The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach. Matthew Dennison
mort de SAE de Saxe à SAE Madame l’Electrice Eleonore. In it, he described the elector’s passion for Billa von Neitschütz as ‘unworthy’, their love ‘un indigne amour’.48 Finally free from the toxicity of mingled terror and humiliation, Eleonore’s only response was relief. In the witchcraft trial of Ursula von Neitschütz the following year she played no part.
Eleonore had endured the death of her first son. Sincerely she had mourned her first husband. With no option but to leave the palace in Ansbach, yet insufficiently provided for, she had spent almost six years lonely, unhappy and all but penniless in provincial retirement in Crailsheim. Velvet-gloved but iron-fisted cajolery on the part of her ‘friends’ had compelled her to marry again, this time a boor and a drunkard with a pronounced streak of mental cruelty. Either her second husband, or associates of her husband’s mistress, had threatened to poison her. John George himself had drawn his sword on her.
In Saxony, she was more fortunate than in Ansbach in her husband’s successor. John George’s heir, his brother Frederick Augustus, afterwards known as ‘Augustus the Strong’ on account of feats that included rolling up silver plates with his bare hands, ‘revel[led] and dance[d]’ at news of his death, then gave himself up to ‘frolicks and debauches’.49 In John George’s beautiful widow and her children he took a passing interest, as he would continue to do, and Eleonore’s life regained a semblance of normality. Among her surviving papers, for example, is the letter of recommendation – the equivalent of a reference – that she wrote in the summer of 1694 for a former page at Crailsheim.50 George Stepney reported in August that he had twice visited Eleonore since her widowhood, and that she permitted him to call on her frequently. On both occasions she had told him ‘old stories and some particulars of the disorders of the late reign which I should never have learn’d from anybody else’.51 The following summer, in company with Caroline, she revisited Dresden on her way to spas near Koblenz, and had supper with Stepney’s colleague Philip Plantamour.52 Her journey proved unhappy: ‘her wagons [were] plundered by snap-hawks [freebooters]’ and she was robbed of valuable plate and goods.53
Whatever the anticipated benefits of Eleonore’s Koblenz trip, the damage, it seemed, had been done. In the interval since John Frederick’s death, her health had deteriorated irreparably. On 9 September 1696, two years after her second husband, Eleonore died. She was thirty-four years old. Her daughter Caroline, just thirteen, found herself an orphan.
A letter changed Caroline’s life. It took the form of an invitation, and offered her a home – her fifth so far – and the security of guardianship. Its author was the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III – to date, as the tone of his letter implicitly acknowledged, an equivocal player in the life of Caroline’s family. With some warmth, Frederick wrote to her in the autumn of 1696, ‘I will never fail as your guardian, to espouse your interests, and to care for you as a loving father, and pray your Highness to have in me the same confidence as your mother always had, which I shall properly endeavour to deserve.’54 Events would prove his sincerity. Caroline had made her home in Berlin before, at Frederick’s glittering court, in the unsettled months preceding Eleonore’s disastrous remarriage. Now, insofar as the young Caroline could ever feel she dare anticipate stability, the shadow of unsettlement temporarily dispersed. Only her parting from her brother William Frederick increased her sorrow. He had returned to Ansbach as heir presumptive, following Christian Albert’s death in 1692 and the accession as margrave of the latter’s unmarried younger brother George Frederick.
Yet it was not the well-intentioned Frederick but his wife, Sophia Charlotte, a Hanoverian princess known to her family as ‘Figuelotte’, who would provide the guardianship that had the greatest impact on an impressionable young girl only fifteen years her junior. The elector was self-important, a little pompous, excessively absorbed by minutiae of etiquette and ceremony, a zealot for elaborate dress despite a spinal deformity and gout; in his own words one who possessed ‘all the attributes of kingliness and in greater measure than other kings’, alternatively one who ‘[went] out of his way to find more and more occasions for ceremony’.55 By contrast the electress disdained ‘the grandeurs and crowns of which people make so much here’;56 she described herself as well acquainted with ‘the infinitely little’.57 While Frederick was at pains to surround himself with a court as rigidly formal as Versailles, his wife – motivated ‘by the ardour that she had for the knowledge of the truth’ – preferred music, reading and ‘the charm of … philosophical conversations’.58 Court life, Figuelotte saw, threatened the truest friendships, the strongest bonds of love, however impassioned Frederick’s professed opposition to ‘Cabals and private Intrigues … [and] intermeddling in other People’s Business’.59 It offered, as the philosopher Leibniz noted, ‘everything that might dissipate the intellect’.60 She was impatient of Frederick’s hankering after royal gloire. And, until 1697, she had a powerful enemy in his close adviser and former tutor, Eberhard von Danckelmann. Studiedly detached from court politics, she occupied herself with less contentious pursuits.
To Agostino Steffani, her father’s director of court music in Hanover, Figuelotte described music as ‘a loyal friend that never leaves one and never deceives one, it never betrays one and has never been cruel. On the contrary all the charm and delight of heaven is there.’61 Within months of Caroline’s arrival, Figuelotte had enticed to Berlin as court composer the Italian organist and former composer to the Duke of Mantua, Attilio Ariosti. From 1702 she employed the composer Giovanni Bononcini. Both would later feature in the operatic life of London after Caroline’s marriage. Among Figuelotte’s costliest purchases was a harpsichord, commissioned from the court instrument-maker Michael Mietke, sumptuously decorated with panels simulating white Chinese lacquer; she also commissioned a folding harpsichord to take with her on journeys. Frederick meanwhile devoted his energies to worldly aggrandisement. In 1701, in exchange for military support for Habsburg ambitions in Spain, he won the emperor’s acquiescence in his elevation from Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia to ‘King in Prussia’. The previous year, in anticipation, he had given orders for a new suite of crown jewels. Like other mythomanes, at his coronation at Königsberg on 18 January, he placed the crown on his own head.
The interests of husband and wife were at variance. On closer observation the young Caroline recognised the astuteness of Figuelotte’s management of her pernickety and egotistical husband and the extent of Frederick’s admiration for his unconventional electress, a feeling unfettered by the acrid presence of his ambitious mistress, Katharina von Wartenburg. Over time Caroline understood that Figuelotte’s absorption in music and philosophy offered more than respite from the labyrinthine formalities of Brandenburg court etiquette and the falsity of ambitious courtiers. It was an antidote to worldliness and self-interest. It also represented one aspect of the role of consort, the soft power of cultural patronage, a division of royal influence typical of German courts in this period.
The scale of Figuelotte’s sway over the teenage Caroline was quickly apparent. In physical and verbal mannerisms, Caroline became her guardian’s mirror, Galatea to the electress’s inadvertent Pygmalion. Figuelotte was intelligent, uncompromising and beautiful. She was irreverent – a woman who took snuff in the middle of her coronation; and she was unconventional, accompanying the court orchestra in concert performances on her harpsichord. ‘She has big, gentle eyes, wonderfully thick black hair, eyebrows looking as if they had been drawn, a well-proportioned nose, incarnadine lips, very good teeth, and a lively complexion,’ runs one account.62 She also inclined to heaviness, the reason her mother