The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach. Matthew Dennison
Weidemann indicates florid good looks and lugubrious stateliness. Caroline’s admiration, albeit she continued to mourn Eleonore, was wholehearted. Unreservedly she acclaimed her guardian’s wife as ‘incomparable’.63 But Figuelotte could not be fully satisfied with the decorative or reproductive roles typically assigned to royal spouses. The silliness of courtiers had killed her first two sons: a crown crammed on to the head of the elder at his christening, a gun salute fired too near the cradle of the second. After the birth of her third son, Frederick William, Figuelotte appeared unconcerned to provide her husband with additional heirs. By the time of Caroline’s arrival in Berlin, without any outward suggestion of a breach, husband and wife lived parallel lives. Figuelotte doted on Frederick William, an unappealing child given to violent tantrums, hair-pulling and kicking valets; she was ripe to form new attachments.
The palace of Lietzenburg, or Lützenburg, in open country less than five miles from the centre of Berlin, provided the setting for her independence. Building work had begun in 1695, to a workaday baroque design by architect Johann Arnold Nering. Four years later its first phase was complete, including Figuelotte’s own suite of rooms, hung with damask beneath ceilings of gilded plasterwork. Following her coronation as queen, she commissioned from court architect Eosander von Göthe a second, grander apartment aping the latest developments in French decoration. She added a sumptuously theatrical chapel and a glittering Porcelain Cabinet decorated with mirror glass and thousands of pieces of Chinese porcelain arranged on gilded brackets. Formal gardens were also French in taste, the work of Siméon Godeau, a pupil of Louis XIV’s garden designer André Le Nôtre: clipped box hedges, pristine lawns with gilded statues and, in emulation of her father’s summer palace, a man-made pond bobbing with real Venetian gondolas – ‘a paradise only without apples’.64 At Lützenburg, Caroline watched unfold a vision that was at the same time personal and political. Figuelotte’s palace expressed her own rarefied connoisseurship; it impressed visitors with a vision of Prussian wealth, refinement and cosmopolitanism. For Caroline it encapsulated all that was most remarkable and delightful in her guardian.
In this rural escape, a private domain of her own making, Figuelotte surrounded herself with a youthful court. Here etiquette gave way to spirited misrule, like the lively amateur theatricals in which Caroline played her part alongside courtiers and visiting royals, and the birthday festivities for Frederick in 1699, when the electoral couple and their guests leaped over tables and benches.65 Contradicting the statement of her cousin Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans, that ‘it is not at all suitable for people of great quality to be very learned’, at Lützenburg Figuelotte pursued interests that were explicitly cerebral.66 From across Europe she welcomed men of intellect, regardless of the orthodoxy of their views; even visiting diplomats were subjected to ‘metaphysical discourses’.67 ‘She loves to see Strangers,’ wrote the English rationalist philosopher John Toland, who counted himself among their number, ‘and to inform herself of all that’s worthy or remarkable in their several Countries.’68 A letter from the summer of 1698 draws attention to evidence of Figuelotte’s anglophilia, too – Caroline’s first introduction to pro-British views.69
Chief among Figuelotte’s ‘Strangers’ was polymath philosopher, mathematician and historian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the inventor of the forerunner of modern computing, infinitesimal calculus. Her father’s librarian and court adviser since 1676, engaged in writing the history of Hanover’s ruling family, the Guelphs, and a trusted confidant to her mother, Leibniz became Figuelotte’s correspondent late in 1697. Their letters were mostly philosophical in bent, and on 1 September 1699 Figuelotte declared herself Leibniz’s disciple and avowed admirer, ‘one of those who esteems you and respects your merit’.70 For his part, Leibniz wooed her with treacle. ‘The charms of an admirable princess have in all matters more power than the strictest orders of the greatest prince in the world,’ he oozed.71 He sent her a fossilised mammoth tooth unearthed near Brunswick; his accompanying commentary attempted to whet her appetite for science. Then, in 1702, in response to Figuelotte’s questioning, he wrote a short essay, ‘On What is Independent of Sense and Matter’.72 In time a self-appointed unofficial go-between for the courts of Hanover and Berlin, journeying whenever possible to Lützenburg in his coffee-coloured carriage painted with roses, Leibniz took his place at the centre of Figuelotte’s coterie of rationalists, free-thinkers and metaphysicians. With familiarity his admiration deepened. ‘There may never have been a queen so accomplished and so philosophical at the same time,’ he wrote to Queen Anne’s favourite, Abigail Masham.73 A painted fan of the 1680s depicting a French scientific salon, with men and women engaged in eager dispute over globes, telescopes, maps and books, points to the existence of other like-minded patronesses across the Continent. None eclipsed Figuelotte’s sincerity.74 At her side, winningly eager to share all her interests, Leibniz also encountered Caroline.
Contemporaries characterised Figuelotte as interested in ‘the why of the why’, omnivorous in her curiosity. She had inherited from her mother Sophia, from 1698 dowager electress of Hanover, a taste for disputatiousness, and her philosophical deliberations were conducted in person and by letter. Unsurprisingly she amassed an extensive music library. With Frederick she increased the collections of the library in Berlin’s old City Palace.75 She assembled an important picture collection.76 She owned two theatres, one in Berlin, the other close to Lützenburg.77 And in 1700 she facilitated the founding of a Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, with Leibniz as president. Frederick encouraged his wife’s hobbyhorses while pursuing his own extensive building programme, aware that cultural pre-eminence among the courts of the Empire served his political aspirations well.
This symbiosis of divergent but sympathetic instincts on the parts of husband and wife was one Caroline would later have reason to remember. She too learned to relish ‘the why of the why’ and to value Leibniz’s guidance; in time she laid out fashionable gardens, collected books and treatises, commissioned the building of a new library. Like her guardians, she would exploit visual iconography for dynastic ends. In Ansbach and Dresden, as well as in Berlin, artistic riches had been features of the shifting stage sets of her childhood. Real awareness began under Figuelotte’s tutelage.
To date, Caroline’s education had been patchy. Her immersion in Berlin’s dynamic court life, with its combination of baroque spectacle and intellectual speculation, proved a watershed, reinforcing the cultural exposure she had been too young to absorb fully at John George’s court. At Lützenburg, Figuelotte – and also her mother Sophia, a regular correspondent and occasional visitor – exemplified for the teenage princess the possibilities of life as princely spouse. Her experience of her Brandenburg guardians challenged Caroline’s memories of Eleonore’s suffering at the hands of John George, her helplessness and loneliness during the lean years at Crailsheim. In this surprising but benign environment, by turns extrovert, urbane and precious, the orphan princess was able to dispel misgivings about past, present and, especially, the future. For Caroline, Lützenburg provided stability, inspiration and a catalyst; it exposed her to female companionship at its most rewarding. When the time came, she would prove herself a consort in Figuelotte’s mould. Like her mentor, she even took snuff.
On 7 June 1696, Duke Frederick II of Saxe-Gotha married Magdalena Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst. The couple were first cousins and, in a markedly successful marriage, went on to have nineteen children, including Caroline’s future daughter-in-law, Augusta.
A century after the event, Horace Walpole reported an over-familiar Duke of Grafton teasing Caroline that, as a young woman, she had fallen in love with Duke