The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach. Matthew Dennison
and living with her mother in out-of-the-way Pretzsch seems grounds enough to query Walpole’s claim. Instead the marriage of Frederick and his duchess illustrates the kind of union Caroline could reasonably have anticipated for herself.
Frederick was seven years older than Caroline. He had inherited his small duchy at the age of fifteen, and would devote a long reign to territorial and financial advancement. His stepmother, Christine of Baden-Durlach, had previously married, as his third wife, Caroline’s Ansbach grandfather, Albert II. Among Frederick’s forebears was John Frederick of Saxony, a Reformation hero who rebelled against the Catholicism of the Holy Roman Emperor and for his pains forfeited his elector’s title.79 In its ties of consanguinity, focus on localised concerns and commitment to Protestantism, the marriage was typical of those contracted among lesser German royalties throughout the period. (The marriage of Caroline’s half-sister Dorothea Frederica to the heir to the tiny territory of Hanau-Lichtenberg was another such, ditto her brother’s marriage to Christiane Charlotte of Württemberg-Winnental.) That Caroline’s life pursued a different trajectory was thanks to the sponsorship of Frederick and Figuelotte.
She can never have doubted that a single choice – to marry or not to marry – governed her future, a paucity of opportunity not restricted to princesses. Furthermore, that her ‘choice’ in the matter was circumscribed to an extreme degree. Too well she understood the hazards of the world into which she had been born. Spinsterhood was a fruitless existence for royal women. Royal marriage was contractual, an arrangement based on policy, unmarried princesses commodities in a calculation of barter and exchange. Husbands took into account strategic considerations; they expected generous dowries. Caroline knew the modesty of her inheritance. Her only trump card – save good looks, which other princesses shared – was the prestige of her Brandenburg guardians, bound to her by honour but few obligations.
Time would show, however, that Caroline was not her mother. In 1692, destitute and miserable, Eleonore had allowed herself to be coerced into marrying a man who offended her on every level. She had exposed herself to humiliation, bullying and even threats of murder in a court dominated by the septic divisiveness of a possibly incestuous affair. When Caroline’s turn came, she would prove less compliant.
Happily for us, circumstances propelled her beyond the reach of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha and his ilk. Frederick III’s father, Frederick William, known as the Great Elector, had transformed the status of the Brandenburg electorate. A standing army, military victories, trading posts on Africa’s Gold Coast, coffers swollen with revenues from new excise duties and a princely building programme had magnified Brandenburg’s prestige and the newsworthiness of its court. Long before Frederick dreamt of his crown, his father had made claims that were altogether more swaggering for the north German state: an Alabastersaal in the palace in Berlin, furnished with twelve full-length statues of Hohenzollern electors confronting the likenesses, in ghostly marble, of a clutch of Roman emperors; a Porcelain Cabinet in the palace of Oranienburg, nodding to Dutch influences and aligning Brandenburg within an international trading network.80 Figuelotte’s peripatetic cadre of thinkers and musicians further broadcast the charms and achievements of Lützenburg; Frederick’s stimulus to the manufacture of home-grown luxury goods including tapestry, lace and mirrors – much of it the work of Huguenot exiles – suggested affluence and sophistication. Brandenburg’s lustre inevitably enhanced Caroline’s marriageability. In addition, her presence in Berlin brought her to the attention of Figuelotte’s redoubtable mother Sophia. It would prove a critical connection.
The septuagenarian Sophia was strong-willed, a gossip, ambitious for the fortunes of her princely house. As a child in Leiden in the 1630s, she had benefited from a rigorous educational programme devised by her father, the Elector Palatine. This training had reaped dividends. In 1670 the English writer and diplomat Edward Chamberlyne described Sophia as ‘one of the most accomplisht Ladies in Europe’, while thirty years later John Toland claimed ‘she has long been admir’d by all the Learned World, as a Woman of Incomparable Knowledge in Divinity, Philosophy, History, and the Subjects of all Sorts of Books, of which she has read a prodigious quantity. She speaks five Languages so well that by her Accent it might be a Dispute which of ’em was her first.’81 Admittedly, the philosopher was a partisan commentator inclined to exaggerate his subject’s prowess; but the sincerity of Sophia’s engagement with the life of the mind, which in turn had shaped Figuelotte’s upbringing, is beyond question. In those closest to her she esteemed strength of character and like-mindedness. Figuelotte’s reports of her orphan protégée, made flesh during Sophia’s visit to Berlin in 1704, piqued the older woman’s curiosity and sowed the germ of an idea.
In the event, concerning rumours of a possible marriage for Caroline, Sophia met her match as gossip in Leibniz. Philosophical genius aside, Liebniz was a man of worldly inclinations. Liselotte described him as one of the rare ‘learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour’; it is hard to exonerate him from accusations of snobbery.82 Silkily he ingratiated himself in high places, as one of his less philosophical letters – to Augustus the Strong’s mistress, about a preventative for dysentery while travelling – testifies.83 In surviving sources, it is Leibniz who first broke the news of a splendid match for Caroline, in a letter written in 1698 to Figuelotte’s cousin Benedicta, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The proposed alliance concerned Duchess Benedicta’s nephew, Archduke Charles of Austria, the thirteen-year-old second son of the Holy Roman Emperor.84
Despite the incendiary quality of such a rumour, Caroline herself remained unaware of the scheme for five years. Her eventual enlightenment had a cloak-and-dagger quality. In the autumn of 1703 she received a breathless letter. By way of introduction, its clergyman-author claimed former acquaintance with her mother. The letter instructed Caroline to travel with all speed to Eleonore’s younger sister, Fredericka Elisabeth, Duchess of Saxe-Weissenfels, in Duchess Fredericka’s tinpot capital. ‘Immediately after receiving this letter, go without the very slightest delay to the Duchess at Weissenfels, because of extremely important matters concerning your Serene Highness’s greatest happiness, about which the Duchess will inform your Serene Highness.’85 In 1703, in the life of an unmarried princess, a single eventuality merited the description ‘greatest happiness’: an offer of marriage. The letter was directed from Vienna. A second letter, arriving at the same time, informed her that waiting at Weissenfels would be a ‘distinguished gentleman’ anxious to meet her.
Caroline’s reaction to these clandestine strategies included a measure of astonishment. Whether she chose to confide in Figuelotte or her brother William Frederick, who had recently succeeded his second stepbrother as margrave in Ansbach, is unclear. So is the extent, if any, to which Vienna’s imperial court had communicated its intentions to Frederick as Caroline’s guardian. That Caroline reached her own conclusion about events afoot appears inevitable. The Austrian emperor, Leopold I, had two sons, of whom the elder, Joseph, King of Hungary, was married already. On 24 February 1699 he had married Duchess Benedicta’s daughter, Amalia Wilhelmine.
In Weissenfels, as if to emphasise to Caroline the honour of an imperial visit, Fredericka Elisabeth’s spendthrift husband provided for the young Archduke Charles a ‘generous and magnificent reception’ costing ‘tons of gold’. In September 1703, in accordance with an agreement brokered in 1699 by Louis XIV and England’s William III as a contingency plan following the death of Spain’s feeble-minded and childless Carlos II, Charles had been proclaimed King of Spain.86 Although the War of the Spanish Succession would deny him his Spanish pretensions, his behaviour in the meantime indicated in full measure consciousness of his eminence. A later observer commended Charles’s ‘art of seeming well pleased with everything without so much as smiling once all the while’.87 Leibniz labelled him ‘an amiable prince’, but he can scarcely have been an easy guest.88