The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach. Matthew Dennison
a role to which, by nature and inclination, she was ideally suited. George Louis’s attitude, by contrast, suggested at best detachment.
A response to Sophia Dorothea’s history was required of Caroline from the beginning of her marriage, in her several roles of wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law and granddaughter-in-law. The younger Sophia Dorothea categorised her mother’s error as one of imprudence, and, following her own marriage and departure from Hanover, wrote to her regularly. Such leniency would have been impolitic on Caroline’s part. Nevertheless, unspecified ‘courtesies’ apparently paid by Caroline and George Augustus to the widowed Duchess Eléonore, living modestly outside Celle at Wienhausen, indicate a joint response to the dilemma by husband and wife.87 Sophia, by contrast, regarded her former daughter-in-law with hostility, while on the subject of recent family history George Louis maintained a discouraging silence.
In the autumn of 1705, Caroline cannot have shared for long Toland’s view of Hanover’s court as ‘even in Germany accounted the best both for Civility and Decorum’.88 With Sophia Dorothea’s disgrace and, in 1698, Ernest Augustus’s death had vanished much of ‘the old gay good humour’.89 Animus between George Louis and his grown-up son was deeply ingrained. A tradition of hostility between ruler and heir had been a feature of Hanover’s ruling family as far back as the Middle Ages, but its absence from George Louis’s relationship with Ernest Augustus invited questions concerning its re-emergence in the current generation.90 It was unavoidable that Caroline should look for explanations in the collapse of George Louis’s marriage, as well as in the undoubted physical resemblance of George Augustus and his mother, both slight in build, impulsive, quick to blush. Caroline’s loyalty to George Augustus in his disputes with his father indicates that, in Clarke’s words, the case she made her own was not Sophia Dorothea’s or George Louis’s, but that of her husband. In 1705 this attitude proved important in consolidating their affection: an awareness of the ties that bound them would characterise their marriage. Caroline too felt the shadow of Sophia Dorothea’s transgression. George Augustus’s compulsion for orderliness, his need to control and obsessive focus on small details – afterwards thorns in Caroline’s side – traced their roots to the vacuum created by his parents’ divorce, and his resulting uncertainty and disorientation.
Caroline recognised in addition warnings for herself in her predecessor’s downfall. By 1705 her exposure to the vagaries of royal marriage was broad. Too young to remember her mother’s happy marriage to John Frederick, she was unlikely to forget the unhappiness of Eleonore’s second marriage. She had witnessed Figuelotte’s unconventional management of Frederick and the latter’s admiration. And the case of Sophia Dorothea implied aspects of the electoral family’s views of the role of wives. Having spent her entire life in courts, Caroline understood the necessity, in such an environment, to temper her behaviour to the prevailing clime – as Stepney had once intimated in Eleonore’s case, if necessary to the point of dissembling. She was aware that ‘in courts … the affections of the heart are as much conceal’d as its substance’, and that there ‘even trifles, elegantly expressed, well looked, and accompanied with graceful action … ever please beyond all the homespun, unadorned sense in the world’.91 Her success in Berlin, her conquest of the Archduke Charles at Weissenfels, her resistance to Father Orban and the Elector Palatine, and her seamless, discreet management of her engagement to George Augustus testify to something remarkable in Caroline’s character. From the outset her fidelity to George Augustus was more than sexual or emotional. She kept faith with something in herself too.
In April 1708, once more bound for war against the French, the Duke of Marlborough, commander in chief of Queen Anne’s forces, described his reception at the court of Hanover.92 Present at the audience granted him were Sophia – who considered Marlborough ‘as skilled as a courtier as he is a brave general’, ‘his manners … as obliging and polished as his actions are glorious and admirable’ – George Louis and George Augustus.93
As electoral princess, the Hanoverian equivalent of Princess of Wales, Caroline played a visual role in court ceremonial: her primary function was dynastic, a provider of heirs and progeny. That she was not present at Marlborough’s audience indicates the perimeters of her sphere of activity. For Caroline, the decade before Queen Anne’s death and the family’s move to London was overwhelmingly domestic in character. George Louis vigorously excluded George Augustus from politics. By continuing to oversee court entertainments, Sophia as effectively barred Caroline from key aspects of a consort’s role.94 With the exception of Sophia herself and Caroline’s favourite of Sophia’s ladies-in-waiting, intelligent, beautiful Johanna Sophia, Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, afterwards Countess of Bückeburg, whose husband, like George Louis, preferred the company of his mistress, Caroline mostly lacked rewarding female friendship. She had little in common with rapacious and dreary Melusine von der Schulenburg; she knew enough of courts to maintain friendly relations with her father-in-law’s favourite and her ‘nieces’. Although Leibniz had been urged in 1705 to ‘cultivate her good qualities assiduously, for there you have a spirit naturally beautiful, and an intellect completely disposed to reason’, the philosopher’s frequent absences from Hanover meant Caroline also lacked intellectual stimulus.95 The period was not without its strains.
Her husband and her sister-in-law were her closest contemporaries. Neither had benefited from the irregularities of their childhood. George Augustus was splenetic, irritable and prickly in his self-esteem. In his grandmother’s eyes he lacked good sense.96 His aunt Liselotte attributed his bad temper to Duchess Eléonore’s inferior bloodlines; he was niggardly, boastful and, at moments of strain, intemperate.97 Toland excused his restlessness as ‘great vivacity’ of a sort that did not ‘let him be ignorant of anything’.98 An indifferent portrait by Kneller, painted in 1716, captures something of his Cock Robin self-regard.99 George Louis preferred his daughter. Superficial but spirited, Sophia Dorothea the younger shared her mother’s want of serious-mindedness. ‘All the pride and haughtiness of the House of Hanover are concentrated in her person,’ her own daughter wrote in the early 1740s, when Sophia Dorothea was in her fifties. She insisted her mother was ‘benevolent, generous and kind’, but also claimed ‘her ambition is unbounded; she is excessively jealous, of a suspicious and vindictive temper, and never forgives those by whom she fancies she has been offended’.100
If even part of this assessment was true in 1705, Caroline can hardly have found proximity easy. She was closer in temperament to the dowager electress, whose interests resembled Figuelotte’s, but the two women initially saw little of one another. George Augustus’s early attentiveness to Caroline was marked. ‘The peace of my life depends upon … the conviction of your continued affection for me,’ he would write to her. ‘I shall endeavour to attract it by all imaginable passion and love, and I shall never omit any way of showing you that no one could be more wholly yours.’101 He did not conceal his preference for her company above that of the court, and he and Caroline spent as much time as possible together. As late as May 1712, an English agent reported, ‘the Court is all gone to Herrenhausen for the whole summer, only the Prince electoral and his wife the princess remain here’.102 Such uxoriousness – influenced in part by the aimlessness of George Augustus’s life, which George Louis ensured lacked official responsibility – inspired mixed reactions, including in Caroline herself. Liselotte dismissed her nephew’s cosy behaviour as inappropriately unprincely, another malign legacy of non-royal Duchess Eléonore.103