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

Maximilian a Catholic and Sophia’s youngest son, Ernest Augustus, almost certainly homosexual, the long-term position of the electoral family was scarcely less precarious than that of the Stuarts they meant to displace.

      Meanwhile, the year after Macclesfield’s official presentation, the English envoy extraordinary in Hanover, James Cresset, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting the loan of communion plate, ‘a dozen or two’ prayerbooks and a Bible. He meant to set up a chapel in his house in Hanover and make it available to leading dignitaries. He explained his aim to Tenison as a means of ‘inspir[ing] in the Court esteem for the Established Church’.30 The archbishop, however, although he referred to himself disparagingly as ‘an uncourtlie, but well intention’d, old man’,31 was already in regular communication with Hanover’s court, via Sophia, and would take his own measures to convince the new heiress of the importance of religious conformity. Sophia responded in kind. On 16 August 1701 she had written to Tenison to express thanks for his support, and that of his fellow bishops in the House of Lords, for the Act of Settlement.32 In letters to Tenison written in French, she labelled herself with statesmanlike nicety ‘votre tres affectionée amie’. Whatever Cresset’s misgivings, Sophia understood clearly that Protestant orthodoxy was paramount among her claims on England. It was a conviction she was assiduous in broadcasting, and one she did her best to impress upon her family. Evidence like Giuseppe Pignata’s dedication to George Louis, in June 1704, of his anti-Catholic Adventures with the Inquisition suggests she succeeded.33

      The lapse of almost a year between Caroline’s rejection of Charles’s suit and her marriage to George Augustus was attributable to several causes, including George Louis’s reluctance to antagonise the emperor. Equally important was the death, on 1 February 1705, of Figuelotte.

      Figuelotte was thirty-seven. She died of pneumonia on the journey from Berlin to Hanover, and her sudden loss inspired near-universal regret. For five days and nights a grief-stricken George Louis immured himself in his rooms, refusing to eat, kicking the walls in his misery, talking to and seeing no one; ‘by hitting his Toes against the Wainscot … he had worn out his Shoes till his Toes came out two Inches at the Foot’.34 Rumour – lurid but unsubstantiated – suggested an alternative cause of Figuelotte’s death: that she had ‘been poisoned, before she left Berlin, with Diamond Powder, for when [her body] was opened her Stomach was so worn, that you could thrust your Fingers through at any Place’.35

      Frederick devoted five months to planning funeral obsequies of surpassing magnificence, as Figuelotte had known he would. More touchingly, he renamed Lützenburg ‘Charlottenburg’ in her memory. To Leibniz, writing from Ansbach, Caroline confided devastation on a scale with George Louis’s: ‘The terrible blow has plunged me into a grievous affliction, and nothing can console me save the hope of following her soon.’ Her recovery from the strain of recent ordeals suffered a setback, and she was once again ill. Her letter betrays the extent to which Figuelotte had come to occupy a mother’s place in her emotions. ‘Heaven, jealous of our happiness, is come to carry away our adorable queen.’36 If the rhetoric is conventional, the sentiments were sharply felt. In her illness, Caroline did not attend Figuelotte’s funeral. Nor, in the short term, did she see or communicate with Sophia. But in her response to von Eltz’s proposal on George Augustus’s behalf in June, the baron reported to George Louis, she ‘admit[ted] that she would infinitely prefer an alliance with your Electoral House to any other; and she considered it particular good fortune to be able to form fresh and congenial ties to compensate for the loss she had suffered by the death of the high-souled Queen of Prussia’.37

      To the prospective father-in-law whom she had never met these were honeyed words. Equally accommodating was her willingness to fall in with George Louis’s requirement that Frederick remain in the dark, a circumstance that reveals something of Caroline’s own anxiety that the match come off. Not for the last time in their lives, Caroline’s measured diplomacy contrasted with the impulsiveness of her husband-to-be. George Augustus wrote to her on the eve of her departure for Hanover, ‘I desire nothing so much as to throw myself at my Princess’s feet and promise her eternal devotion,’ and there is puppyishness even in the copybook posturing. ‘You alone, Madam, can make me happy; but I shall not be entirely convinced of my happiness until I have the satisfaction of testifying to the excess of my fondness and love for you.’38 Undoubtedly Caroline reached her own estimate of this ‘fondness and love’ that was based on a single meeting. But with memories of her mother’s treatment at the hands of the elector John George still painful, she could only be reassured by such effusive auguries. Like Eleonore’s second marriage, Caroline’s marriage to George Augustus represented a step up the ladder; her response to von Eltz’s proposal indicates her assessment of the prize at stake. At twenty-two, ambitious and clear-sighted but with a genuine attachment to the electoral family based on her affection for Figuelotte and Sophia, she was still young enough to hope for love too.

      Like Hollar’s etching of Ansbach, the view of Hanover by an unknown draftsman published by printmaker Christoph Riegel in 1689 depicts a Gothic town compact within its walls and dominated by church spires.39 At intervals along the city boundaries, fortified towers bristle above undulations of the Leine river. The only building identified in the key that is not a church is the Fürstlich haus, the home of Hanover’s ruling family called the Leineschloss. From its extensive but otherwise unremarkable façade long views unroll across the water. Behind it, hugger-mugger along busy streets cluster the tall houses of townsfolk, their steep roofs red-tiled and gabled, modest in their dimensions since Hanover’s nobles lived elsewhere, in castles and country manor houses. From Versailles Liselotte remembered the market square as overrun with street urchins and, at Christmas, its box trees decorated with candles.40

      A windmill in the foreground denotes the proximity of farmland: British diplomat George Tilson described it as ‘flat Country … very full of fir and Corn; mostly rye’.41 It is grazed by sheep for the lucrative wool trade or set aside for hops. Out of sight, nearby forests are plentifully stocked with game. Within tranquil surrounds lies this small, unassuming town of no more than ten thousand inhabitants, ‘neither large nor handsome’ in the estimate of the well-travelled Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and lacking magnificence, rich only in ‘miserable’ taverns.42 The main gates were closed every night.

      Despite its middling size, smaller and so much less impressive than the Dresden and Berlin of her childhood, the town that greeted Caroline at the end of her ten-day journey from Ansbach, undertaken in the company of her brother, offered intimations of a grandeur absent from many provincial capitals. Sophia’s late husband Ernest Augustus, the eldest of four brothers, had ultimately succeeded to the bulk of the brothers’ joint inheritance, united under his rule as the Duchy of Hanover. Ambition had prompted his campaign for electoral status, which was granted in 1692, six years before his death. Like his Brandenburg son-in-law Frederick, he had exploited cultural initiatives to support his political aspirations, to the benefit of his old-world capital. In addition to the masquerades, gondola festivals, illuminations and Venetian-style annual carnival that raised the court of Hanover above many of its neighbours for style and splendour, these included a theatre in which French comic actors performed nightly, and an opera house within the Leineschloss hung with cloth of gold and crimson velvet and capable of seating 1,300 spectators. Lady Mary rated the latter as ‘much finer than that of Vienna’.43 Its completion at breakneck speed within a single year stemmed from competitiveness with the neighbouring court of Wolfenbüttel, which had embarked on a similar endeavour at the same time.44