The First Iron Lady

by Matthew Dennison

  Refusing to make allowances for his own physical weakness, George Augustus withheld similar concessions from Caroline or his children. At a drawing room in 1734 he permitted her – ‘near swooning’ and ‘unable to stand any longer’ – to withdraw early. ‘Nothwithstanding [her condition],’ Hervey recorded, ‘at night he brought her into a still greater crowd at the ball, and there kept her till eleven o’clock.’211 He ‘[did] not love that any about him should complain of being ill’.212

  Towards those outside the royal family, his indulgence was kindlier. In a letter of January 1731 describing his recent collapse at court, Hervey acknowledged, ‘the King assisted with more goodness than his general good-breeding alone would have exacted, and has sent here [i.e. to enquire about Hervey’s health] perpetually’.213 For the time being such consideration outstripped that extended towards Caroline. Her pride would not have wished it otherwise. Ahead of the brisk morning walks on which George Augustus continued to demand her company, she plunged her feet and ankles in painfully cold water to reduce their gouty swelling. To Anne in 1733 she confessed, ‘I took the trouble to get my feet into a fit state for walking … and could not sleep all night for pain.’214

  In 1730, a courtier and a poet contributed materially to Caroline’s happiness. The first was John, Lord Hervey. He took up his position as vice chamberlain in June, and embarked on the career as Caroline’s cavalier servente that he chronicled in his memoirs with astringent relish. The second boasted none of Hervey’s advantages of noble birth, familiarity with courts or close acquaintance with Robert Walpole. He did not, like Hervey, observe Caroline at close quarters in unguarded moments. He was not on terms of intimacy with leading politicians. He was not present when the drawing room emptied and the card tables were cleared; when, with her needlework, Caroline, ‘a little angry, and a little peevish, and a little tired’, steeled herself to endure George Augustus’s nightly litany of grievances; when the King ‘poured out an unintelligible torrent of German, to which the Queen made not one word of reply, but knotted on till she tangled her thread, then snuffed the candles that stood on the table before her’, an entire marriage’s frustrations in that tangled thread, humiliation concealed behind extinguished flames.215 Yet he conceived in similar measure lasting affection for the woman who changed the course of his life. His name was Stephen Duck.

  Hervey’s appointment marked his return to court after a period in the House of Commons as MP for Bury St Edmunds and, following illness, a lengthy recuperative visit to Italy in company with the man who was almost certainly his lover, Stephen Fox, in place of his wife, Caroline’s former maid of honour Molly Lepell. With his dazzling, willowy, girlish good looks, dandified clothes, clumsy make-up, brittle wit and talent for barbed repartee, Hervey had played the part of court butterfly from early in George Louis’s reign. His marriage produced eight children; his attitude to his beautiful, serious-minded wife was neglectful and dismissive. Hervey indulged in numerous affairs. Soon after his return to court in 1730 he embarked on what historians have described as a ‘homoerotically charged’ friendship with Frederick, Prince of Wales that soured into lasting enmity.216 Among objects of his contempt were George Augustus and Alexander Pope. ‘When God created Thee,’ he addressed Pope, ‘one would believe,/He said the same as to the Snake of Eve;/To human Race Antipathy declare.’217

  At times his urbanity was the thinnest of veneers. To his own surprise, this jaded cynic succumbed to an affection and admiration for Caroline that was wholehearted and unreserved. If the portraits of his memoirs are unreliable, that of Caroline at least offers an accurate measure of the powerful feelings she inspired in those closest to her: not only Hervey but Peter Wentworth, Charlotte Clayton, Frances Hertford and Henrietta Pomfret. Hervey claimed he looked upon her goodness daily ‘like heav’n with fear and love’.218 For her part, Caroline’s fondness for him was such that she joked onlookers would suspect impropriety in their relationship were it not for the disparity in their ages. She gave him ‘a ring … with her head upon it’, which he kept until his death and afterwards bequeathed to her daughter Caroline; she gave him ‘a gold snuff-box … with Arts and Sciences engraved upon it’, and the ‘prettiest and agreeablest’ horse, which he rode alongside her chaise when she followed George Augustus hunting.219 She overlooked accusations of bisexuality that involved Hervey in fighting a duel, and Pope’s vicious characterisation of him as an ‘amphibious thing’: ‘Now trips a lady, and now struts a Lord’.220

  Dangerously, she allowed Hervey to usurp Frederick’s place in her affections. In his role as an MP she relied on him as an alternative source of parliamentary gossip and information. His light, accomplished conversation balanced George Augustus’s chafing, which Hervey decried as ‘abominably and perpetually so harsh and rough’, his temper ‘seldom put in a sheath’.221 When Caroline’s talents as grandissime comédienne faltered and tears of frustration or humiliation succeeded her husband’s criticisms and contradictions, Hervey agreed with her that the catch in her throat that she suppressed had been laughter, not sobs. ‘You are one of the greatest pleasures of my life,’ she told him.222 He repaid her trust by acting as Walpole’s agent, his political outlook closely aligned to that of the king’s first minister. Insofar as he was able he returned Caroline’s intense platonic affection.

