Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Matthew Dennison 2017

Matthew Dennison asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008121990

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008122010

Version: 2018-08-20

Dedication

For Gráinne, with love

‘Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair … Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.’

Song of Solomon

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Family Trees

Epigraph

Introduction

Prologue: ‘Halliballoo!’

PART ONE: GERMANY

I Princess of Ansbach: ‘Bred up in the softness of a Court’

II Electoral Princess: ‘The affections of the heart’

PART TWO: BRITAIN

I Princess of Wales: ‘Majesty with Affability’

II Leicester House: ‘Not a Day without Suffering’

III Queen: ‘Constancy and Greatness’

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Picture Section

Index

Also by Matthew Dennison

About the Publisher

Epigraph

‘The darling pleasure of her soul was power.’

Lord Hervey, Memoirs

‘She loved the real possession of power rather than the show of it, and whatever she did herself that was either wise or popular, she always desired that the King should have the full credit as well as the advantage of the measure, conscious that, by adding to his respectability, she was most likely to maintain her own.’

Walter Scott on Caroline of Ansbach, The Heart of Midlothian, 1818

Introduction

History has forgotten Caroline of Ansbach. The astuteness of her political manoeuvrings; her patronage of poets, philosophers and clerics; her careful management of her peppery husband George II; the toxic breakdown of her relationship with her eldest son, Frederick; her reputation as Protestant heroine; even the legendary renown of her magnificent bosom – ‘her breasts they make such a wonder at’ – have all escaped posterity’s radar.1

Her contemporaries understood her as the power behind George II’s throne. One lampoon taunted, ‘You may strutt, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain;/We know ’tis Caroline, not you, that reign.’2 She was the first Hanoverian queen consort. On her arrival in London from Germany in October 1714, following the accession of her father-in-law as George I, she became the first Princess of Wales since 1502, when Catherine of Aragon married Prince Arthur, short-lived elder brother of the future Henry VIII.

Blonde, buxom, with a rippling laugh and a raft of intellectual hobbyhorses, in 1714 she was also the mother of four healthy children. Her fertility was in stark contrast to the record of later Stuarts: barren Catherine of Braganza, Portuguese wife of Charles II; childless Mary II and Queen Anne, whose seventeen pregnancies fatally undermined her health but failed to produce a single healthy heir. Early praise of Caroline celebrated her fecundity. Poet Thomas Tickell’s Royal Progress of 1714 invites the reader to marvel at ‘the opening wonders’ of George I’s reign: ‘Bright Carolina’s heavenly beauties trace,/Her valiant consort and his blooming race./A train of kings their fruitful love supplies.’ Those magnificent breasts, so remarked upon by onlookers and commemorated in a formidable posthumous portrait bust by sculptor John Michael Rysbrack, were an obvious metaphor, key assets for the mother of a new dynasty.3

With conventional hyperbole, the future Frederick the Great addressed her as ‘a Queen whose merit and virtues are the theme of universal admiration’.4 Voltaire acclaimed her as ‘a delightful philosopher on the throne’.5 Her niece, the Margravine of Bayreuth, praised her ‘powerful understanding and great knowledge’, and an Irish clergyman noted in her ‘such a quickness of apprehension, seconded by a great judiciousness of observation’.6 In his Marwnad y Frenhines Carolina (‘Elegy to Queen Caroline’), London-based Welsh poet Richard Morris called her ‘ail Elisa’, a second Eliza or Elizabeth.7 Jane Brereton’s The Royal Heritage: A Poem, of 1733, made another Tudor connection, linking the intelligent Caroline with Henry VIII: ‘O Queen! More learn’d than e’er Britannia saw,/Since our fam’d Tudor to the Realm gave Law.’8 More simply, her girlhood mentor described her company as ‘reviving’.9 Meanwhile Alexander Pope, a sceptical observer, was responsible for several critical poetic imaginings of Caroline. These include the personification of cynical adroitness he offered in Of the Characters of Women – ‘She, who ne’er answers till a Husband cools,/Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules;/Charms by accepting, by submitting sways’ – a view in line with Lord Hervey’s statement that she ‘governed [George Augustus] by dissimulation, by affected tenderness and deference’.10 Caroline’s dissatisfaction with the conventional limits of a consort’s role – her reluctance to be defined by gynaecological prowess or her appearance – inspired conflicting responses among her contemporaries, but lies at the heart of her remarkable story.

