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

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СКАЧАТЬ in 1701. In stark contrast to his relationship with George Augustus and the younger Sophia Dorothea, the elector was devoted to all three of his mistress’s ‘nieces’. For her part, Sophia Dorothea had imagined she would continue to see her children following her divorce, and wrote to Sophia as intermediary, begging that she be allowed to embrace them once more. Her surviving correspondence does not otherwise lament their loss: her daughter is mentioned in a single letter, George Augustus not at all.80 At intervals she implored her father-in-law to reconsider the terms of her confinement: other courts, her mother reported to her, condemned their harshness and injustice. All in vain. Sophia Dorothea remained at Ahlden for thirty-two years, ‘lead[ing] a very solitary life, but all the same … splendidly dressed’, in one of Liselotte’s less sympathetic observations.81

      Shorter in duration was the confinement in the state prison of Scharzfelz Castle of Eleonore von dem Knesebeck, who was tortured for her part in the lovers’ perfidy. She narrowly escaped a charge of attempting to poison George Louis with nitric acid after explaining her possession of the chemical as a beauty aid. In 1701, William III’s patience with Duchess Eléonore finally snapped. For seven years she had lobbied him on her daughter’s behalf, and with no wish to antagonise George Louis or risk the loss of Hanoverian support in his campaigns against the French, he forbade her to broach the subject any longer.82

      Over the Leineschloss and Herrenhausen settled an immoveable silence. Sophia Dorothea was never mentioned again, her name excised from state prayers. Her portraits were banished to storerooms, including Jacques Vaillant’s confusing image of her with her children, of 1690, in which a heavily jewelled electress embraces George Augustus while her dress parts to disclose tantalisingly full pink-white breasts. At a stroke both her children were motherless. George Louis and Sophia restricted the time either spent alone with Duchess Eléonore.

      In chancelleries across Europe Sophia Dorothea’s story electrified idle prattlers. As late as 1732, it inspired the rapidly suppressed shilling-shocker Histoire Secrette [sic] de la Duchesse D’Hanover. Gossip came close to the mark nevertheless. Stepney based his final explanation for Königsmarck’s vanishing on rumours that dogged Ernest Augustus’s court: ‘a great lady … (with whom he is suspected to have been familiar) may have been cause of his misfortune’.83 And steps were taken to put the curious off the scent, beginning with Königsmarck’s sister Aurora, mistress of Augustus the Strong of Saxony. ‘His sister raves like Cassandra and will know what is become of her brother,’ Stepney wrote, ‘but at Hanover they answer like Cain that they are not her brother’s keeper.’84 Only Duke Anton Ulrich, habitually at odds with his Hanoverian neighbours, successfully uncovered the full facts of the murder, laid bare in his correspondence with a Danish diplomat called Otto Mencken.85 To Octavia, a Roman Story, he added a sixth volume. In his tale of ‘Princess Solane’, Sophia Dorothea is a romantic innocent fatally outmanoeuvred by George Louis and Countess von Platen.

      ‘Her natural feelings for the pains and distresses of others are not to be described,’ wrote Dr Alured Clarke, the author of An Essay Towards the Character of Her late Majesty Queen Caroline, in 1738. ‘They were so strong that she became a fellow sufferer with them, and made their cases … much her own.’86

      If there is any truth in this posthumous panegyric, it seems likely that the story of George Augustus’s mother, known to Caroline before her marriage, provoked her fellow feeling – and not only with Sophia Dorothea but with George Augustus. Sources have not survived that document either short- or long-term effects on George Augustus of his mother’s fall from grace, only a series of assumptions made by successive historians. How much the eleven-year-old prince understood in 1694 is not clear. Nor is the nature of his response in the decade ahead. The abruptness of his severance from his mother was surely traumatic, as was his exposure to the bitter recriminations against Sophia Dorothea which consumed the electoral court. Rich in pathos, a story of George Augustus attempting to catch a glimpse of his vanished mother by stealing away from a hunting party, only to be caught four miles from Ahlden, is almost certainly a sentimental invention. His grandmother Sophia became the dominant female presence in his childhood, a role to which, by nature and inclination, she was ideally suited. George Louis’s attitude, by contrast, suggested at best detachment.

      A response to Sophia Dorothea’s history was required of Caroline from the beginning of her marriage, in her several roles of wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law and granddaughter-in-law. The younger Sophia Dorothea categorised her mother’s error as one of imprudence, and, following her own marriage and departure from Hanover, wrote to her regularly. Such leniency would have been impolitic on Caroline’s part. Nevertheless, unspecified ‘courtesies’ apparently paid by Caroline and George Augustus to the widowed Duchess Eléonore, living modestly outside Celle at Wienhausen, indicate a joint response to the dilemma by husband and wife.87 Sophia, by contrast, regarded her former daughter-in-law with hostility, while on the subject of recent family history George Louis maintained a discouraging silence.

      In the autumn of 1705, Caroline cannot have shared for long Toland’s view of Hanover’s court as ‘even in Germany accounted the best both for Civility and Decorum’.88 With Sophia Dorothea’s disgrace and, in 1698, Ernest Augustus’s death had vanished much of ‘the old gay good humour’.89 Animus between George Louis and his grown-up son was deeply ingrained. A tradition of hostility between ruler and heir had been a feature of Hanover’s ruling family as far back as the Middle Ages, but its absence from George Louis’s relationship with Ernest Augustus invited questions concerning its re-emergence in the current generation.90 It was unavoidable that Caroline should look for explanations in the collapse of George Louis’s marriage, as well as in the undoubted physical resemblance of George Augustus and his mother, both slight in build, impulsive, quick to blush. Caroline’s loyalty to George Augustus in his disputes with his father indicates that, in Clarke’s words, the case she made her own was not Sophia Dorothea’s or George Louis’s, but that of her husband. In 1705 this attitude proved important in consolidating their affection: an awareness of the ties that bound them would characterise their marriage. Caroline too felt the shadow of Sophia Dorothea’s transgression. George Augustus’s compulsion for orderliness, his need to control and obsessive focus on small details – afterwards thorns in Caroline’s side – traced their roots to the vacuum created by his parents’ divorce, and his resulting uncertainty and disorientation.

      Caroline recognised in addition warnings for herself in her predecessor’s downfall. By 1705 her exposure to the vagaries of royal marriage was broad. Too young to remember her mother’s happy marriage to John Frederick, she was unlikely to forget the unhappiness of Eleonore’s second marriage. She had witnessed Figuelotte’s unconventional management of Frederick and the latter’s admiration. And the case of Sophia Dorothea implied aspects of the electoral family’s views of the role of wives. Having spent her entire life in courts, Caroline understood the necessity, in such an environment, to temper her behaviour to the prevailing clime – as Stepney had once intimated in Eleonore’s case, if necessary to the point of dissembling. She was aware that ‘in courts … the affections of the heart are as much conceal’d as its substance’, and that there ‘even trifles, elegantly expressed, well looked, and accompanied with graceful action … ever please beyond all the homespun, unadorned sense in the world’.91 Her success in Berlin, her conquest of the Archduke Charles at Weissenfels, her resistance to Father Orban and the Elector Palatine, and her seamless, discreet management of her engagement to George Augustus testify to something remarkable СКАЧАТЬ