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

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СКАЧАТЬ also her sense of foreboding that, as king, he would ‘find more worry and trouble than pleasure in his regal condition, and … often say to himself, “If only I were still Elector, and in Hanover.”’138 As Caroline recognised, it was she and George Augustus who stood to profit most from imminent changes. Deliberately she set out to demonstrate a comprehensive embracing of all things British, establishing the pattern to which, in public, husband and wife adhered for the foreseeable future. In her own case this extended even to her name. While she signed her early correspondence with Leibniz, for example, ‘W. Caroline’, by 1710 she was simply ‘Caroline’, Wilhelmine abandoned, as it would remain. The English-sounding ‘Caroline’ allied her with earlier Stuarts. Caroline and Charles shared a common Latin root in ‘Carolus’: the coincidence of name was capable of suggesting continuity between dynasties. It seems likely that this double recommendation outweighed a similar link between Wilhelmine and William. Architect of the Hanoverian succession, champion of both Sophia and George Augustus, the Dutch-born William III lacked the native appeal of Charles II.

      In her self-anglicisation Caroline was helped by increasing numbers of British travellers who made their way to Hanover. On 11 September 1710, Mademoiselle Schutz, niece of George Louis’s minister Baron Bernstorff, wrote to a friend in London that the electoral court contained quantities of English visitors.139 Others wrote to Caroline, like Edmund Gibson, chaplain to Archbishop Tenison, who in March 1714 sent her a copy of his Codex juris ecclesiastici Anglicani, on the government and discipline of the Church of England, accompanied by fulsome compliments.140

      Caroline first tasted tea at her own request from English visitors to Herrenhausen. She employed a Miss Brandshagen to talk and read to her every day in English, unaware that the thickness of the latter’s German accent would leave her with a heavy Hanoverian burr for the remainder of her life. Her English was never perfect, although one commentator credited her with mastering the language ‘uncommonly well for one born outside England’, and in July 1712 Sophia claimed she had begun to speak the language very prettily, and was amusing herself reading everything she could lay hands on either in support of, or against, the Hanoverian succession.141 Alured Clarke’s claim that her ‘uncommon turn for conversation’ was ‘assisted by … her skill in several languages … [and] art of compounding words and phrases, that were more expressive of her ideas than any other’ suggests a distinctive patois of mixed origin, almost certainly including elements of English, French and German.142 At Herrenhausen she spoke English to the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, whose own written English survives as flawless, and in the summer of 1714 to the poet John Gay, whose relief at being spared speaking French as a result was tangible.143 Both women, Gay wrote, ‘subscrib’d to Pope’s Homer, and her Highness did me the honour to say, she did not doubt it would be well done, since I recommended it’.144 Caroline also requested from the poet a copy of his own recent verse, The Shepherd’s Week. Earlier, in another instance of her grasp of cultural developments, Caroline had asked a visiting diplomat to obtain for her in London the works of exiled French essayist Charles de Saint-Evremond, which had been published for the first time in 1705, following Saint-Evremond’s burial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

      Thanks in no small measure to Caroline, the spring after her marriage, Howe was able to report the enthusiasm of the electoral family for celebrating Queen Anne’s birthday. ‘The Electoral Prince and Princess … told me the night before that they would come and dance. Half an hour before the ball began, they brought me word that the Electress was also coming. The Electress gave the Queen’s health at supper, and stayed till two o’clock.’145

      Anne’s response to such heavyweight flattery was muted. The value she attached to it can be judged from the silence with which she greeted news of the birth of Princess Amelia in 1711 and that of Princess Caroline in 1713. Her ‘perfect friendship’ proved, in appearances at least, decidedly variable. By contrast the Duke of Marlborough wrote to George Augustus following Amelia’s birth of ‘the joy that comes to mind from the increase of your illustrious house. It is a subject of rejoicing to all who have at heart the interests and satisfaction of Your Highness.’146 Meanwhile Caroline’s assiduous anglophilia looked beyond Anne’s lifespan. While her second daughter had been named for members of her German family Amelia Sophia Eleanor, her third daughter was christened Caroline Elizabeth. It was a clear indication of the direction of her parents’ thoughts.

      In describing George Augustus as possessing ‘rather an unfeeling than a bad heart’, Lord Chesterfield expressed the opinion of his more generous contemporaries.147 The Jacobite Lord Strafford dismissed him as ‘passionate, proud and peevish’.148 The prince had inherited in some measure the ‘honest blockhead’ instincts of his father, ‘more properly dull than lazy’; he shared with his father and his wife the fixation, widespread at German courts, with ‘pedigrees that were of no more signification than Pantagruel’s in Rabelais’, familiar with the antecedents ‘of every reigning prince then in Europe’.149 George Augustus lacked the ‘penetrating eye’ Lord Egmont noted in Caroline, lacked too her penetrating mind.150 Yet husband and wife were affectionate and companionable. In different ways, each was devoted to their growing family. Unlike George Louis, both were straightforwardly ambitious about their British prospects. And Caroline’s good looks had mostly survived her brush with smallpox. At a court where the women were so heavily powdered that the custom of kissing on greeting had been abandoned, Caroline was naturally pale-skinned, with a pink-and-white glow captured in 1714 in a portrait miniature by Swiss artist Benjamin Arlaud.151 Her physical charms inspired in her highly sexed husband a giddy sort of libidinous infatuation, which would prove of long duration.

      They were not, however, equals in temperament, intellect or outlook. George Augustus was described as ‘of a small understanding’, while Caroline possessed ‘a quickness of apprehension, seconded by a great judiciousness of observation’.152 Her love of reading, which extended to rereading favourite texts like Leibniz’s Theodicy, based on conversations between the philosopher and Figuelotte, stirred her husband to boorish spite. He dismissed her instincts as those of a schoolmistress, ‘often rebuked her for dabbling in all that lettered nonsense (as he termed it), called her a pedant’ – but on the evidence of her plan, in November 1715, to have Theodicy translated into English, failed to sway her mind.153 He was quick to pique, crimson-faced in his fury. His tantrums exploded and receded like August thunder, and accounts of him venting his anger by kicking his wig around the room like a football inevitably suggest Rumpelstiltskin. By contrast one gushing newspaper labelled Caroline of ‘majestic mien … extraordinary sense … greatness of soul’.154 Her self-control points to a nature more moderate or more calculating, either the ‘low cunning’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu disliked in her or the ‘softness of behaviour and … command of herself’ applauded elsewhere.155 As we will see, there are strong grounds for challenging Lady Mary’s view that Caroline’s ‘extravagant fondness’ for George Augustus was ‘counterfeited’; and if we accept her statement that ‘his pleasures … [Caroline] often told him were the rule of all her thoughts and actions’, the grounds for such behaviour are easy enough to identify in the sexual politics of the period, as the history of Sophia Dorothea amply demonstrates.156 СКАЧАТЬ