Caroline is the heroine of sparkling memoirs by her vice chamberlain, John, Lord Hervey, written shortly after the events they describe; she is at the heart of published memoirs and diaries by two of her closest female attendants, Mary, Lady Cowper, and Charlotte Clayton, afterwards Lady Sundon. Like the majority of primary sources, none is wholly reliable. In 1900, Caroline’s first full-length biography, Caroline the Illustrious, by W.H. Wilkins, lauded its subject as central to the successful transfer of the electors of Hanover to Britain’s throne. Unlike the author, reviewers glimpsed Caroline and her world through a prism of Victorian disapproval, firmly thrusting her back into a disreputable past. ‘She died as she lived, a strange mixture of cynicism and clairvoyance,’ commented the Spectator opaquely. ‘Herself the model of virtue, she spent her life in an atmosphere of vulgar vice.’11 In 1939, a biography by Rachel Arkell again acclaimed Caroline’s intellect and acuity. Both authors drew on source material in German archives subsequently damaged by wartime bombing. Published in the same year as Arkell’s account, Peter Quennell’s Caroline of England is lighter stuff, in part a portrait of robust Augustan London dandled in the face of Nazi aggression.

And then a curtain descended. Like her husband George II, in 1973 the only British monarch not to merit a volume in Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s popular ‘Life and Times’ series, Caroline again fell out of view. Her reputation suffered eclipse by a better-known Queen Caroline, George IV’s despised wife Caroline of Brunswick. The latter’s rackety story invests her husband’s history with tabloid sensationalism. Caroline of Ansbach’s impact on her demanding spouse came closer to that of Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on Queen Victoria or Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon on George VI, an admonitory, popularising presence, albeit exercised more covertly than Albert’s earnest pedagogy.

Such wholesale neglect is the more surprising given that, in her lifetime, Caroline inspired reverence, adulation, sneering and hatred. A poem written to celebrate her coronation in 1727 pictured her unconvincingly as the embodiment of ‘Innocence and Mildness …/The sure Foundation of domestic Love’; a decade later, Richard West’s A Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline wrongly predicted ‘thy name, great Queen, shall … live in every age’.12 By contrast her father-in-law described her as a ‘she-devil’ or ‘fury’. She was burnt in effigy on the streets of London. A rancorous elderly courtier recoiled even from her appearance, her ‘face frightfull, her eyes very small & green like a Cat & her shape yet worse’.13

To others she was a poster girl for Protestant piety and, in at least one case, no less than the earthly mediator of a Protestant God: ‘Th’Almighty seeing so much Christian Grace,/And how, on Earth, she ran the heavenly Race;/Has constituted ROYAL CAROLINE/His Agent here, to make his Glory shine.’14 A panegyric stated, ‘it appears to the admiration even of those who saw her at all times and seasons, and in every hour when the Mind is most unguarded, that her Majesty was always in a very eminent manner the same great and good Person’.15 A politician’s wife referred to Caroline’s ‘ears … always open to the cries of the distressed’.16

The truth is seldom one-sided, and flattery distorts. Caroline was villain and victim, sinner as well as saint, fond and loving but a good hater too. Keenly interested in politics, in the decade until her death she played a part in George II’s government, while never revealing to that prickly and self-important prince the full extent of her interference when his back was turned. She had no truck with political impartiality. Whig politics – a Protestant, pro-parliamentary outlook – had placed her husband’s family on the throne, and in her relationship with pre-eminent politician of the period, Robert Walpole, satirised on her account as ‘the Queen’s Minister’, Caroline was as fully a Whig partisan as her husband or her father-in-law George I. ‘We are as much blinded in England by politicks and views of interest, as we are by mists and fogs, and ’tis necessary to have a very uncommon constitution not to be tainted with the distempers of our climate,’ wrote Caroline’s contemporary Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.17 Caroline shared the blindness of her adopted countrymen. ‘I am a woman and I delude myself,’ she once claimed with careful disingenuousness; she was concerned with status as well as power.

