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

as well as to Brandenburg-Prussia at large. In Hanover, however, the electoral family had more specific and more pressing reasons for courting Caroline.

      In 1701, at an age when many of her contemporaries were dead, the dowager electress Sophia had experienced an upturn in her fortunes. With uncharacteristic but deliberate extravagance, she had welcomed to Hanover an English embassy led by the Earl of Macclesfield in mid-August that year. Its purpose was to present her with a copy of recent legislation passed by Parliament in Westminster and, on William III’s behalf, to invest George Louis with England’s highest order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter.

      This was more than ordinary diplomatic flummery. In the Act of Settlement of June 1701, Hanover’s electoral family were named as heirs to the thrones of England and Scotland in the event of the death without issue of the current heir, Princess Anne, younger daughter of the deposed James II. First in line was Sophia herself. After her, in the Act’s key wording, came ‘the heirs of her body, being Protestants’: George Louis, then George Augustus.

      This was not unexpected. William III had applied pressure to Parliament to pass a similar resolution as early as 1689. England’s Dutch king was well disposed towards Sophia. His friendship with the ‘good old duke’, her brother-in-law George William of Celle, was warm and of long standing, and he had been impressed by George Augustus after meeting him at George William’s court in October 1698. For all that, the Act’s implications were momentous. Hanover in 1701 was a region of limited international profile and territorially insignificant, mostly confined between the North Sea and the Harz Mountains and bounded by the Elbe and Weser rivers. It had been granted electorate status only within the last decade. Months earlier, it had been outflanked by the promotion of neighbouring Brandenburg, now effectively the Kingdom of Prussia, a piece of political leapfrogging decried by Sophia as ‘the fashion for Electors to become Kings’.22 In return for Protestantism, however, the Act of Settlement offered Hanover’s ruling family promotion to sovereigns of one of Europe’s oldest kingdoms, shortly to be formally ‘united’ by the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. That the bride of George Augustus, now fourth in line to the British throne, should already have proven so convincingly her Protestant mettle ‘and in all her words and actions … declared herself to be on the most reasonable conviction, a sincere Christian, a zealous Protestant’ was an obvious recommendation in the aftermath of this seismic adjustment.23

      The significance of Caroline’s stand was increased by the nature of Sophia’s claim. Like England’s current heir Anne, Sophia was a granddaughter of James VI and I. She was the twelfth of the thirteen children of James’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, by her marriage Electress Palatinate and, briefly, Queen of Bohemia. Anne’s happy marriage to Prince George of Denmark had resulted in seventeen pregnancies but only a single child who survived infancy, William, Duke of Gloucester. He in turn died on 30 July 1700, aged just eleven, of acute bacterial infection exacerbated by pneumonia and water on the brain.24

      But his death did not make Sophia Anne’s closest heir. The second marriage of Anne’s father had produced a son, James Edward Stuart, who as a result of James’s religious conversion in the 1670s was a Catholic. In 1688, Catholicism had accounted for James’s own loss of his throne. Apparently in accordance with the will of the people, certainly in accordance with the will of sections of parliamentary opinion, James was replaced that year as England’s sovereign by his elder daughter from his first marriage, Mary, and Mary’s husband, the Dutch prince William of Orange, both of them Protestants, Mary devoutly so. Parliament’s Bill of Rights, passed the following year, sought to legitimise this dynastic shuffle, the so-called Glorious Revolution. The Bill formally excluded Catholics from the succession in perpetuity, and damned government by any ‘papist prince’ as ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom’. It was by this means that James Edward Stuart, brought up in exile on the generosity of Louis XIV of France, was stripped of his right to the throne. By the same means, more than fifty cousins and family members who were more closely related to Anne than Sophia, but who were Catholics or married to Catholics, including descendants of Sophia’s elder brothers and of Charles I’s daughter Henrietta, also forfeited their claims. Sophia’s ‘legitimacy’ as England’s heir stemmed from the rejection by Members of Parliament of the principle of hereditary succession. It was grounded in religious intolerance.

      Her understanding of the contentious nature of her candidacy and its potential for divisiveness prompted Sophia’s commission of a commemorative medal, the ‘Mathilde medal’, ahead of Macclesfield’s embassy. Its two sides bore a profile of Sophia herself and, in a markedly similar portrait on the reverse, an English princess called Mathilde, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1156 Mathilde had married George Louis’s most warrior-like forebear, Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. More than Sophia’s Protestantism, the Mathilde medal celebrated former glories and the Hanoverians’ specifically ‘English’ descent. It was among Sophia’s gifts to the suite that accompanied Lord Macclesfield in the summer of 1701. The earl himself received a gold basin and ewer that had cost his hostess half her annual income, while to William III Sophia wrote tactfully, ‘we await [the] event without impatience here, and pray with all our hearts “God save the King”’.25 Periodically she took care to deny any personal desire to occupy England’s throne, a politic deceit on the part of this ambitious princess who, despite her age, was not above opportunism. Piously she wrote to Archbishop Tenison, ‘I live in quiet and contentment, and have no reason for desiring a change.’26

      Little wonder, then, that her thoughts should have turned to Caroline as a wife for George Augustus. Whatever sleight of hand was employed to convince this strutting, eager prince that the selection of Caroline for his future consort was his own, his grandmother as well as his father had reached the same conclusion ahead of him. Caroline’s desirability in George Augustus’s eyes was almost certainly sharpened by the interest she excited in Charles of Austria and his own younger cousin Frederick William. He also anticipated increased standing and greater autonomy at his father’s court as a result of his marriage. For Sophia and George Louis, other princes’ partiality mattered not a jot. Caroline’s commitment to Protestantism was a powerful weapon in the dynasty’s British aspirations, and an essential counterweight to family crisis.

      In 1658, Sophia’s own marriage contract had included a clause permitting her, in Lutheran Hanover, to continue to practise the Calvinism of her upbringing. This concession was made at her father’s request rather than her own, and she did not value it highly. Later she had shown pragmatism – calculation too – in the matter of Figuelotte’s faith, placing her daughter’s marriageability above doctrinal allegiance. With Leibniz as her sounding block, she had since entertained herself with philosophical rather than specifically religious discourse, and read a number of key texts, including Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy.27 She was aware of Leibniz’s attempts in the early 1690s to win support for a reunion of Catholic and Protestant Churches in the electorate and, equally, was not opposed to the initiative.28 And she approved her husband’s acquiescence in a plan for building a Catholic church in Hanover, as a means of wooing the good opinion of the emperor.29

      This easy-going position inevitably changed following the Act of Settlement. There were other factors too that contributed to a religious stance on Sophia’s part that appeared (although in fact it may not have been) increasingly hardline. The conversion to Catholicism of her son Maximilian in 1701 explained aspects of the permanent rupture in their relationship; until his death at the battle of Munderkingen in 1703 she was troubled by the possibility of her fifth son, Christian, following in Maximilian’s footsteps. Happily George Louis’s plodding Lutheranism permitted no grounds for concern. Caroline had demonstrated that she was likewise sound in her allegiances. Recent events appeared to indicate that she would buttress George Augustus’s faith, an essential prerequisite since the 1701