  There were no approaches to intimacy in Caroline’s relationship with Stephen Duck. On 23 September 1730 the Daily Post reported that ‘several ingenious poetical Compositions’ had earned their author a royal pension and, at Caroline’s gift, ‘a little house in Richmond Park to live in’.223 Duck, the author in question, was a farm worker from Wiltshire. Chief among his ‘poetical Compositions’ was The Thresher’s Labour, his depiction of the annual cycle of ‘endless Toils’ of the labouring life in the country.

  Duck came to Caroline’s notice with lofty recommendations. The Earl of Tankerville sent copies of his poems to court; George Augustus’s chaplain in ordinary Dr Alured Clarke passed on the view of ‘some people of taste’ that Duck ‘must be the best poet of the age … [and], with all his defects, a superior genius to Mr Pope’; Clarke employed Charlotte Clayton as his go-between with Caroline.224 To her considerable enjoyment, The Thresher’s Labour was read aloud to Caroline by Lord Macclesfield at Windsor Castle.

  Afterwards she summoned Duck to Windsor. At their meeting on 2 October he presented her with two poems, ‘Royal Benevolence’ and ‘On Providence’. Overwhelmed by the honour of royal patronage, he wrote clumsily: ‘Your ROYAL MAJESTY a Muck-worm took/From Labour, pleas’d with his mean trifling Book/… Your Royal Bounty sets my Soul on fire;/And what I lov’d before, I now admire.’225 Duck’s own benefits at Caroline’s hands become, in ‘Royal Benevolence’, proof of the benignity of the regime: ‘This contriving and performing Good,/Runs in each Vein of Hanoverian Blood.’ For his loyalty, if not his artistry, Caroline rewarded him financially. She offered him a house and occupation in the gardens at Richmond; she made him keeper of Duck Island in St James’s Park. In 1733 she appointed him a yeoman of the guard. At a stroke she severed his connection with the land. And thanks to her attention, broadcast in the journals of the day, Duck found himself a literary celebrity.

  A pirated volume of his work, Poems on Several Occasions, published at the end of September, ran through seven editions within eleven days.226 The following March no less a figure than the Oxford professor of poetry, Joseph Spence, turned a series of conversations with Duck into an early equivalent of celebrity biography, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck the Wiltshire Poet. Either misguidedly or mischievously, Caroline dispatched copies of Duck’s verse to Alexander Pope. His response was predictably derisive. At Duck’s expense Swift committed harsh invective to rhyme: ‘From threshing corn he turns to thresh his brains/For which her Majesty allows him grains.’227 Those ‘grains’ would continue until Caroline’s death and beyond. Duck never again wrote verse with the easy facility or sincerity of The Thresher’s Labour, but thanks to Car
oline, nor was he ever again forced to earn his living threshing. Instead, in the words of the playwright and novelist Catharine Cockburn, Caroline ‘seated him at ease near her lov’d Hermitage’.228 In the gardens of Richmond Lodge she accorded him a principal role in the bucolic masquerade she created there, part escapist fantasy, part visual political allegory. In transplanting him from his native soil she consulted the views of Tankerville, Clarke and Charlotte Clayton. None consulted Duck himself.

  The Hermitage referred to by Cockburn was first planned late in 1730. William Kent’s commission, sited beyond a sweep of lawn in a thicket of pine trees in the garden’s northernmost wooded enclave, was for a rustic building of picturesque desuetude. The picturesque note continued inside: vaulted ceilings artfully dripped stalactites.229 One room was furnished as a library. In the main central space Caroline commissioned from Giovanni Battista Guelphi portrait busts of ‘the brightest Stars in Learning’s Hemisphere’, a gallery of Whiggish Enlightenment thinkers: Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke, known to her from Leicester House days, Clarke’s disciple William Wollaston, author of the influential Religion of Nature Delineated, which Caroline reputedly read three times, the philosopher John Locke and philosopher-scientist Robert Boyle. Works by Clarke, Locke and Wollaston found their way on to the library’s shelves.230