During George’s absences in Hanover she acted as regent on four occasions. With regal élan, she exercised patronage, commissioning architects and garden designers, providing financial assistance for poets, overseeing loose coteries of philosophers, scientists and divines; building for herself a splendid royal library adjoining St James’s Palace. She championed inoculation. The report she commissioned on a Parisian orphanage shaped Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, opened after her death. She identified grounds for prison reform during the regency of 1732, but failed to persuade Robert Walpole to action. And from early in her marriage, aware that her husband’s destiny lay in Britain, she worked consistently at self-anglicisation, this German princess determined to succeed in the role of British queen. In scale her anglophile initiatives were large and small – from cultivating the good opinion of politicians and militarists to drinking tea and subscribing £100 to Pope’s translation of The Iliad. None of these acts was either wholly accidental or disjointed.

Caroline had inherited a Continental model of queenship. In German states, female consorts balanced the political and military governance of their husbands with spiritual and cultural direction. In Caroline’s case, innate ambition encouraged her to look beyond prescribed bounds: with variable success she took pains to dissimulate her aspirations. She blended affability with dignity but understood the importance, on occasion, of adopting what she called ‘grand ton de la reine’, full regal fig. As her unwavering support for her exacting spouse and her long association with Walpole show, she could be enthusiastic in partnership in order to achieve her ends. Others, like the letter-writing Lord Chesterfield and her husband’s mistress Henrietta Howard, would experience the vigour of her disapprobation.

That visible reminders of Caroline are scant in twenty-first-century Britain ought not to blind us to her achievements – or the scale of the obstacles she mostly overcame. Hers was a world in which the political was still personal, an elision she manipulated skilfully. Her overriding aim was that of every dynast: to ensure the survival of the precarious organisation she and her husband represented. In the early days, her personal popularity played its part in countering the threat to the Hanoverians of lingering Stuart support, a movement known as Jacobitism. More charismatic than her husband, more genuinely in thrall to her adopted country, she found admirers even among disaffected Catholics and Scots. There is a spin-doctor quality to aspects of her exploitation of soft power.

The present account seeks to offer some redress to Caroline of Ansbach’s historical vanishing act. Recent scholarship has re-examined George II’s conduct of monarchy to reveal a statesman more perceptive and engaged than earlier versions have suggested.18 Nor can Caroline be defined exclusively as the spirited, all-controlling heroine of Lord Hervey’s Memoirs, the ‘Goddess of Dulness’ satirised in Pope’s Dunciad, the scheming cynic who emerges from the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, or the monstrous harridan imagined by the niece by marriage who never met her: ‘She was imperious, false, and ambitious. She has frequently been compared to Agrippina; like that empress, she might have exclaimed, let all perish, so I do but rule.’19 As the spectacular failure of her relationship with her eldest son indicates, Caroline had her share of flaws. She also inspired powerful affection, not least in her husband, whose devotion to her survived his long-term infidelity and the corrosive sycophancy of kingship.

Caroline worked hard at queenship. She was inspired by the examples of her guardian, Sophia Charlotte of Prussia, and her husband’s grandmother, Sophia of Hanover; eagerly she examined precedents established in Britain by recent queens-regnant Mary II and Queen Anne. Measured against the yardstick of her own devising, she enjoyed notable success at a time when the court still retained – in part, thanks to her – social, cultural and political significance. Although she was not single-handedly responsible for the successful establishment of the Hanoverians in Britain – or even in British affections – her understanding that she had a role to play in this process raises her above the average early-eighteenth-century princess. ‘Nothing will pass for what is great or illustrious, but what has true merit in it,’ wrote the unctuous Alured Clarke in An Essay Towards the Character of Her late Majesty Caroline, Queen-Consort of Great Britain, &c, published the year after Caroline’s death.20 We will see that Caroline’s life included its measure of merit.

Prologue

‘Halliballoo!’

Above the hubbub rose a single voice. On that dark December evening, the sound of a young woman singing soared above disarray. Above the noise of rain in nearby St James’s Park it lifted, above the dripping branches of lime trees planted in hundreds a decade ago by royal gardener Henry Wise.

