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

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СКАЧАТЬ Duchess Benedicta’s nephew, Archduke Charles of Austria, the thirteen-year-old second son of the Holy Roman Emperor.84

      Despite the incendiary quality of such a rumour, Caroline herself remained unaware of the scheme for five years. Her eventual enlightenment had a cloak-and-dagger quality. In the autumn of 1703 she received a breathless letter. By way of introduction, its clergyman-author claimed former acquaintance with her mother. The letter instructed Caroline to travel with all speed to Eleonore’s younger sister, Fredericka Elisabeth, Duchess of Saxe-Weissenfels, in Duchess Fredericka’s tinpot capital. ‘Immediately after receiving this letter, go without the very slightest delay to the Duchess at Weissenfels, because of extremely important matters concerning your Serene Highness’s greatest happiness, about which the Duchess will inform your Serene Highness.’85 In 1703, in the life of an unmarried princess, a single eventuality merited the description ‘greatest happiness’: an offer of marriage. The letter was directed from Vienna. A second letter, arriving at the same time, informed her that waiting at Weissenfels would be a ‘distinguished gentleman’ anxious to meet her.

      Caroline’s reaction to these clandestine strategies included a measure of astonishment. Whether she chose to confide in Figuelotte or her brother William Frederick, who had recently succeeded his second stepbrother as margrave in Ansbach, is unclear. So is the extent, if any, to which Vienna’s imperial court had communicated its intentions to Frederick as Caroline’s guardian. That Caroline reached her own conclusion about events afoot appears inevitable. The Austrian emperor, Leopold I, had two sons, of whom the elder, Joseph, King of Hungary, was married already. On 24 February 1699 he had married Duchess Benedicta’s daughter, Amalia Wilhelmine.

      In Weissenfels, as if to emphasise to Caroline the honour of an imperial visit, Fredericka Elisabeth’s spendthrift husband provided for the young Archduke Charles a ‘generous and magnificent reception’ costing ‘tons of gold’. In September 1703, in accordance with an agreement brokered in 1699 by Louis XIV and England’s William III as a contingency plan following the death of Spain’s feeble-minded and childless Carlos II, Charles had been proclaimed King of Spain.86 Although the War of the Spanish Succession would deny him his Spanish pretensions, his behaviour in the meantime indicated in full measure consciousness of his eminence. A later observer commended Charles’s ‘art of seeming well pleased with everything without so much as smiling once all the while’.87 Leibniz labelled him ‘an amiable prince’, but he can scarcely have been an easy guest.88 It says much for the charms of the twenty-year-old Caroline that Charles’s aide-de-camp was able to assure her by letter that, after five hours in her company, their ‘most happy and delightful meeting had filled [the Archduke] with the liveliest admiration’.89 On 1 October, anticipating Caroline’s return from her brother’s court at Ansbach, Figuelotte described recent improvements in her looks as likely to attract a suitor.90

      In the language of the time, this sort of lively admiration amounted to a decided expression of interest, albeit not a formal proposal. By a circuitous route, Charles set off from Weissenfels to claim his crown in Spain. His aide-de-camp informed Caroline of his progress and the golden opinions he won along the way, including at Queen Anne’s court at Windsor and in Lisbon, where, in honour of a new alliance, the Portuguese king, Pedro II, outdid himself in the splendour of his ceremonial welcome; Anne commissioned his portrait from Godfrey Kneller.91 For six months, these long-distance tweets proved Caroline’s only update on the ‘extremely important matters concerning [her] greatest happiness’. The question was out of Charles’s hands. In Vienna, the thoughts of the imperial court centred less on Charles’s admiration and Caroline’s charms of mind and body than on the issue of the princess’s religion.

      Once, it was rumoured, Eleonore had considered conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Maximilian II of Bavaria. Now, for an infinitely greater marriage prize, Caroline’s change of faith would become the sine qua non. Insistence on such a condition cannot have come as a surprise to any of the key players in this unromantic drama. Nor did any doubt Caroline’s acceptance of this inevitable and overriding preliminary.

      She had inherited from Eleonore, Stepney’s ‘princess of great virtue and piety’, a sturdy Lutheranism remote from Habsburg Catholicism. By 1703, time had tempered her unhappy mother’s influence. In exchanging the dower house at Pretzsch for the palaces of Berlin and Lützenburg, Caroline found herself in an environment in which religious faith, alongside philosophy and metaphysics, formed one strand of a continuous dialogue about the nature and governance of the universe. Sophia of Hanover, one clergyman claimed, ‘multiplied’ questions, one leading to another: no single answer satisfied her, and she failed to convince herself of any conclusion.92 This habit of intellectual restlessness her daughter Figuelotte shared. While religion for Eleonore had been a narrow matter of faith, Sophia’s approach was discursive and, above all, pragmatic. She had delayed Figuelotte’s confirmation until after her sixteenth birthday, in order to widen her marriage prospects to embrace Catholic as well as Protestant suitors. As an adult, Figuelotte disclaimed any attachment to dogma. Debate at Lützenburg centred on what she described as her ‘curiosity about the origin of things’, her desire ‘to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness’:93 a continuous creedless disquisition about ethics, free choice, love and the soul, through which Figuelotte set out to emphasise reason over superstition and relished verbal or epistolary skirmishes for their own sake. But no one forgot that the setting for these skirmishes was the palace bestowed on Figuelotte by an indulgent husband. Hers were the freedoms of a married woman.

      From Weissenfels, Caroline had returned to Berlin. She could not avoid informing Frederick as well as Figuelotte of what had taken place. From now on Vienna would communicate with Frederick directly, albeit intermittently. Ever alert to worldly advantage, Frederick described the meeting between Caroline and the archduke as ‘God’s providence’.94 Nevertheless, the wheels of Habsburg statecraft revolved slowly. To her brother, the Elector Palatine, the emperor’s wife entrusted supervision of the process by which Caroline’s eligibility for marriage could be accomplished. Without Caroline’s conversion there could be no formal proposal. Six months after her single meeting with Archduke Charles, the Elector Palatine requested that Caroline return to Weissenfels. His purpose was to apprise for himself this future imperial bride and compile a report for the empress.

      To Caroline, a portionless princess, the imperial court offered no incentive bar the incontrovertible lure of a Habsburg prince. Distant were the glory days of the Empire, when Austria had defended Christian Europe against the Turkish infidel; but still an aureole of greatness clung to the imperial family. Austria’s sons represented the greatest prize in the marriage market of the German-speaking world. After she had endured a six-month virtual silence, Caroline’s reaction was moderate to the point of obstinacy. She resented the requirement to return to Weissenfels, and retraced her steps with an ill grace. Having done so, she lingered at her aunt’s court for almost two months, awaiting the absent elector, before ignoring Frederick’s protests and journeying back to Lützenburg late in August. Tardily the Elector Palatine recognised the mettle of the young woman with whom he was dealing. His departure from Vienna was days too late. Instead he sent after Caroline his Jesuit confessor, Father Ferdinand Orban, with the request that she ‘[be] completely persuaded that what he will lay before your noble incomparable self … is the pure, undefiled, genuine, holy truth’.95

      Until now Caroline’s exposure to Catholicism had been scant. In 1685 the Great Elector had passed the Edict of Potsdam, offering СКАЧАТЬ