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

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СКАЧАТЬ Sophia’s commission of a commemorative medal, the ‘Mathilde medal’, ahead of Macclesfield’s embassy. Its two sides bore a profile of Sophia herself and, in a markedly similar portrait on the reverse, an English princess called Mathilde, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1156 Mathilde had married George Louis’s most warrior-like forebear, Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. More than Sophia’s Protestantism, the Mathilde medal celebrated former glories and the Hanoverians’ specifically ‘English’ descent. It was among Sophia’s gifts to the suite that accompanied Lord Macclesfield in the summer of 1701. The earl himself received a gold basin and ewer that had cost his hostess half her annual income, while to William III Sophia wrote tactfully, ‘we await [the] event without impatience here, and pray with all our hearts “God save the King”’.25 Periodically she took care to deny any personal desire to occupy England’s throne, a politic deceit on the part of this ambitious princess who, despite her age, was not above opportunism. Piously she wrote to Archbishop Tenison, ‘I live in quiet and contentment, and have no reason for desiring a change.’26

      Little wonder, then, that her thoughts should have turned to Caroline as a wife for George Augustus. Whatever sleight of hand was employed to convince this strutting, eager prince that the selection of Caroline for his future consort was his own, his grandmother as well as his father had reached the same conclusion ahead of him. Caroline’s desirability in George Augustus’s eyes was almost certainly sharpened by the interest she excited in Charles of Austria and his own younger cousin Frederick William. He also anticipated increased standing and greater autonomy at his father’s court as a result of his marriage. For Sophia and George Louis, other princes’ partiality mattered not a jot. Caroline’s commitment to Protestantism was a powerful weapon in the dynasty’s British aspirations, and an essential counterweight to family crisis.

      In 1658, Sophia’s own marriage contract had included a clause permitting her, in Lutheran Hanover, to continue to practise the Calvinism of her upbringing. This concession was made at her father’s request rather than her own, and she did not value it highly. Later she had shown pragmatism – calculation too – in the matter of Figuelotte’s faith, placing her daughter’s marriageability above doctrinal allegiance. With Leibniz as her sounding block, she had since entertained herself with philosophical rather than specifically religious discourse, and read a number of key texts, including Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy.27 She was aware of Leibniz’s attempts in the early 1690s to win support for a reunion of Catholic and Protestant Churches in the electorate and, equally, was not opposed to the initiative.28 And she approved her husband’s acquiescence in a plan for building a Catholic church in Hanover, as a means of wooing the good opinion of the emperor.29

      This easy-going position inevitably changed following the Act of Settlement. There were other factors too that contributed to a religious stance on Sophia’s part that appeared (although in fact it may not have been) increasingly hardline. The conversion to Catholicism of her son Maximilian in 1701 explained aspects of the permanent rupture in their relationship; until his death at the battle of Munderkingen in 1703 she was troubled by the possibility of her fifth son, Christian, following in Maximilian’s footsteps. Happily George Louis’s plodding Lutheranism permitted no grounds for concern. Caroline had demonstrated that she was likewise sound in her allegiances. Recent events appeared to indicate that she would buttress George Augustus’s faith, an essential prerequisite since the 1701 Act. For, if George Augustus failed to provide the dynasty with Protestant heirs, the family’s claims to the English crown evaporated. With 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 СКАЧАТЬ