Idlers heard it above the ‘racket of coxes! such a noise and halliballoo!’ in gaming dens and coffee houses.1 They heard it above the ‘Modern Midnight Conversation’ of boozy taverns shortly to be depicted by scourge of the age William Hogarth, above the ‘violent Fit[s] of Laughter’ in fashionable drawing rooms that novelist Sarah Fielding likened to ‘the Cackling of Geese, or the Gobbling of Turkeys’.2 Astringent as the sluice of ordure on wet cobbles, revoltingly inventoried by Jonathan Swift as ‘sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,/Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,/Dead cats and turnip-tops’, her song trilled its defiant strain.3 Brightly, ‘despising doleful dumps’, it eclipsed the stamping hooves of horses, servants’ shuffling feet, hourly chimes from unlit churches.4 It rang clear above the clatter of packing cases, including the royal close stool entrusted to woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Clayton, above orders and counter orders and – unmistakeable in the broad London street – the sound of sobbing: ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’.

The Honourable Mary Bellenden was singing. Mary was a maid of honour, one of a group of high-spirited and decorative unmarried young women in attendance on Caroline, Princess of Wales. ‘The most perfect creature’, ‘smiling Mary, soft and fair as down’, ‘incontestably the most agreeable, the most insinuating, and the most likable woman of her time’, she was in flushed good looks tonight, singing in the shadows that skirted St James’s Palace.5 The same could not be said of her royal mistress. Two years previously, in one of his last excrescences as Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate had acclaimed flaxen-haired, inquisitive, plain-speaking Caroline as ‘adorned with every grace of person and of mind’.6 As the rank, wet December darkness enfolded princess and attendants in its clammy grip, she appeared anything but.

Loyal Mary sang for Caroline, an angry song of protest. ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ was a rallying cry for Jacobites, those pro-Stuart opponents of Britain’s new Hanoverian monarchy; later, Mary Bellenden would be painted by portraitist Charles Jervas in the character of Mary, Queen of Scots. Caroline, of course, was herself a key player in the usurping dynasty. On 2 December 1717 she too played her part as victim.

Her father-in-law – for three years George I, elector of Hanover since 1698 and a man accustomed to obedience – had expelled her husband George Augustus from his rickety, brick-built palace following a footling argument about the choice of a royal godparent. In a satirical age, such septic dysfunctionalism was a boon to the writers of ballads and broadsheets. To the king’s chagrin, Caroline had chosen to accompany her husband into ignominy. ‘You may not only hope to live but Thrive, If with united hearts and hands you live,’ promised an engraving called ‘The Happy Marriage’, published in 1690, and throughout her marriage Caroline had done her best to present a united front.7 Surprised and displeased, the king shrugged his shoulders, comfortable in the apartments of his bald and red-faced German mistress overlooking the palace gardens. In the words of a ballad called ‘An Elegy upon the Young Prince’, ‘Both the Son and’s Spouse,/He left ’em no/Where else to go,/But turn’d ’em out on’s House’.8

No royal guards attended prince and princess in their hasty flit. The doors of the palace were closed against them, the Chapel Royal too, their attendance at court forbidden and every special act of deference suspended. Still the choleric and implacable monarch protested at his inability under British law to halt their payments from the civil list. Even Caroline’s children, a baby of three weeks and three daughters ranging in age from four to eight, were prevented from accompanying her in this hour of disgrace. They remained abed within the palace. The king had ‘[taken] his grey goose quill/And dip’t it o’er in gall’, a balladeer wrote. His sentence was comprehensive:

Take hence yourself, and eke your spouse,

Your maidens and your men,

Your trunks, and all your trumpery,

Except your children.9

Where the royal couple took their unhappy caravanserai was the house of Henry d’Auverquerque, Earl of Grantham. Since February, this slow-witted loyalist, his character dominated by ‘gluttony and idleness, … a good stomach and a bad head, … stupidity and ennui’, had served as Caroline’s lord chamberlain, the highest-ranking officer of her household.10

Up St James’s Street the convoy jolted. Across Piccadilly to Grantham House in Dover Street it wound its way. Servants followed separately, in the glimmering illumination of the new round glass street lamps, lit only on moonless nights, that marvelling visitors to the city likened to ‘little Suns of the Night’.11 The Duke of Portland described the party on arrival as ‘in the utmost grief and disorder, the Prince cried for two hours, and the Princess swooned several times’.12 Caroline had given birth only weeks earlier, an event, in the words of one phlegmatic diarist, ‘which occasioned great joy for the present, but proved of short duration’.13 Following months of escalating tension, the baby’s christening was the battleground on which king and prince collided. By 2 December neither Caroline’s strength nor her nerves had recovered from birth or baptism. Besides the daughters she entrusted to governesses on that darkest evening, she left behind her in the care of his wetnurse her baby son.