  It was a folly at the cutting edge of garden design, with obvious affinities to the Tory Lord Cobham’s Temple of British Worthies at Stowe. Stephen Duck was moved to verse. ‘On the Queen’s Grotto, in RICHMOND Gardens’, published in the Daily Post-Boy on 11 December 1732, praised both Kent’s design and Caroline: ‘See how the Walls, in humble Form, advance,/With careless Pride, and simple Elegance:/… How small the Mansion, and the Guest how Great!’231 Royal gardening became a metaphor for the civilising impulse, the replacement of ‘Weeds and Thistles’ by ‘harmonious Lustre’ a heroic image of progress: ‘So, once, confus’d, the barb’rous Nations stood;/Unpolish’d were their Minds, their Manners rude;/Till Rome her conqu’ring Eagles wide display’d,/And bid the World reform.’232 Others acclaimed ‘Carolina, sapient queen’, unaware of the Hermitage’s enormous price tag, which eventually exceeded £3,000.233 ‘Every man and every boy is writing verses on the royal hermitage,’ commented Pope sourly.234 Despite criticism in the opposition journal the Craftsman – ‘a heap of stones thrown into a very artful disorder, and curiously embellished with moss and shrubs, to represent rude Nature’ – Caroline’s Hermitage won widespread acclaim. The queen was praised for her patriotic choice of British worthies; she was praised for the outlook her choices represented, an attachment to philosophical debate and scientific enquiry and ‘Your Esteem and Friendship for all Defenders of Truth, while they are living, [and] the Regard You pay to their Memories when dead’.235 ‘When her Majesty consecrated these dead heroes,’ the London Journal offered, ‘she built herself a temple in the hearts of the People of Britain who will by this instance of her love of liberty and public virtue, think their interests safe in the hands of the Government as their own.’236 The absence of any representation of Leibniz was noted with approval.

  To a markedly different reception, Caroline afterwards ventured a further sortie into garden-building. Kent’s final folly at Richmond Lodge was dismissed by the Craftsman as ‘an old Haystack thatch’d over’.237 Caroline called it Merlin’s Cave. A short distance from the Hermitage, it stood beyond a dancing lawn and a man-made pond in an enclosure of trees reached by winding woodland paths. In an engraving of 1736, ducks clog the pond. The ‘cave’ itself appears an eccentric structure of three simple Gothic bays topped by towering beehive-shaped thatched roofs like coconut shells. In a rare poetic commendation, William Mason, writing after the structure’s demolition a generation later, called it a ‘sweet design’, its setting ‘Fairy land’.238 Other poets wavered in their views.

  In the Hermitage Caroline had showcased a handful of her intellectual heroes, aligning herself, and by implication George Augustus’s regime, with developments in science, religion and rationalism. The message of Merlin’s Cave, built during George Augustus’s absence in Hanover in the summer of 1735, was less clear, especially after Caroline employed Duck’s wife, an uneducated woman called Sarah Big, as visitor guide. Duck himself became hermit-interpreter.239

  At the centre of the ‘cave’, a triptych of Gothic niches contained six life-size wax figures sculpted by a precursor to Madame Tussaud, Mary Salmon. One was identified as Merlin, another as Henry VII’s wife Elizabeth of York, a third as Elizabeth I. A fourth figure represented Merlin’s secretary. The remaining waxworks may have been intended as Minerva, goddess of learning and the arts, with whom Caroline herself had been associated in earlier imagery, and the well-known sorceress Mother Shipton; they were also identified as Britomart and Britomart’s nurse, characters from Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan poem The Faerie Queene. Visiting in droves, Caroline’s contemporaries were baffled. In Britain, unlike on the Continent, waxworks enjoyed a lowly status, as vulgar as fairground attractions. Horace Walpole dismissed the whole as ‘an unintelligible puppet show’.240 With Merlin as the key figure, Caroline may have intended to make a point about prophecy and the inevitability of the Hanoverian succession. Or perhaps she intended this combination of history and legend as an alternative narrative of Britishness, again with the Hanoverians as the culmination. ‘I do not read romances but they say it is taken out of Spencer’s Fairy Queen,’ wrote Sarah Marlborough with pointed lack of interest.241

  Fair-booth kitsch and a confusing message won Caroline few plaudits. Fog’s Weekly Journal sprang to her defence. For all its ardour, the paper’s apologia made matters no clearer: ‘When we consider where and by whom this singular Edifice is erected, and these extraordinary Figures placed, we cannot imagine the Whole to be a mere useless Ornament; nor reflect without some Indignation, on the Indecency of those who treat it as no better than an idle Whim, a Painter’s Fancy, a Gardiner’s Gugaw … a Puppet-Shew … Pretty-Shew, etc. On the contrary, we doubt not but that … it is wholly Hieorglyphical [sic], Emblematical, Typical and Symbolical, conveying artful Lessons of Policy to Princes and Ministers of State.’242 The substance of those lessons the paper failed to impart.

