative sort of husbandry.194 His assessment reveals the importance Caroline attached to royal provenance. Budgetary constraints restricted the scope of her collecting, so, too, her purpose. Voltaire described her, in Letters Concerning the English Nation, as ‘born to encourage the whole Circle of Arts’.195 In truth her focus was narrower. In Hanover she had promoted her interest in all things British as a means of indicating through the appropriately female medium of culture her fitness to share the British throne with George Augustus. As queen, her artistic energies were directed at emphasising the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession, rooted in the family’s descent from James I via Elizabeth of Bohemia. At Hampton Court, Windsor Castle and, especially, Kensington Palace, she redisplayed paintings, especially royal portraits and portrait miniatures. As in the collections she had known in Germany, she arranged images chronologically into the equivalent of a visual line of descent; she told Lord Egmont that this was the best way.196 Her intention was to place George Augustus’s family within a continuum of British monarchs. The undertaking appealed to her absorption in genealogy, bolstered the sense of belonging of this poor-relation princess. Caroline’s arrangements of portraits depicted the Hanoverians as current occupants of an ancient throne, tied to their predecessors by consanguinity and religion. Each picture hang represented the same propagandist impulse. Inevitably their reach was restricted by the location of th
ese displays within royal residences, visible only to the tiniest elite audience.

  A chance discovery stimulated her zeal. In the early 1730s, George Vertue described the treasure trove Caroline happed upon in the first year of George Augustus’s reign: ‘Of late (about a year or two) the present Queen met with in the library at Kinsinton many pictures, drawings (in a book) from the life done by Hans Holbein. The pictures of persons living in the time and courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI. These pieces have long been buried in oblivion.’197 In the same haul she also came across engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar, which inspired less excitement: she loaned them to her bedchamber lady, Lady Burlington. Vertue located the discovery ‘in a bureau’. He further identified the portrait sketches as ‘one book of heads said to be King Henry VIII his Queens and Court etc, some with names, some without’.198 There were sixty-three drawings in total, dating from two separate visits to London on Holbein’s part.

  To Caroline, who had demonstrated her enthusiasm for Tudor England as early as 1716, admiring the collection of Sir John Germaine, Holbein’s preparatory drawings offered a window on to the country’s first Protestant courts. It was a period regularly recalled on the London stage, with its staple diet of more or less rewritten plays by Shakespeare, bulked out by new ‘Tudor’ drama like Rowe’s Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray; it was the period in which seeds of the Act of Settlement were first sown, with Henry VIII’s break from Rome and England’s Reformation. And by association, Holbein’s drawings recalled aspects of the world of Elizabeth I, to whom Caroline had more than once been compared. Caroline ordered the drawings to be individually framed. Then she removed them to Richmond Lodge, the house that was her personal getaway, and displayed them there to chosen courtiers. Later she transferred all sixty-three images to Kensington Palace. In a new picture closet which she created in a room close to the State Drawing Room, they formed part of a scheme of sixteenth-century likenesses, alongside an extensive group of miniatures of the Dukes of Brunswick, forebears of George Augustus. She would acquire in addition a handful of Holbein’s finished portraits.

  ‘English men and women are very clean: not a day passes without their washing their hands, arms, faces, necks and throats in cold water, and that in winter as well as summer,’ wrote César de Saussure in 1727.199 It was a habit Caroline shared with her adopted countrymen. ‘I cannot forebear doing Justice to the Queen my Mistress, and Glumdalclitch my Nurse, whose Persons were as sweet as those of any Lady in England,’ insists Gulliver of the Queen of Brobdingnag, discussing the hygiene of the gigantic courtiers in Gulliver’s Travels.200 It was equally true of Caroline, whose ablutions extended beyond washing in cold water. She was an early advocate of bathing, and encouraged it in every member of her family. Over a ten-year period, beginning in 1727, more than twenty new wooden bathtubs were ordered for the royal family from makers Thomas Ayliffe and William Grindall, including the big new tub ‘with large brass strong handle, [and] large strong castors’ delivered at the end of 1734. Caroline’s household accounts also include regular orders of a cosmetic preparation used for washing the face and hands, William Lowman’s ‘Maydew’ water.201

  Caroline bathed regularly in a wooden ‘body bath’, a round or oval tub bound with brass hoops. Some were fitted with castors for easy moving into position in front of a fire, standing on a painted floorcloth that protected wooden boards. Unlike modern baths, the tubs were lined with linen; in each was a wooden stool on which the bather sat. Bathers of the period wore fine linen shifts like voluminous bathing costumes, one reason Caroline was able to preserve for so long the secret of her umbilical hernia. The necessary woman Mrs Susanna Ireland was instructed to look after Caroline’s baths. She received additional payments for filling tubs, carrying ‘hot water and other necessaries towards Their Majesties’ bathing’.202