Caroline’s friend, the Countess of Bückeburg, recalled the anguish of their parting: ‘The poor Princess went into one faint after another when her weeping little Princesses said goodbye.’14 Caroline had told the king that she valued her children ‘not as a grain of sand compared to [her husband]’, but there was more of bravado than truth in the statement.15 None of the family would recover from the fissure wrought that winter night. Before the spring was out, the baby Caroline left behind her ‘kick’d up his heels and died’.16 He was killed by ‘convulsions’, water on the brain, a cyst on his tiny heart; each internal organ was swollen, distended, angrily inflamed. The miracle was that he had survived so long.17 That this looked bad for the king was cold comfort for a grief-stricken Caroline. ‘That which, in our more liberal age, would be considered as bare invective and scurrility, was the popular language of those times,’ wrote Lord Hailes, looking back in 1788.18 In this instance scurrility rose up in Caroline’s defence. Doggerel commended her suffering; it condemned the king’s heartlessness: ‘Let Baby cry/Or Lit [sic] it die/Own Mother’s Milk deny’d,/He no more car’d/How poor thing far’d.’19

‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ sang beautiful Mary Bellenden, and rain and darkness engulfed her song. The king she meant to upbraid was not listening, and the royal gaggle’s short journey, undertaken pell-mell on foot in view of a hastily convened sympathetic crowd, soon carried them out of earshot. In Lord Grantham’s house, smaller than their apartments in St James’s Palace, prince and princess were forced to share a bedroom. Such intimacy, and confines of space, prevented any ceremonial in their rising or retiring to bed, the complex rigmarole of bedchamber staff, of basins and ewers proffered on bended knee, shifts, chemises, gloves, fans and shoes presented or withdrawn by attendants greedy for the privilege: the ritualised posturing of baroque monarchy. Instead ‘Higgledy-piggledy they lay/And all went rantam scantam.’20

To his father, the prince dispatched the tersest of notes. ‘I have just obeyed your Majesty’s orders, having left St James’s. The Princess goes along with me, and our Servants shall follow with all imaginable Expedition.’21 No response was requested or forthcoming.

‘I am so sorry for our dear Princess of Wales that I shed tears for her yesterday,’ her closest correspondent wrote.22 As a measure of his distress, George Augustus succumbed to a feverish ‘inflammatory distemper, with bumps in his face somewhat like a rash’. Doctors treated Caroline for fainting fits and violent throat pains.23 For all its brevity, her journey from familiar certainties, beginning with a walk in the dark, was a big one. Her life encompasses its share of new beginnings and abrupt severances.

PART ONE

Germany

I

Princess of Ansbach

‘Bred up in the softness of a Court’

In Wenceslaus Hollar, the old palace of Ansbach – towered, turreted and architecturally uninspiring – found its ideal chronographer. An etcher from Bohemia, born in 1607 and destined, surely unfairly, to die in poverty, Hollar worked in black and white for a fixed rate of fourpence an hour, creating topographical views as intricately wrought as Flemish lace.

First printed in the 1630s, Hollar’s view of the south German town of Ansbach has a congested spikiness. He delighted in inky shadows, details sharp as pinpricks, the awkward geometry of serried roofs. The tiny figures he scattered across his panorama – riding in a coach, chasing a stag across an empty field – are fragile as house spiders and likewise insignificant. Like spiders they thread the crooked streets. Their meagre limbs are gossamer alongside the solider outlines of steeples and town walls and the criss-cross fronts of timber-framed merchants’ houses. Hidden from view are Ansbach’s metalworkers and cloth-makers, whose workshops oozed woodsmoke and sweat. Out of earshot the ring of hammers and wooden tools, expletives, invective, laughter.