  Like the Hermitage, Merlin’s Cave was entrusted to Stephen Duck’s care: to his literary bent Caroline tailored the position of librarian. The trouble she took equipping its library suggests that, despite adverse comment, it satisfied her as a diversion. Among her choice of titles were works by Samuel Clarke: her ‘education’ of Duck included inculcation in her own latitudinarian principles. Later Duck committed suicide. Commentators have traced the origins of his unhappiness to his removal by Caroline from his natural sphere, but Caroline had been dead many years by the time Duck killed himself in 1755. It may be that, in the 1730s, he was as much a toy for his royal mistress as any other of her servants. If so, her exploitation was inadvertent and her admiration for his talents – however misguided – apparently genuine. Duck described himself uncomplainingly to Caroline as ‘a Tree, which You have transplanted out of a barren Soil into a fertile and beautiful Garden’.243

  A sketch begun by William Hogarth in 1732, the same year he painted William Augustus, Mary and Louisa in the audience of A Performance of ‘The Indian Emperor or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards’, points to stark divisions within the royal family. A preliminary study for a commission that failed to materialise, The Family of George II depicts George Augustus and Caroline surrounded by their seven children. In front of the Tuscan temple designed by Kent for the southern end of the riverside terrace at Richmond Lodge, sovereign and consort sit in elaborately carved chairs. In the centre foreground, Mary and Louisa play with a spaniel. Their older sisters stand behind them, beside a table. On the farther side of the table, Frederick gestures to Amelia and the younger Caroline. They glance towards him, as do Mary and Louisa. Anne appears to be talking over her shoulder to her father. And Caroline, ignoring all else, gazes at William Augustus, a diminutive princely figu
re closer than any of his siblings to his parents’ ersatz thrones.

  Even in its unfinished state, it is an image of separations. Frederick is remote from his parents, an object of curiosity to his younger sisters. Anne pays him no attention at all, resentful of his higher status, likewise William Augustus, whom he had displaced on his arrival from Hanover. Amelia and Caroline are attentive to their brother, who fails to engage his parents. There is physical ease in Caroline and George Augustus’s proximity, but no communication between them.

  Hogarth appears to have intended the painting as the first in a series of royal commissions that would enhance his reputation and his practice. He did not mean it to expose the fragmented nature of the country’s first family, but his disparate composition achieved precisely that. The Family of George II accurately reflects fissures within George Augustus’s house.

  Separately, Frederick and Anne were bent on escape. A decade before Hogarth’s preparatory sketch, George Louis had discussed with Frederick his plans for the Prussian marriages. Frederick’s summons to London in December 1728 had been motivated in part by George Augustus’s determination that his elder son be prevented from interfering in the diplomatic wranglings of such a scheme. Recalled to the chilly bosom of his family, housed like his youngest siblings in apartments in St James’s Palace on a fraction of the allowance his father had enjoyed as heir to the throne, Frederick found his ardour for marriage increased rather than otherwise. Marriage offered him the promise of an independent establishment, more money and a degree of status within his own home.

  Although she swiftly came to nurture an overwhelming dislike of her elder brother, Anne’s aspirations were similar. This imperious, accomplished princess craved the distinction of a throne, achievable only through marriage. From the polite diversions of life at court she drew limited fulfilment: music lessons with Handel, visits to the opera, gambling at cards, needlework. Stephen Duck’s ‘On a Screen, work’d in Flowers by Her Royal Highness Anne, Princess of Orange’, published after her marriage, expresses the elegant futility of her existence: ‘Each Flow’r does with such Lustre shine,/Such beauties crown the gay Design;/That Nature fix’d in Wonder stands,/To see she’s rival’d by your Hands.’244 Her sisters – and, to a lesser extent, Caroline too – were similarly constrained. Hervey presents life at Hampton Court as grinding, unvaried routine: ‘no mill-horse ever went in a more constant track, or a more unchanging circle … Walking, chaises, levees, and audiences fill the morning; at night the King plays at commerce and backgammon, and the Queen at quadrille.’245 ‘All our actions,’ wrote Lady Pomfret, ‘are as mechanical as the clock which directs them.’246 Anne longed to escape the ossified roundelay. She longed to escape her father’s pettifogging exactions. And the longer she lived alongside Frederick, the more she dreaded the prospect of her father’s death and spinsterhood at the court of a brother she despised.