  Caroline’s unusual fondness for bathing may have been motivated by more than a desire for cleanliness. In the birthday poem he addressed to her in 1732, Richard Savage toyed heavy-handedly with an idea of the queen as arbiter of spring; he presented her birthday on 1 March as heralding a new beginning, nature’s rebirth: ‘Cold, wintry sorrows fly;/… Cheerful the vegetative world aspire,/Put forth unfolding blooms …/So gives her birth, (like yon approaching spring)/The land to flourish.’203 Caroline understood Savage’s metaphor as a pretty piece of optimism and rewarded him with an annual pension of £50. In truth, as she recognised, her springtime had begun its descent towards autumn. Her worsening health was a debit to set against credits. An attack of gout had followed the exertions of the coronation. As the 1720s gave way to the 1730s, similar irruptions increased in frequency. The pain in her legs and feet made walking difficult: she resorted to occasional use of a wheelchair – a present from Augustus II of Saxony, brother of her stepfather John George IV – as early as 1728.204 Unable to take even gentle exercise, she continued to put on weight. She was gradually becoming obese, which further hindered her mobility. With good reason her detractors referred to her as George Augustus’s ‘great fat-arsed wife’.205

  A handful of reported conversations indicate her concern about her health. Since the birth of Princess Louisa in 1724 she had suffered abdominal pains as a result of her ‘rupture’ or umbilical hernia, damage to the abdominal wall in the form of an opening, caused by the strain of multiple pregnancies. Her chief concern, however, appears not to have been her physical discomfort. Umbilical hernias may cause the navel to bulge outwards, and Caroline’s principal anxiety was her shame at the unsightliness of this visible evidence of her condition, which she took pains to conceal. Given the infrequency with which she was naked, even when bathing, her fears were mostly exaggerated. The real source of her concern was almost certainly George Augustus’s likely reaction, and her fear that discovery on his part would cause physical revulsion, with an inevitable lessening of the hold she exercised over him through sexual attraction.

  Horace Walpole reported her strategies for diverting speculation: ‘To prevent all suspicion her Majesty would frequently stand for some minutes in her shift talking to her Ladies, tho labouring with so dangerous a complaint.’206 For the most part her confidence trickery succeeded. Either her vigilance once slipped or Charlotte Clayton was unusually beady-eyed. How the bedchamber woman stumbled upon her secret Caroline did not discover; it was not a welcome revelation. Nor did it lessen her preoccupation with her condition. To Robert Walpole, following his wife’s death, Caroline addressed a series of questions unrelated to conventional condolence. Minutely she quizzed him about Lady Walpole’s decline. Again and again, he noticed, she ‘reverted to a rupture’.207 Her fixity, he concluded, permitted a single explanation.

  In the event a combination of causes hastened Caroline’s physical decline. Painful gout deterred her from the lengthy brisk walks that had been her habit since the summers at Herrenhausen with Sophia. A regime of little exercise and an abundance of rich food, especially red meat, exacted its toll. With obesity and a consequent decline in muscle strength, pressure on the hernia increased, causing the opening in the abdominal wall to expand and thus increasing the possibility of the small intestine pushing out through the hole, with life-threatening consequences. Ill-defined and muddle-headed, Caroline’s anxiety was nevertheless well-placed. Through fear of repelling George Augustus and a conviction of physical impairment as unbecomingly undignified she said nothing. Just as she concealed smallpox scars with patches, so she chose to hide an affliction that was altogether more serious. Her determined neglect inevitably hastened the fulfilment of her fears.

  Meanwhile, Caroline made concessions to her growing physical discomfort. She abandoned whenever possible the stiff corsets that were an essential feature of court dress, creating the distinctive mantua silhouette of triangular bodice above a heavy train and skirts stretched wide over whalebone hoops; she ordered only a single set of stiff stays between 1730 and 1734.208 In their place she adopted the soft corsetry, with silver hooks, more often worn during pregnancy, that exerted gentler p
ressure on her stomach and the painful hernia. Instances recorded by Hervey, Wentworth and others of Caroline’s indisposition during formal court entertainments suggest that it was only on these occasions that she continued to wear a full set of boned stays.

  In Hervey’s account, Caroline’s martyrdom is exacerbated by the attitude of the royal family towards illness. Of robust constitution like his grandmother Sophia, George Augustus showed little tolerance of illness among his close relations. As a result his family affected an illusion of permanent good health that none but the hypochondriac younger Caroline ever punctured. Lady Pomfret reported Amelia’s behaviour, though ‘very much out of order’, in April 1728: ‘The occasion was this: she had a Drawing-room on Thursday, where it was extremely hot, and she (to oblige people) stayed above two hours; and, I believe, would not have gone then, (though far from well,) if I had not ventured to whisper what was o’clock.’209 ‘There is a strange affectation of an incapacity of being sick that ran through the whole Royal Family,’ Hervey wrote. ‘They carried [it] so far that no one of them was more willing to own any other of the family ill than to acknowledge themselves to be so. I have known the King to get out of bed, choking with a sore throat, and with a high fever, only to dress and have a levée, and in five minutes undress and return to his bed till the same ridiculous farce of health was to be presented the next day at the same hour.’210