Instead, it is the old Renaissance palace that draws the eye in Hollar’s etching. Built in the third quarter of the sixteenth century by an architect from Swabia called Blasius Berwart, it is a tall building of four storeys, and its walls form the sides of a square. Hollar depicts it as a cat’s cradle of uprights and mullioned windows. From its corners, narrow towers rise, topped by spires. Gables frame shuttered dormers. A pennant – or possibly a weathervane – flutters stiffly from the spire of the largest, central, hexagonal tower. Above the steep-pitched roof, a chimneystack supports a bird’s nest complete with resident stork. Hollar’s scale is all wrong, and the stork, brought to life, would have been enormous, like an airborne dodo. At the start of our chronicle the bird is appropriate, associated with new beginnings, harbinger of new life.

In one version of Hollar’s etching the building is labelled ‘Furstlich Residents’, ‘princely seat’, in letters as big as the palace windows.1 The same print offers the viewer a key: the princely seat is sight ‘A’. Hollar’s contemporaries would have agreed with him that any viewer’s primary interest must be the home of Ansbach’s first family – not the taller Gothic churches of St Gumbertus and St John to the east, nor the palace’s formal garden within crenelated walls to the west, each flowerbed a filigree square. Buildings close to the palace are nondescript by comparison: regular as boxes, like the plastic houses on a Monopoly board, much as they remain.

In Berwart’s palace, in a room quite different from that later mocked up for tourists as ‘Queen Caroline’s apartment’, complete with rococo boiseries and Chinese porcelain, Caroline of Ansbach was born on 1 March 1683. Otherwise, save in Hollar’s etching, the old palace of Ansbach has been forgotten. It was remodelled and extended at the turn of the eighteenth century, after Caroline had already left it.

Today’s Residenz Ansbach – now the administrative seat of the government of Middle Franconia – is an exercise in baroque symmetry begun in 1705: routinely grand. Last whiffs of absolutism confer a bland sort of glamour. Externally, pilasters divide ribbons of tall windows; from the pediment statues gesture sturdily. Vanished is the dark, mysterious poetry invoked by Hollar, gone the mighty stork on its twiggy nest, long dead those spidery figures chasing a stag, jolting in their carriage, working iron or bronze in hidden forges. Nothing remains to recall the older palace at the heart of this cluster of timber-built houses and soaring churches and small-scale provincial aspirations set amid green meadows and distant wooded hills above the Rezat river.

Several of Berwart’s interiors survived the remodelling. There is little today save a handful of portraits that would be recognisable to the blonde-haired princess baptised into the Lutheran faith in the spring of 1683 as Wilhelmine Karoline. In the event, circumstances throughout her life would discourage her from looking back. First family tragedy, later political expediency, forced her to fix her gaze on the present and the future. Her contemporaries discounted her early years. British printmakers even confused her baptismal names: Edward Cooper called her ‘Wilhelmina Charlotta’, Thomas Bowles ‘Wilhelmina Charlotte’.2 It seems likely that she was known first as ‘Wilhelmine’. The switch to ‘Caroline’ coincided with the prospect of a life in Britain, following her marriage into the reigning house of Hanover. ‘Caroline’ was easier for the British to pronounce.

Begun in the year of Caroline’s marriage, Ansbach’s new palace is an exercise in regal conformity: a cumbrous assertion of majesty inspired, like so much German palace-building, by Louis XIV’s Versailles. Her own later life would share this concern with successfully projecting authority. Like the building she never knew, her future career encompassed baroque bombast and a focus on order, reason and measure more typical of the Enlightenment. All that lay ahead.

In March 1683, her birth was of no importance. No poets hymned her tiny limbs, no kerfuffle ruffled diplomats’ dispatches. Only love could justify John Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, beginning a second family after the death of his wife Joanna Elizabeth of Baden-Durlach. The three surviving children of his first marriage, Christian Albert, Dorothea Frederica and George Frederick – seven, six and four respectively – already filled his turreted palace with noise and the surety of another generation. By 1683, Ansbach required from its ruling prince no more sons or daughters. Caroline was a baby without purpose or promise. Save in a mother’s heart, few aspirations can have been nurtured for her. Yet there is no reason to doubt her parents’ happiness at her birth. Given the existence already of two male heirs to the Ansbach patrimony, even her sex cannot have disappointed.

