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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’.120 Despite the opposition of George Louis and Sophia, George Augustus had remained at her bedside throughout, a 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, СКАЧАТЬ