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

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СКАЧАТЬ princely agendas. The Saxon Kunstkammer, with its collection of dynastic portraits, and the marvels of the Green Vault, had first stirred in her an aesthetic awakening continued by Frederick and Figuelotte. Sophia’s collection of paintings in Hanover rivalled her daughter’s. Her cabinet of curiosities was rich in jewels and gemstones, and her garden was the foremost in Germany. Compared with that of his father, George Louis’s court lacked panache, peopled by ‘such leather-headed things that the stupidity of them is not to be conceived’.49 The court opera was closed, and celebrations, including that of Caroline’s marriage, missed the flourish prized by Ernest Augustus and Frederick. Court routine was dully repetitive: ‘We have not much variety of Diversions, what we did yesterday & to day we shall do tomorrow’; the daily ‘drawing room’, or formal reception, did not daily delight.50 Even Sophia’s gatherings of learned and distinguished men, albeit they included after 1710 the composer George Frederick Handel, employed as George Louis’s Kapellmeister or master of court music, wanted the sparkle of Figuelotte’s effervescent sodality. After the dowdiness of Berwart’s shadow-filled palace in Ansbach, Herrenhausen and the Leineschloss were splendid enough.

      Caroline’s married life began in Hanover itself. At the Leineschloss Sophia formally welcomed her, on 2 September 1705, ‘with all the expressions of kindness and respect that could be desired’.51 Her wedding took place the same evening, in the palace chapel, in a service notable for its simplicity. Caroline wore a dress of coloured silks. There was a ball and a French play, the former accompanied by modest quantities of alcohol, Caroline’s introduction to the abstemiousness that was a feature of Hanoverian court life.52 George Augustus slept through the wedding sermon, provoking predictably ribald comment. ‘What good news for the bride that he should be well rested,’ Liselotte wrote, the sort of quip that, a century later, earned her the epithet of the ‘most improper Letter-writer in Europe’.53 From England Queen Anne wrote too, letters of congratulation to Sophia and her family. Days later Sophia still remembered the faces of the congregation as ‘wreathed in smiles when we looked at the young couple’.54 George Louis was almost certainly the exception. Acrimony and impatience dominated his feelings towards his only son, and would colour aspects of his relationship with Caroline. He acknowledged her good looks but as yet made no further approaches to intimacy.

      It is also possible that Caroline’s smiles lacked conviction. Both she and George Augustus had anticipated from the elector a more generous wedding present. She ‘really could not help taking notice’, wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘that the presents made to her on her wedding were not worthy of [George Augustus’s] bride, and at least she ought to have had all his mother’s jewels’.55 With a degree of subtlety, Caroline’s complaint was not on her own account. She protested at the suggestion of any slight to George Augustus.

      A living ghost shared with Caroline and George Augustus the quarters allocated to them in Hanover’s town palace. She was the prince’s mother, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, and though very much alive, dead to the court and the electoral family, by whom her name was never mentioned. Not for the first time in our chronicle, her story is one of conflicted emotions, double standards and novelettish melodrama that nevertheless impacts on events to come.

      Sophia Dorothea was George Louis’s first cousin. Her father was Ernest Augustus’s younger brother, George William, Duke of Celle. Her mother, Eléonore d’Olbreuse, was a Huguenot noblewoman of striking good looks, whose commoner blood earned from Liselotte the pithy dismissal of ‘mouse droppings in the pepper’.56 Neither love nor romance played its part in forging the cousins’ disastrous union. At the time of their marriage in November 1682, Sophia Dorothea was sixteen; spoilt, self-willed, preoccupied with dress and luxuries, but notably pretty in the curvaceous, pale-skinned manner of the times, and, if an early portrait by Jacob Ferdinand Voet can be trusted, lacking in confidence and anxious to please.57 George Louis was twenty-two. By the terms of their marriage contract, kept secret from Sophia Dorothea, he received straight away her entire dowry; at her parents’ death, their revenues and property became his too. It was an arrangement guaranteed to deny George Louis’s bride the possibility of financial independence.

      Opportunities for acquaintance had recurred throughout the cousins’ childhoods; decided antipathy predated their marriage. Although G.K. Chesterton exaggerated in describing George Louis in 1917 as ‘the barbarian from beyond the Rhine’, his preoccupations were strenuously masculine.58 Off the battlefield he enjoyed hunting. ‘Low of stature, of features coarse, of aspect dull and placid’, he inherited few of his mother’s rarefied interests, only walking and music, and no aptitude at all for the role of romantic swain.59 Like many German princelings, including his lecherous father, he began as a busy fornicator, though his momentum would slow with increasing responsibility. He was otherwise undemonstrative and emotionally costive. He was sixteen when Figuelotte’s under-governess fell pregnant with his first child: Sophia castigated him as a ‘progenitor of bastards’.60 His first full-time mistress shortly afterwards was Maria Katharine von Meysenburg, the sister of his father’s redoubtable mistress Countess von Platen. With no eye to psychological complexities, this curious arrangement had been brokered by Ernest Augustus himself.61 His mother insisted that George Louis would ‘marry a cripple if he could serve the house’, but in the event this was not required of him.62 Instead, despite rumours that Sophia’s English family wished him to marry Princess Anne of York, the future Queen Anne, and, in 1680, an inconclusive trip to London apparently to that end, his father chose for George Louis his pretty young cousin in neighbouring Celle.

      It was an arranged royal marriage like others before and since, and compatibility between the partners was an afterthought. Ernest Augustus’s plan was twofold: to bring together the disparate territorial possessions of his family, and to ensure their long-term security by introducing primogeniture in the next generation. George Louis’s marriage enabled Ernest Augustus to knit together Calenburg, Celle and Hanover. In time both George Louis and his eldest son would inherit outright the contiguous raggle-taggle of all three duchies, as well as the fourth segment in the patrimonial jigsaw, the prince-bishopric of Osnabrück.

      It was unfortunate that George Louis’s response to the prospect of marrying Sophia Dorothea combined delight in her good looks with ‘repugnance’ at aspects of her character, and that her own reaction was something akin: of such was the stuff of political necessity.63 The glister of Sophia Dorothea’s inheritance outweighed her temperamental and emotional unsuitability to play the parts of George Louis’s wife and Hanover’s electress, outweighed even the £40,000 dowry of Princess Anne, with additional annual promises of £10,000. A portrait of the mid-1680s by Henri Gascar depicts the married Sophia Dorothea with flowers in her curly hair. Her dress of richly woven fabric slips alluringly from her shoulder. A garland of flowers in her hand represents fertility and the promise of springtime, but nothing in this seductively decorative image suggests gravity.

      As the marriage approached, Sophia wrote tactfully to the bride’s father that she had never imagined George Louis capable of so violent a passion.64 Three of his four younger brothers were similarly smitten, with Frederick Augustus serenading his sister-in-law as ‘bellissime’, ‘most beautiful’. For her part Sophia Dorothea hurled a diamond-set miniature of George Louis against the wall. But the couple’s first child and only son, George Augustus, СКАЧАТЬ