John Frederick was a man of imagination and culture. He wrote fiction, in the manner of contemporary French authors, published under the pseudonym Isidorus Fidelis (‘Faithful Isidore’), and expanded and reorganised the court library; he loved music, especially opera. He employed the composer Johann Wolfgang Franck as director of court music at the outset of his career; he was a patron of composer and well-known castrato singer Antonio Pistocchi. Franck wrote two new operas during his six years in Ansbach, including a version of the story of Perseus and Andromeda: chivalry overcoming tyranny.3 Pistocchi meanwhile would first teach Caroline to sing.4 And John Frederick commissioned for his palace a double portrait of himself and his new wife. She was Eleonore Erdmuthe Louise, elder of the two daughters of John George I, Duke of Saxe-Eisenach. The home she left behind her lay 150 miles to the north, on the north-west edge of the Thuringian forest, an enclave every bit as insignificant as tiny Ansbach.

An uxorious image, John Frederick’s marriage portrait suggests a man happy with his spouse. The sturdy German margrave leans towards his charming consort, seven years his junior, and proudly clasps her hand. Like many another princess, she was acclaimed by poets as the loveliest alive; a shrewder observer noted her mildness of temper, compliance, good sense.5 Her double chin, plump forearms and breasts as deliciously rounded as the peaches in the basket she cradles, indicate her conformity to prevailing notions of beauty. Visual metaphors of fecundity are easily unravelled. Less so her auburn hair, possibly a wig, a tottering confection of marshmallow curls. Corkscrew ringlets foam about her pale shoulders. She wears a necklace of pearls and bulky, square-cut jewels glimmer on her bodice. John Frederick wears a brown wig of a style that had changed little since the middle of the century.

The couple’s pale eyebrows suggest that their colouring was naturally fair – as it appears in Samuel Blesendorff’s engraving of the painting, as well as mezzotints of an earlier portrait of John Frederick attributed to Willem Wissing, in breastplate and chivalric orders.6 A contemporary engraving of John Frederick by Mark Anton Gufer shows that Caroline inherited from her father her distinctively rounded face, with pointed chin and long, straight, pointed nose; her brother William Frederick resembled her closely.7 From her mother Caroline would inherit her quantities of pale blonde hair and, as time would show, considerable strength of character. Her father bequeathed her in addition bibliophilia, a relish for poetry and music, his manipulation of cultural patronage as a medium for communicating power. Although she lacked Eleonore’s uncontested beauty, Caroline would share her ‘expressive countenance’.8 Inviting curves and a splendid embonpoint – a plenitude of milk-white fleshiness and snowy bosom – were also gifts of Eleonore’s. A possibly apocryphal story has a youthful Caroline being followed through Ansbach’s narrow streets by a crowd of gawping admirers. Like Eleonore, she would inspire devotion in her future spouse. Like both her parents, she would make an essentially arranged marriage successful and rewarding.

At the outset she was born to high-ranking obscurity, cut off from the common herd in Berwart’s palace with its garden concealed between high walls, her destiny at best marriage into a court like her father’s. Seventeenth-century Ansbach was part of the Holy Roman Empire. This confederation of around three hundred more-or-less autonomous territories extended across modern-day Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and beyond; its Habsburg overlord was chosen by a handful of the Empire’s leading princes, whose role in the process earned them the title ‘elector’ along with covetable sinecures.9 Situated between Nuremberg to the north-east and Munich further south, Ansbach lies in present-day Bavaria; its outlook focused on its German neighbours. Since the fifteenth century its governing family had been kinsmen of the Hohenzollerns, rulers of the much larger north German territory of Brandenburg, in one eighteenth-century estimate ‘one of the most ancient and illustrious families in Europe’.10 As their title suggests, the margraves of Brandenburg-Ansbach had connections. They had money too, from silver mines in the Harz Mountains, close to the Brandenburg border. John Frederick matched imagination with initiative, promoting traditional local manufactures, including weaving and metal-smithing. But his power was finite, confined like his sphere of influence to an area smaller than an English county, and his family history was middling. Caroline would be the first of Ansbach’s princesses to marry a crown.

