The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach. Matthew Dennison
fully apprised of her new husband’s entanglement before the marriage contracts were signed. Under pressure from Frederick III, realistic in her measure of the precariousness of her position, brought up to understand that royal women’s purpose lay in dynastic diplomacy and with an eye to her own and her children’s security, she hesitated to muster objections. For appearance’s sake, Billa had been temporarily removed from John George’s entourage. On 25 April 1692, when, as part of their formal entry to the electoral capital, John George and Eleonore travelled by gondola along the River Elbe, the night sky illuminated with fireworks marking out the letters of their linked monograms, Billa was included among guests at the elector’s table for the banquet that followed. Eleonore’s feelings are easily imagined. In Stepney’s eyes she was sufficiently sensible ‘to dissemble her grievance’.27 Characteristically, John George did not stoop to dissimulation. On Eleonore’s side, the marriage was an exercise in good behaviour from the outset. She paid a high price for financial stability and the outward lustre of the electress title. Her powerlessness – how well she knew it – was simply in the nature of things.
With Frederick III’s departure from Torgau on 29 April, and Caroline and William Frederick still in Berlin, Eleonore found herself, less than a fortnight into her marriage, as much alone as she had been at Crailsheim. At least the splendour of Dresden, called ‘the Florence on the Elbe’, and the magnificent royal palace – contemporary with the old palace in Ansbach – put paid to recent memories of poverty. Behind iron shutters beyond a single door in the elector’s apartments lay the Secret Repository, known as the Green Vault, built in the previous century by the elector Maurice as a treasure chamber. Its glittering collections – priceless trinkets of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, amber and precious stones – dazzled even Peter the Great, visiting six years later. Artefacts prized for the technical virtuosity of their craftsmanship inspired admiration for the electors’ connoisseurship; rarefied materials suggested the wonder of the natural world.28 In the short term Eleonore could derive some satisfaction from the discovery that she was pregnant. While John George flaunted his infatuation for Billa von Neitschütz to the extent of lobbying the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, to grant her an imperial title, appearances were seemingly maintained by such obvious evidence of married relations.
Eleonore’s pleasure proved short-lived. In August she miscarried. A second miscarriage followed in February 1693. In late October she was described as ‘far gone with child’, and prayers for her safe delivery were said in churches across Saxony.29 Perhaps indicative of her state of mind, it proved a phantom pregnancy – as sympathetic bystanders were quick to discern, a victory for her enemies.30 Laconically, Stepney commented, ‘it seems a little wind could not find passage, and all the while we have mistook a fart for an heir to the Electorate’.31
In despair, Eleonore took to her sickbed. That she nevertheless granted audiences to visiting diplomats suggests her determination not to be sidelined.32 Unlike the wife of John George’s successor, she did not resort to the thermal springs in the Saxon town of Teplitz to encourage conception; probably her heart was no longer in it.33 Meanwhile, in a letter signed on 20 February 1693 by the imperial vice chancellor, Leopold von Königsegg und Rothenfels, the emperor had bestowed on Billa the title Countess of Rochlitz.34 Four months later, on 20 June, at the midpoint of Eleonore’s phantom pregnancy, the new countess had succeeded where Eleonore was to fail, and gave birth to John George’s child. The bastard girl was baptised Wilhelmina Maria Frederica.
Secretly, John George offered his mistress a written pledge: surviving documents include the marriage contract he presented to her.35 Publicly he extolled the pragmatism of bigamy. Stepney quoted claims that, among German princes, bigamy was more widespread than ever before, and that John George ‘va épouser formellement la comtesse de Rochlitz’ (will formally marry the Countess of Rochlitz). Already the Saxons were referring to the ‘young’ electress (Billa) ‘in opposition to the Old’ (Eleonore).36 Late in 1693, Stepney recorded ‘a report that apartments for the countess are being prepared at the court’.37 For Eleonore these were alarming developments: with good reason she mistrusted her husband’s intentions. Bigamy or divorce aside – and political considerations meant that John George dare not attempt the latter – Eleonore understood that her death alone could make good his promise to the countess. In an argument between husband and wife over John George’s gift to Billa of the valuable Pillnitz estate, only the presence of bystanders prevented the elector from stabbing Eleonore with the sword he drew on her.38
How much of her mother’s anxiety Caroline knew about or understood at this point is unclear. Aspects of adult life remain concealed from the most precocious and observant child. Even after Caroline and William Frederick’s return from Berlin, the requirements and formalities of court life separated Eleonore from her children for much of the time. It is possible that Caroline overheard gossip about John George’s behaviour, and probable that she noticed her stepfather’s frequent absences from the palace; she understood the extent of John George’s lack of interest in herself and her brother, and was surely aware of a febrile quality in the atmosphere at court, and her mother’s growing nervousness. At intervals Eleonore appears to have retreated to the safety of a house in Bayreuth with her lady-in-waiting, Madame du Mornay. When it suited him, and contrary to her intentions, John George followed her there.39
That she feared for her life, genuinely concerned that the Neitschütz faction intended to poison her, is not something Eleonore is likely to have shared with her nine-year-old daughter. To others she branded Die Generalin ‘a person guilty of black practices’.40 In explaining her decision finally to abandon the royal palace in favour of the estate, remote from Dresden, at Pretzsch on the banks of the Elbe, that had been settled on her at the time of her marriage, she doubtless happed upon a useful fiction. To the English authorities, Stepney explained that she intended to ‘spend the rest of her life [there] rather than be continually exposed to hard usage’.41 He had previously expressed concern that, in her own best interests, Eleonore should withdraw from court to the country.42 Even if he was unaware of the full extent of the threats to her, he clearly considered that, in Dresden, no good could come to Eleonore.
Once, smallpox had deprived Eleonore of a doting husband. Now the disease struck again. ‘Die Favoritin’, Billa von Neitschütz, succumbed first. ‘For fear her face should suffer’, her mother dispensed with doctors (such as they were) and concocted remedies of her own. The result was ‘agonyes speechless’. As death approached, ‘locked jaws prevent[ed] [Billa] from taking the sacrament’.43 A grief-stricken John George ordered deep mourning for the entire court.44 Weeks later, on 27 April 1694, smallpox claimed John George’s life too, the price this headstrong and intemperate prince paid for nursing his mistress himself.45 In the medieval church of St Sophia, the corpse of die Favoritin was placed on public view, her face alarmingly discoloured. An eyewitness account survives from 30 April, more than two weeks after Billa’s death.46 So, too, a scurrilous epitaph on John George’s foolish mistress and her scheming and ambitious mother.47
In 1692, George Stepney, then agent to the Brandenburg court, had correctly forecast a short life for the elector John George IV. His appointment the following year to the post of commissary and