The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach. Matthew Dennison

127 In spirit, and despite Figuelotte’s doting, Frederick William was not the child of Lützenburg. Determinedly unlovable, he does not emerge from the sources as the grounds for Caroline declining the suit of Archduke Charles – either to gratify Figuelotte’s hopes, of which she was presumably aware, or, as British diplomatic correspondence in the spring of 1705 suggests, Frederick William’s own wish to marry Caroline and a similar hope on the part of her brother in Ansbach.128 Nor is there reliable evidence that Caroline had already directed her thoughts towards the man she subsequently married, Sophia’s grandson George Augustus, Hanoverian elector-in-waiting, or that Frederick offered her guidance in his role as guardian, despite his tendency to ‘[take] upon himself to such an extent to command her to do this, that and the other’.129 Instead Frederick occupied himself elsewhere. Denied one august connection by Caroline’s intractability, he set about planning another, a marriage between Frederick William and a sister of the King of Sweden. It was not to be, but in February 1705 diplomats reported that Frederick was sufficiently engaged with his plotting to be fully restored to good humour.130 It proved of short duration.

      Vienna’s second choice fell on a princess renowned for her beauty, Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the granddaughter of the same Duke Anton Ulrich who, in cumbersome prose, fictionalised the heroism of Caroline’s sacrifice. Like Caroline the sixteen-year-old boasted a profusion of blonde hair, pale skin and what contemporaries regarded as perfectly formed arms and hands; she was ‘God-fearing and graceful to all’.131 Again the Archduke Charles was all admiration: theirs would be a genuinely loving marriage. Even in middle age, reduced by quack fertility remedies to an obese alcoholic scarcely able to shuffle unaided from chair to chair, her pale skin flushed an ugly red, her lovely arms pendulous with fat, Elisabeth-Christine would remain in Charles’s eyes his ‘weisse Liesl’ (‘white Lizzy’).

      Her suit was vigorously promoted by Duke Anton Ulrich. Praise for Caroline’s resolution notwithstanding, the ambitious duke made no concessions to his granddaughter’s religious sensibilities. Like Caroline, Elisabeth-Christine had been brought up Lutheran. Like Caroline, she felt no inclination to convert to Catholicism. Ultimately she attributed her change of religion to family pressure: ‘I feel obliged to follow the divine direction and worthy opinion of my highly honoured grandfather graciously in all things.’132 Leibniz reassured her that salvation took no account of liturgical differences: neither Protestants nor Catholics could claim a monopoly, and in changing her faith she in no wise jeopardised her eternal prospects.

      First her family set about her apostasy. Afterwards the empress, her future mother-in-law, played her part. Like Caroline in her early dealings with the Elector Palatine, Elisabeth-Christine appears to have done her best to satisfy expectations. She accompanied the empress on a pilgrimage to the statue of the Virgin Mary at Mariazell in 1706; a year later she was deemed ready for conversion. Her scruples had survived almost three years, and, as in Caroline’s case, the outcome during that period was at intervals sufficiently in doubt to form a subject of conjecture across the Continent. The marriage of archduke and princess was finally solemnised in 1708, a decade after first rumours of Caroline’s candidacy. In London, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Tenison received a letter informing him of Elisabeth-Christine’s conversion and subsequent marriage as late as July of that year.133 Three years later, following the death of Charles’s elder brother Joseph I, the Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, zealous in her new faith, found herself Holy Roman Empress. In the short term she was also ‘the most Beautifull Queen upon Earth’, with the added satisfaction, since 1710, of the late-in-life conversion of her ‘highly honoured grandfather’, Anton Ulrich.134

      The former accolade might have belonged to Caroline. It was not an omission she regretted; indeed she would exploit it skilfully. Over time her refusal to exchange Protestantism for Catholicism – described after her death as ‘an early proof of her steady adherence to the Protestant cause’ – became a key aspect of Caroline’s identity and achievement.135 Four days after the coronation of her father-in-law as George I of Great Britain, on 24 October 1714, Joseph Acres reminded his parishioners in the church of St Mary in Whitechapel, ‘What a rare thing for a young Lady that has been bred up in the Softness of a Court, to decline the Pomp and Glory of the World.’136 Caroline’s upbringing had contained little of ‘softness’, and ‘the pomp and glory’ she rejected in 1704 was not the imperial crown that the Archduke Charles, as a younger son, did not then expect to inherit. Undoubtedly her decision contained its measure of religious unease. Her reservations were perhaps no more acute than those first experienced by Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. But while the latter succumbed to family pressure, Caroline, lacking parents or grandparents – and perhaps aware of likely overtures from a different quarter – resisted. As a later British encomium had it, she ‘chose rather to wait with a safe Conscience, in the Exercise of the true Protestant Faith, for any remote Rewards of her Merit and Vertue, than to accept the Imperial Dignity, when it must be connected with a false and idolatrous Worship’.137

      ‘He is very impertinent to suppose that I, who refus’d to be Empress for the Sake of the Protestant Religion, don’t understand it fully,’ Caroline later remarked when a well-meaning Bishop of London offered to ‘satisfy her in any Doubts or Scruples she might have in regard to our Religion, or to explain Anything to her which she did not comprehend’.138 Her lady-in-waiting described her on the occasion as ‘a little nettled’.

      For the remainder of her life Caroline took pride in her renunciation, her determination to ‘slight th’Imperial Diadem’.139 To Leibniz, as late as November 1715, she wrote, ‘You know that I am not at all a Jesuit,’ a reminder of her hard-fought sacrifice.140 The vehemence of her feelings indicates the trouble it had cost her – and a certain shrewdness in her estimate of the value of her resistance that transcended Duke Anton Ulrich’s elaborate fictions.

      II

       Electoral Princess

      ‘The affections of the heart’

      Caroline was wooed by a prince in disguise and in a hurry, Figuelotte’s nephew George Augustus, Electoral Prince of Hanover.

      His departure for Ansbach – at midnight, under cloak of darkness – suggests romance, even derring-do. He was short in stature, vain, with pale bulbous eyes, fine hair of an indeterminate colour and a peppery self-importance – or, in Toland’s characteristically rosier assessment, of ‘a winning countenance, speaks gracefully, for his Years a great Master of History, a generous disposition and virtuous inclinations’.1 Unlike his intended bride he was fascinated by ghosts and werewolves, his religious outlook ‘without scruples, zeal or inquiry’.2

      It was the first week of June 1705. George Augustus travelled in the garb of a Hanoverian nobleman and called himself ‘von dem Bussche’. His former tutor, Baron Philipp Adam von Eltz, a Hanoverian privy councillor, accompanied him under the alias ‘Steding’. With a single manservant, they directed their tracks southwards to Ansbach. There they presented themselves at the margrave’s court as travellers en route for Nuremburg. Only the elector George Louis knew their true destination and purpose. Afraid of the reaction of Frederick in Berlin, he insisted that both remain secret.

      The prince