The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach. Matthew Dennison
miniature set in diamonds. To Caroline she wrote, ‘I take keen pleasure in giving, as often as I am able, proofs of the perfect friendship I bear for your husband as well as the whole electoral family,’ and added, ‘I believe the diamonds are very good.’133 Neither Sophia nor George Louis accepted either of these statements at face value, and indeed the gift had only been forthcoming after a number of tactful reminders. Loftily, Sophia dismissed Anne’s trinket as ‘the sort one gives to ambassadors’. Like her son, she was predictably irked by the queen’s request that Duchess Eléonore stand proxy for her at the baby’s baptism.
Anne’s stipulation may well have been a piece of calculated mischief-making. Certainly it was a reminder to her Hanoverian heirs that, for the moment at least, the balance of power tilted in her favour. The prize represented by the British throne was a considerable one. It had lately been augmented by the passing of the Act of Union, which prevented Scotland’s Parliament from nominating its own successor to Anne, thereby guaranteeing her heirs the double inheritance. Correctly Anne estimated Sophia’s greed for her crown, revealed in the elaborate courtesies she extended to British visitors to Hanover and her ‘many questions about [British] families, customs, laws, and the like’, noted by Toland as early as 1701.134 Diplomats kept the queen informed of efforts made by members of Sophia’s family to prepare themselves for coming apotheosis: lessons in English; the acquaintance of British politicians, men of letters and military men like Marlborough assiduously cultivated; Leibniz’s faulty attempts to master the intricacies of parliamentary opinion, including the divisions between those ‘vile enormous factions’, the Whigs, who supported the Hanoverian succession, and the Tories, who included those opposed to it, as well as the nature and extent of support for Jacobitism; the reception of a delegation from the University of Cambridge in 1706 and, following his appointment in the autumn of 1713, new English books dispatched from London by the Hanoverian resident George von Schütz. George Augustus had begun to learn English in 1701, soon after the Act of Settlement; Sophia extolled his speedy progress the following spring.135 Bilingualism would form a cornerstone of Frederick’s education. At necessary intervals Sophia also protested her fondness for her British niece: ‘I believe that it would be for the good of England that the Queen should live for a hundred years,’ she wrote cumbrously to the Duke of Marlborough.136 Out of earshot she grumbled at the failure of Anne’s government to grant her a pension or civil list payments, or to invest her with the title Princess of Wales. ‘I quite agree, “Altesse Royale” [Royal Highness] has become very vulgar now, much more common than “Your Electoral Serene Highness”,’ Liselotte consoled her.137
In this process of preparation, Caroline acted independently. Sophia was thirty-five years older than Anne. For all she invoked a Dutch proverb about creaking wagons going far, her chances of surviving even so sickly an individual as Anne were slight. George Louis was a man of middle age, dogmatic, unenthusiastic about leaving Hanover. He shared Liselotte’s view that ‘what one is familiar with is always better than anything strange, and the fatherland always appears best to us Germans’, and perhaps also her sense of foreboding that, as king, he would ‘find more worry and trouble than pleasure in his regal condition, and … often say to himself, “If only I were still Elector, and in Hanover.”’138 As Caroline recognised, it was she and George Augustus who stood to profit most from imminent changes. Deliberately she set out to demonstrate a comprehensive embracing of all things British, establishing the pattern to which, in public, husband and wife adhered for the foreseeable future. In her own case this extended even to her name. While she signed her early correspondence with Leibniz, for example, ‘W. Caroline’, by 1710 she was simply ‘Caroline’, Wilhelmine abandoned, as it would remain. The English-sounding ‘Caroline’ allied her with earlier Stuarts. Caroline and Charles shared a common Latin root in ‘Carolus’: the coincidence of name was capable of suggesting continuity between dynasties. It seems likely that this double recommendation outweighed a similar link between Wilhelmine and William. Architect of the Hanoverian succession, champion of both Sophia and George Augustus, the Dutch-born William III lacked the native appeal of Charles II.
In her self-anglicisation Caroline was helped by increasing numbers of British travellers who made their way to Hanover. On 11 September 1710, Mademoiselle Schutz, niece of George Louis’s minister Baron Bernstorff, wrote to a friend in London that the electoral court contained quantities of English visitors.139 Others wrote to Caroline, like Edmund Gibson, chaplain to Archbishop Tenison, who in March 1714 sent her a copy of his Codex juris ecclesiastici Anglicani, on the government and discipline of the Church of England, accompanied by fulsome compliments.140
Caroline first tasted tea at her own request from English visitors to Herrenhausen. She employed a Miss Brandshagen to talk and read to her every day in English, unaware that the thickness of the latter’s German accent would leave her with a heavy Hanoverian burr for the remainder of her life. Her English was never perfect, although one commentator credited her with mastering the language ‘uncommonly well for one born outside England’, and in July 1712 Sophia claimed she had begun to speak the language very prettily, and was amusing herself reading everything she could lay hands on either in support of, or against, the Hanoverian succession.141 Alured Clarke’s claim that her ‘uncommon turn for conversation’ was ‘assisted by … her skill in several languages … [and] art of compounding words and phrases, that were more expressive of her ideas than any other’ suggests a distinctive patois of mixed origin, almost certainly including elements of English, French and German.142 At Herrenhausen she spoke English to the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, whose own written English survives as flawless, and in the summer of 1714 to the poet John Gay, whose relief at being spared speaking French as a result was tangible.143 Both women, Gay wrote, ‘subscrib’d to Pope’s Homer, and her Highness did me the honour to say, she did not doubt it would be well done, since I recommended it’.144 Caroline also requested from the poet a copy of his own recent verse, The Shepherd’s Week. Earlier, in another instance of her grasp of cultural developments, Caroline had asked a visiting diplomat to obtain for her in London the works of exiled French essayist Charles de Saint-Evremond, which had been published for the first time in 1705, following Saint-Evremond’s burial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Thanks in no small measure to Caroline, the spring after her marriage, Howe was able to report the enthusiasm of the electoral family for celebrating Queen Anne’s birthday. ‘The Electoral Prince and Princess … told me the night before that they would come and dance. Half an hour before the ball began, they brought me word that the Electress was also coming. The Electress gave the Queen’s health at supper, and stayed till two o’clock.’145
Anne’s response to such heavyweight flattery was muted. The value she attached to it can be judged from the silence with which she greeted news of the birth of Princess Amelia in 1711 and that of Princess Caroline in 1713. Her ‘perfect friendship’ proved, in appearances at least, decidedly variable. By contrast the Duke of Marlborough wrote to George Augustus following Amelia’s birth of ‘the joy that comes to mind from the increase of your illustrious house. It is a subject of rejoicing to all who have at heart the interests and satisfaction of Your Highness.’146 Meanwhile Caroline’s assiduous anglophilia looked beyond Anne’s lifespan. While her second daughter had been named for members of her German family Amelia Sophia Eleanor, her third daughter was christened Caroline Elizabeth. It was a clear indication of the direction of her parents’ thoughts.
In describing George Augustus as possessing ‘rather an unfeeling than a bad heart’, Lord Chesterfield expressed the opinion of his more