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

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СКАЧАТЬ later, Raby confirmed that Vienna’s anxiety had given way to anger.117

      Harried, bruised, a victim of nervous exhaustion but at last convinced of the conclusion she had reached, at the end of November Caroline withdrew to her brother’s court at Ansbach to recover and temporarily escape observation.118 Letters from Father Orban, the Elector Palatine and leading Habsburg courtiers followed her; each one bolstered her certainty. By contrast, Leibniz informed her that an admiring Duke Anton Ulrich of neighbouring Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel intended to include her in a romantic novel. A member of the Fructiferous Order of German literary enthusiasts as well as a reigning princeling, the ageing duke wrote poetry, oratorios and melodramatic novels of extraordinary length. As good as his word, he included passages inspired by Caroline’s recent history in his doorstopper, Octavia, a Roman Story.

      A year after their only meeting, Caroline stated her belief ‘that the king of Spain no longer troubles himself about me’.119 From Protestant Hanover, Sophia wrote to Leibniz, ‘Most people here applaud the Princess of Ansbach’s decision.’120 In a letter to Bothmer, her response was delighted, her language high-falutin. ‘I left Lützenburg last Monday,’ she wrote, ‘after witnessing a great fight in the spirit of the beautiful princess. God’s love finally got the upper hand and she has scorned worldly grandeur and a prince she valued highly, in order to do nothing against her conscience, which might cause her what she describes as eternal anxiety.’121 For reasons of her own, Sophia exaggerated. She may have been swayed by a letter in praise of Caroline’s principles which she received in November from her eldest son, the elector George Louis.122

      Caroline’s own feelings, although she described herself in December as ‘perfectly recovered’, lacked euphoria.123 To Leibniz, she was studiedly emollient. ‘[I] am glad to think that I still retain your friendship and your remembrance,’ she wrote. Her references to Figuelotte and Sophia were appropriately respectful.124 In truth she need not have worried about either. As long ago as November 1703 Figuelotte had described her as one who ‘understands with good reason her own quality’.125 Sophia too had taken the measure of that quality. She considered Caroline ‘a beautiful princess of great merit’.126

      Caroline was not in love with Figuelotte’s son Frederick William. At seventeen that furious firebrand, whose upbringing she had partly shared, remained recognisably the young boy given to kicking and hair-tugging and bullying servants. In the estimation of his daughter Wilhelmina, Frederick William’s temper as an adult was ‘lively and hot’; he was ‘suspicious, jealous and frequently guilty of dissimulation’; ‘his governor had sedulously inspired him with contempt for the female sex’.127 In spirit, and despite Figuelotte’s doting, Frederick William was not the child of Lützenburg. Determinedly unlovable, he does not emerge from the sources as the grounds for Caroline declining the suit of Archduke Charles – either to gratify Figuelotte’s hopes, of which she was presumably aware, or, as British diplomatic correspondence in the spring of 1705 suggests, Frederick William’s own wish to marry Caroline and a similar hope on the part of her brother in Ansbach.128 Nor is there reliable evidence that Caroline had already directed her thoughts towards the man she subsequently married, Sophia’s grandson George Augustus, Hanoverian elector-in-waiting, or that Frederick offered her guidance in his role as guardian, despite his tendency to ‘[take] upon himself to such an extent to command her to do this, that and the other’.129 Instead Frederick occupied himself elsewhere. Denied one august connection by Caroline’s intractability, he set about planning another, a marriage between Frederick William and a sister of the King of Sweden. It was not to be, but in February 1705 diplomats reported that Frederick was sufficiently engaged with his plotting to be fully restored to good humour.130 It proved of short duration.

      Vienna’s second choice fell on a princess renowned for her beauty, Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the granddaughter of the same Duke Anton Ulrich who, in cumbersome prose, fictionalised the heroism of Caroline’s sacrifice. Like Caroline the sixteen-year-old boasted a profusion of blonde hair, pale skin and what contemporaries regarded as perfectly formed arms and hands; she was ‘God-fearing and graceful to all’.131 Again the Archduke Charles was all admiration: theirs would be a genuinely loving marriage. Even in middle age, reduced by quack fertility remedies to an obese alcoholic scarcely able to shuffle unaided from chair to chair, her pale skin flushed an ugly red, her lovely arms pendulous with fat, Elisabeth-Christine would remain in Charles’s eyes his ‘weisse Liesl’ (‘white Lizzy’).

      Her suit was vigorously promoted by Duke Anton Ulrich. Praise for Caroline’s resolution notwithstanding, the ambitious duke made no concessions to his granddaughter’s religious sensibilities. Like Caroline, Elisabeth-Christine had been brought up Lutheran. Like Caroline, she felt no inclination to convert to Catholicism. Ultimately she attributed her change of religion to family pressure: ‘I feel obliged to follow the divine direction and worthy opinion of my highly honoured grandfather graciously in all things.’132 Leibniz reassured her that salvation took no account of liturgical differences: neither Protestants nor Catholics could claim a monopoly, and in changing her faith she in no wise jeopardised her eternal prospects.

      First her family set about her apostasy. Afterwards the empress, her future mother-in-law, played her part. Like Caroline in her early dealings with the Elector Palatine, Elisabeth-Christine appears to have done her best to satisfy expectations. She accompanied the empress on a pilgrimage to the statue of the Virgin Mary at Mariazell in 1706; a year later she was deemed ready for conversion. Her scruples had survived almost three years, and, as in Caroline’s case, the outcome during that period was at intervals sufficiently in doubt to form a subject of conjecture across the Continent. The marriage of archduke and princess was finally solemnised in 1708, a decade after first rumours of Caroline’s candidacy. In London, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Tenison received a letter informing him of Elisabeth-Christine’s conversion and subsequent marriage as late as July of that year.133 Three years later, following the death of Charles’s elder brother Joseph I, the Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, zealous in her new faith, found herself Holy Roman Empress. In the short term she was also ‘the most Beautifull Queen upon Earth’, with the added satisfaction, since 1710, of the late-in-life conversion of her ‘highly honoured grandfather’, Anton Ulrich.134

      The former accolade might have belonged to Caroline. It was not an omission she regretted; indeed she would exploit it skilfully. Over time her refusal to exchange Protestantism for Catholicism – described after her death as ‘an early proof of her steady adherence to the Protestant cause’ – became a key aspect of Caroline’s identity and achievement.135 Four days after the coronation of her father-in-law as George I of Great Britain, on 24 October 1714, Joseph Acres reminded his parishioners in the church of St Mary in Whitechapel, ‘What a rare thing for a young Lady that has been bred up in the Softness of a Court, to decline the Pomp and Glory of the World.’136 Caroline’s upbringing had contained little of ‘softness’, and ‘the pomp and glory’ she rejected in 1704 was not the imperial crown that the Archduke Charles, as a younger son, did not then expect to inherit. Undoubtedly СКАЧАТЬ