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

well-intentioned but predictably restless attendant. Like John George, his reward was to contract the disease himself, though his recovery from what was evidently mild exposure was quicker than Caroline’s and without setbacks. This proof of his devotion had a symbolic quality. The experience of potentially life-threatening illness served further to cement the couple’s affections, in their own minds as well as their attendants’, and Caroline’s future tolerance of her husband’s foibles would be coloured by gratitude for such evidence of courage and attentiveness.

      The following year, with the succession assured, George Louis relaxed his prohibition against George Augustus joining the allied troops. With clear guidelines on suitably princely behaviour in the field, he allowed him to take part in a campaign by English, German and Dutch forces in the Low Countries. Beginning in May 1708, George Augustus was absent from Hanover for six months. His companions in arms included von Eltz, who had accompanied him incognito to Ansbach in 1705. It was the only significant period of time he and Caroline would spend apart until 1729, and they wrote to one another twice or three times every week.

      First-hand experience of armed combat offered George Augustus responsibility and princely gloire: a commendation for bravery from the Duke of Marlborough after his horse was shot from under him during heavy fighting near Oudenaarde on 11 July. Not for the last time, his actions inspired indifferent verse, variously attributed to Jonathan Swift and William Congreve. In a sign of the electoral family’s rising profile in England, the poem in question was published in London: by John Morphew, at a printing press near Stationers’ Hall. George Augustus appears in Jack Frenchman’s Lamentation as ‘Young Hanover brave’: ‘When his warhorse was shot/He valued it not,/But fought it on foot like a fury.’ For obvious political reasons the poet ascribed the prince’s courage to his blood ties to Queen Anne. In a battle fought against the Catholic French, George Augustus’s bravery was a useful weapon to advocates of the Hanoverian succession. Afterwards he was described as having ‘distinguished himself early in opposition to the Tyranny which threatened Europe’.121 The next day, exhausted after twenty-four hours without sleep but eager to share his elation, George Augustus wrote an excited letter to Caroline.

      Caroline would not be alone in detecting in him a newfound confidence. Short of his twenty-fifth birthday, he had sampled the military daring that remained central to a prince’s role in the Empire. It brought him lasting fulfilment, and the memory of Oudenaarde, including his own part as ‘Young Hanover brave’, was one he cultivated assiduously.

      In conversations with Sophia, Caroline expressed her pride in George Augustus’s bravery; during their lengthy separation she was more often prey to fear and anxiety. But the events of Oudenaarde would serve wife as well as husband. As late as 1734, An Ode to be Performed at the Castle of Dublin, On the 1st of March, being the Birth-Day of Her Most Excellent and Sacred Majesty Queen Caroline celebrated Caroline’s role as loving wife to the conquering hero: ‘What Shouts of publick Joy salute her Ears!/See! see! the Reward of her Virtue appears./From Audenard’s Plain/Heap’d with Mountains of Slain,/The Dread of Gallic Insolence,/Grac’d with Spoils,/Reap’d by Toils/In Godlike Liberty’s Defence,/The Hanoverian Victor comes,/Black with Dust, and rough in Arms,/From the Noise of Fifes and Drums,/He comes, he comes, he comes/To gentler Love’s Alarms.’122

      Caroline’s satisfaction in the fulfilment of her own public role, as mother of a new generation of the electoral house, was less straightforward. With the self-containment habitual to her, she kept her own counsel. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my soul, that her Royal Highness, whom I value above all persons liveing, continues in so good health, and, as I am inform’d, in as good humor & temper as ever,’ John Toland wrote to Leibniz on 6 October.123 Her good humour was an aspect of Caroline’s infectious zest for life: she had learned long ago the value of counterfeiting even-temperedness.

      Three further children completed the nursery in Hanover. Daughters Anne, Amelia – whom Caroline called ‘Amely’ – and Caroline were born at two-yearly intervals from 1709. Although Caroline would later tell one of her ladies of the bedchamber that ‘she thought the principal Duty of a Woman was to take care of her Children’, and at least one contemporary account claimed ‘she took infinite pleasure in amusing herself with the sportings and innocence of young children’, she was not consistently cosily maternal with her children when young.124 Even a sympathetic observer like her future woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Clayton protested at Caroline’s preference for ‘settling points of controversial divinity’ over vigilance in the matter of her children’s development; she was attentive to discipline, and the royal schoolroom included lessons in Latin, German, French, Italian and the work of ancient historians.125

      Caroline’s apparent failure to react either swiftly or effectively to the infant Frederick developing rickets suggests negligence, but should be read within the context of contemporary parenting habits and widespread medical ignorance, and balanced by George Augustus’s assurance to her, in a letter written two years later, of his instinctive love for their new baby Anne, a clear indication that she valued affection between parents and children.126 In the event, credit for Frederick’s recovery mostly belongs to Sophia, who, by directing that ‘Fritzchen’ spend time outdoors in the gardens at Herrenhausen, exposed him to the light and fresh air which effected a cure around the time of his third birthday. In her letters, Sophia intimated that her contribution extended to supervising Fritzchen’s wetnurse and feeding regimen: first smallpox then pneumonia had separated Caroline from her baby.127 A subsequent appraisal would absolve Caroline of the besetting flaw of royal and aristocratic parenting, that ‘Parents of rank … have so little regard to … the happiness of their children, as by leaving them in the hands of their servants, to suffer them to receive their earliest impressions from those, who are commonly taken from the dregs of their people.’128 In Caroline’s case it was an assessment of variable accuracy, and Frederick benefited from the doting ministrations of his still energetic great-grandmother.

      Caroline had miscalculated Frederick’s delivery date. Two years later, she made the same mistake with her second pregnancy. Ernest Augustus, Sophia’s youngest son, complained that the combination of Caroline’s muddle-headedness and George Augustus’s secrecy in relation to his ‘petite famille’ had left him again unsure whether Caroline was in fact pregnant. Perhaps she had lately miscarried or was on the brink of miscarriage?129 All doubts were resolved on 2 November 1709.

      George Augustus was absent from the birth of his first daughter. Mindful of the restlessness of his nursemaiding two years earlier, Caroline had encouraged him to join the remainder of the court at the recently renovated electoral hunting box at Göhrde in the Celle forests. In his absence, he committed to paper effusions of love. ‘I am only a little bit angry that it [the birth] has caused you pain,’ he wrote with clumsy fondness. ‘You should know me well enough, my very dear Caroline, to believe that everything that concerns you attaches me the more deeply to you, and I assure you, dear heart, that I love the baby without having seen it. I pray you, take care of yourself, that I may have the pleasure of finding you well, and that still greater joy may be conferred upon a heart deeply desirous of it.’130 Sophia’s letters from Göhrde, full of the coldness of the weather and the splendour of the palace’s remodelling, echoed a similar strain, proof of an improvement in the women’s relationship since 1705. ‘I am sure you do not doubt that my heart is completely yours,’ the older woman wrote, ‘and that I defy even your Prince to love you more than I will do all my life.’131 To Bothmer she described the speediness of Caroline’s second labour.132

      With a view to the family’s future prospects, the baby was christened Anne. At George Augustus’s