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

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СКАЧАТЬ of the library in Berlin’s old City Palace.75 She assembled an important picture collection.76 She owned two theatres, one in Berlin, the other close to Lützenburg.77 And in 1700 she facilitated the founding of a Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, with Leibniz as president. Frederick encouraged his wife’s hobbyhorses while pursuing his own extensive building programme, aware that cultural pre-eminence among the courts of the Empire served his political aspirations well.

      This symbiosis of divergent but sympathetic instincts on the parts of husband and wife was one Caroline would later have reason to remember. She too learned to relish ‘the why of the why’ and to value Leibniz’s guidance; in time she laid out fashionable gardens, collected books and treatises, commissioned the building of a new library. Like her guardians, she would exploit visual iconography for dynastic ends. In Ansbach and Dresden, as well as in Berlin, artistic riches had been features of the shifting stage sets of her childhood. Real awareness began under Figuelotte’s tutelage.

      To date, Caroline’s education had been patchy. Her immersion in Berlin’s dynamic court life, with its combination of baroque spectacle and intellectual speculation, proved a watershed, reinforcing the cultural exposure she had been too young to absorb fully at John George’s court. At Lützenburg, Figuelotte – and also her mother Sophia, a regular correspondent and occasional visitor – exemplified for the teenage princess the possibilities of life as princely spouse. Her experience of her Brandenburg guardians challenged Caroline’s memories of Eleonore’s suffering at the hands of John George, her helplessness and loneliness during the lean years at Crailsheim. In this surprising but benign environment, by turns extrovert, urbane and precious, the orphan princess was able to dispel misgivings about past, present and, especially, the future. For Caroline, Lützenburg provided stability, inspiration and a catalyst; it exposed her to female companionship at its most rewarding. When the time came, she would prove herself a consort in Figuelotte’s mould. Like her mentor, she even took snuff.

      On 7 June 1696, Duke Frederick II of Saxe-Gotha married Magdalena Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst. The couple were first cousins and, in a markedly successful marriage, went on to have nineteen children, including Caroline’s future daughter-in-law, Augusta.

      A century after the event, Horace Walpole reported an over-familiar Duke of Grafton teasing Caroline that, as a young woman, she had fallen in love with Duke Frederick.78 That Frederick’s marriage took place when Caroline was thirteen and living with her mother in out-of-the-way Pretzsch seems grounds enough to query Walpole’s claim. Instead the marriage of Frederick and his duchess illustrates the kind of union Caroline could reasonably have anticipated for herself.

      Frederick was seven years older than Caroline. He had inherited his small duchy at the age of fifteen, and would devote a long reign to territorial and financial advancement. His stepmother, Christine of Baden-Durlach, had previously married, as his third wife, Caroline’s Ansbach grandfather, Albert II. Among Frederick’s forebears was John Frederick of Saxony, a Reformation hero who rebelled against the Catholicism of the Holy Roman Emperor and for his pains forfeited his elector’s title.79 In its ties of consanguinity, focus on localised concerns and commitment to Protestantism, the marriage was typical of those contracted among lesser German royalties throughout the period. (The marriage of Caroline’s half-sister Dorothea Frederica to the heir to the tiny territory of Hanau-Lichtenberg was another such, ditto her brother’s marriage to Christiane Charlotte of Württemberg-Winnental.) That Caroline’s life pursued a different trajectory was thanks to the sponsorship of Frederick and Figuelotte.

      She can never have doubted that a single choice – to marry or not to marry – governed her future, a paucity of opportunity not restricted to princesses. Furthermore, that her ‘choice’ in the matter was circumscribed to an extreme degree. Too well she understood the hazards of the world into which she had been born. Spinsterhood was a fruitless existence for royal women. Royal marriage was contractual, an arrangement based on policy, unmarried princesses commodities in a calculation of barter and exchange. Husbands took into account strategic considerations; they expected generous dowries. Caroline knew the modesty of her inheritance. Her only trump card – save good looks, which other princesses shared – was the prestige of her Brandenburg guardians, bound to her by honour but few obligations.

      Time would show, however, that Caroline was not her mother. In 1692, destitute and miserable, Eleonore had allowed herself to be coerced into marrying a man who offended her on every level. She had exposed herself to humiliation, bullying and even threats of murder in a court dominated by the septic divisiveness of a possibly incestuous affair. When Caroline’s turn came, she would prove less compliant.

      Happily for us, circumstances propelled her beyond the reach of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha and his ilk. Frederick III’s father, Frederick William, known as the Great Elector, had transformed the status of the Brandenburg electorate. A standing army, military victories, trading posts on Africa’s Gold Coast, coffers swollen with revenues from new excise duties and a princely building programme had magnified Brandenburg’s prestige and the newsworthiness of its court. Long before Frederick dreamt of his crown, his father had made claims that were altogether more swaggering for the north German state: an Alabastersaal in the palace in Berlin, furnished with twelve full-length statues of Hohenzollern electors confronting the likenesses, in ghostly marble, of a clutch of Roman emperors; a Porcelain Cabinet in the palace of Oranienburg, nodding to Dutch influences and aligning Brandenburg within an international trading network.80 Figuelotte’s peripatetic cadre of thinkers and musicians further broadcast the charms and achievements of Lützenburg; Frederick’s stimulus to the manufacture of home-grown luxury goods including tapestry, lace and mirrors – much of it the work of Huguenot exiles – suggested affluence and sophistication. Brandenburg’s lustre inevitably enhanced Caroline’s marriageability. In addition, her presence in Berlin brought her to the attention of Figuelotte’s redoubtable mother Sophia. It would prove a critical connection.

      The septuagenarian Sophia was strong-willed, a gossip, ambitious for the fortunes of her princely house. As a child in Leiden in the 1630s, she had benefited from a rigorous educational programme devised by her father, the Elector Palatine. This training had reaped dividends. In 1670 the English writer and diplomat Edward Chamberlyne described Sophia as ‘one of the most accomplisht Ladies in Europe’, while thirty years later John Toland claimed ‘she has long been admir’d by all the Learned World, as a Woman of Incomparable Knowledge in Divinity, Philosophy, History, and the Subjects of all Sorts of Books, of which she has read a prodigious quantity. She speaks five Languages so well that by her Accent it might be a Dispute which of ’em was her first.’81 Admittedly, the philosopher was a partisan commentator inclined to exaggerate his subject’s prowess; but the sincerity of Sophia’s engagement with the life of the mind, which in turn had shaped Figuelotte’s upbringing, is beyond question. In those closest to her she esteemed strength of character and like-mindedness. Figuelotte’s reports of her orphan protégée, made flesh during Sophia’s visit to Berlin in 1704, piqued the older woman’s curiosity and sowed the germ of an idea.

      In the event, concerning rumours of a possible marriage for Caroline, Sophia met her match as gossip in Leibniz. Philosophical genius aside, Liebniz was a man of worldly inclinations. Liselotte described him as one of the rare ‘learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour’; it is hard to exonerate him from accusations of snobbery.82 Silkily he ingratiated himself in high places, as one of his less philosophical letters – to Augustus the Strong’s mistress, about a preventative for dysentery while travelling – testifies.83 In surviving sources, it is Leibniz who first broke the news of a splendid СКАЧАТЬ