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

Prince Electoral and his wife. It appears as if they were made for one another, which causes us great joy.’104 But, despite earnest protestations of devotion, the prince struggled to suppress argumentative instincts.

      Whenever possible, Caroline sought out fleeting opportunities for time alone with Sophia at Herrenhausen. Their shared interests were wide-ranging and included philosophy, music and politics. During these first months of adjustment, disjointed encounters placed even this relationship under strain. Sophia’s letters to Liselotte make clear her frustration and disappointment: Caroline’s presence failed to staunch the older woman’s grief for Figuelotte, and the new electoral princess was cast firmly on her own resources. She oscillated between gratitude for George Augustus’s attachment and the need to cultivate, or indeed placate, others of her new family. Reading and singing offered her an outlet of sorts. Like Sophia she took lengthy walks in the palace gardens. In 1711, Handel wrote a set of twelve chamber duets for Caroline, described by his first biographer in 1760 as ‘a species of composition of which the Princess and court were particularly fond’.105 That Caroline hazarded the challenging soprano part is testament to the success of the singing lessons begun in her childhood at Ansbach by Antonio Pistocchi.106

      A phantom pregnancy during the first year of her marriage, reported by Sophia as early as November, indicates Caroline’s anxiety to provide the necessary heir.107 At twenty-two she could anticipate more than a decade of childbearing; it was George Augustus’s determination to play his part in the long-running War of the Spanish Succession that contributed a note of urgency. Supported by his privy council, George Louis had consistently thwarted his son’s military aspirations. To date the latter’s nearest approach to the theatre of war was a journey to the Dutch palace of Het Loo, undertaken in the autumn of 1701 with his grandfather, the Duke of Celle, as part of William III’s efforts to create a coalition against Louis XIV. Following his marriage, George Augustus again requested permission to join the fight against the French. ‘The court is against it and will not give their consent to let him go into the field until he has children,’ noted a British envoy.108 Repeated prohibitions failed to depress his ardour. Instead his resentment of his father mounted, adding a further note of asperity to a fissured relationship, with inevitable implications for Caroline.

      On 31 January 1707, despite gainsayers who attributed her increasing girth to distemper or even wind, and ‘the court having for some time past almost despaired of the Princess Electoral’s being brought to bed’, Caroline succeeded in her primary task.109 Early in the evening, with the windows shuttered against the cold and the doors barred to court flunkeys, she gave birth to a delicate-looking baby boy, Frederick Louis. Unusually – and ill-advisedly, given speculation that Caroline’s pregnancy was once again imaginary – only a midwife and the court surgeon, de la Rose, were present at the birth in the Leineschloss. Responsibility for this break with tradition lay with George Augustus, whose concern was for Caroline’s comfort. His actions irritated the British envoy Emmanuel Scrope Howe and, in the absence of the usual crowd of official witnesses, facilitated lurid rumours that the baby’s father was not George Augustus but one of George Louis’s Turkish valets. Portraits of the prince throughout his life refute such spiteful calumnies. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu afterwards noted in Frederick ‘the fine fair Hair of the Princesse’ and ‘an Air of Sprightliness’ reminiscent of George Augustus’s volatile fidgetiness.110 Introduced to her first great-grandchild at the perfunctory service of baptism held in Caroline’s bedroom two weeks later, Sophia commended both his liveliness and his laughing eyes; erroneously she described him as ‘strong and robust’.111 She stood as one of three godparents, all of them members of the baby’s immediate family.

      At George Louis’s insistence, invitations to the baptism were not extended to foreign officials. In England, this second departure from tradition was interpreted as a slight to Queen Anne, whose throne the baby stood to inherit. It was left to George Augustus to untangle the knot of ill-feeling predictably wrought by the double omission. In a dispatch of 25 February, Howe noted with some scepticism divisions in the electoral family and George Augustus’s anxiety to exonerate himself from blame. A measure of his disgruntlement, the envoy tarred elector and electoral prince with the same broad brush: ‘I think the whole proceeding has been very extraordinary. Wherever the fault is, I won’t pretend to judge.’112

      Howe’s prickly equivocation notwithstanding, Anne’s view of George Augustus was principally coloured by her ambivalence towards his father and, especially, his grandmother. To George Louis her attitude was remote, in the account of a French spy resentful, because, in 1680, he had ‘refused to marry [her] because of the humble birth of her mother’, Anne Hyde, like Duchess Eléonore a commoner.113 Her resistance to Sophia was shaped by her conviction that the older woman coveted her crown, and was not above meddling in British politics to stir up trouble to serve her own ends. In the short term, Anne set aside her ire and most of her misgivings.

      To Howe, a smooth-talking Duke of Marlborough described news of Frederick’s birth as ‘received here [at Anne’s court] with great joy and satisfaction’.114 In its aftermath Anne conferred on George Augustus the titles Duke and Marquess of Cambridge, Earl of Milford Haven, Viscount Northallerton and Baron Tewkesbury, with precedence above all other British peers; she also invested him with the Order of the Garter. The gift of titles was partly made at the request of Sophia. Her response nevertheless was to dismiss her grandson’s elevation as ‘meaningless’, an attitude that neither George Augustus nor Caroline shared.115

      George Louis reacted with predictable jealousy. He confirmed Anne’s disaffection by refusing to permit the appropriate ceremonial in the formal presentation of the patents of nobility. With hindsight George Augustus’s assurances to his royal benefactress, via Howe, of ‘the most perfect veneration and … the most zealous and respectful sentiments’ sound increasingly strangulated, the response of a man aware that his family’s attitude towards its future prospects lacked coordination.116

      Anne’s emissaries in 1706 included, as secretary to the Lords Justices, the future Spectator essayist and playwright Joseph Addison. Addison’s admiration for Caroline, first encountered then, would prove long-lasting; it was reciprocated in full. In November 1714 he dedicated his tragedy Cato to her. He remembered her as a ‘bright Princess! who, with graceful Ease/And native Majesty, are form’d to please’.117 She in turn told Leibniz that Addison shared all the good qualities of his Cato, though his writing about gardening, especially his advocacy of a ‘natural’ or non-formal approach, ultimately influenced her more than his drama.118

      Soon, however, George Augustus’s priority was not the querulous Anne but Caroline. Six months after she gave birth to Frederick, Caroline contracted smallpox. It was the disease that had killed her father as well as her greatly disliked stepfather John George of Saxony and his mistress Billa von Neitschütz. How she reacted is not recorded, and she was fortunate not only to survive but, after a lengthy period of illness culminating in pneumonia, to emerge at the end of August relatively unscathed. To the younger Sophia Dorothea, newly married to her cousin Frederick William in Berlin, Sophia confided that she found Caroline’s appearance greatly altered. She had previously described her as ‘much more beautiful than her portraits’, since paintings failed to convey accurately the luminescence of her skin.119 Others considered the damage to her complexion minimal, and Caroline’s good looks would remain a source of flattery: a decade later she was described as ‘of a fine complexion’.