If Caroline remembered anything of her early childhood, a period entrusted to the care of nurses and waiting women, her memories of her mother would have been of Eleonore’s near-continuous pregnancies. In January 1685 she gave birth to a son, christened Frederick Augustus, who died three weeks later. Within a year, a second son, William Frederick, was born. Then darkness fell. Two months after William Frederick’s birth, John Frederick died of smallpox. He was thirty-one years old. His remains were interred in the margraves’ vault in nearby St Gumbertus church. Caroline grew up with no memories of the father who died when she was three years old.

Eleonore became a widow at the age of twenty-three; she had been married four years. Six months later her father died in a hunting accident. For the grieving mother of two the darkness of Hollar’s townscape became a reality. John Frederick was succeeded by the elder surviving son of his first marriage, ten-year-old Christian Albert, who felt little warmth for the stepmother who could almost have been his sister, or for the stepsister whom he regarded as a baby. His minority left no role for Eleonore. Instead Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg acted as guardian to Ansbach’s underage margrave. He also provided a temporary home in Berlin for Caroline and William Frederick, in company with his gangly daughter Louise Dorothea and, from 1688, an ungovernable son, Frederick William. Alone, Eleonore retreated the short distance to a dower house in Crailsheim, south-west of Ansbach, a small medieval town of no distinction. Forced upon her by the terms of her marriage settlement and Christian Albert’s indifference, her withdrawal was a species of defeat. The uncertainty that was to be the keynote of Caroline’s peripatetic childhood began early.

At Crailsheim, Eleonore struggled for money. Unhappy and distracted, in the intervals when mother and daughter were reunited she neglected Caroline’s education. Penury made her fretful, threatened to overwhelm her. ‘She is a princess of great virtue and piety,’ noted the English diplomatist George Stepney, discussing Eleonore’s Lutheranism: her circumstances demanded the full resources of her faith. Stepney described her as ‘one who passes for a bigot in that persuasion’.11 Exigency is a hard taskmaster. Driven by anxiety, Eleonore was rumoured to have overcome her Lutheran bigotry to the extent of considering conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Maximilian II, elector of Bavaria, whose capital at Munich ‘excel[led] and out-dazzled[d] [all] for her elegant cleanliness’.12 Since the elector was married already, albeit to the fragile Habsburg archduchess Maria Antonia, who shortly died, this rumour – if it has any basis in truth – indicates the pitch of desperation Eleonore had reached. Understandably, her thoughts during the Crailsheim years were of escape by any means.

Through precocity, boredom or curiosity, Caroline took matters into her own hands and set about teaching herself to write.13 For the rest of her life, her sprawling, forward-tilting handwriting with its bold loops and lopsided incontinence betrayed the struggle it had cost her. She wrote ‘like a cat’, her husband protested, and could never spell in any language: ‘Choresbury’ for Shrewsbury, ‘Hamthuncour’ for Hampton Court, ‘Lady Bomffrit’ for Lady Pomfret – even the name of her closest lady-in-waiting was variously rendered as ‘Clayton’, ‘Claiton’ and ‘Klethen’.14 Her punctuation was erratic or non-existent, an oversight in the cat-like torrents. From the inky tangle emerges a vigorous quality to her character as well as the sharpness of her intelligence. It would not be reasonable, a Church of England bishop would comment later, ‘to measure the extent of her Royal Highnesses abilities by the common standard’.15 If handwriting is a guide, Caroline was determined, quick-witted, vehement, expressive.

Happily for Caroline’s future choices, Eleonore did not change her religion. When it happened, the remarriage of the widowed margravine served only to jeopardise her family’s wellbeing.

In November 1691, five years after John Frederick’s death, Eleonore travelled to Berlin at the invitation of Frederick III. On the eve of her thirtieth birthday she retained her good looks – ‘[a] beautiful person, the admiration of all who saw her’;16 unmistakeably she bore the imprint of grief, money worries and separation from her children. ‘She is handsome, well shaped but too lean,’ Stepney recorded.17 Weight loss won few plaudits at the end of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Stepney’s admiration can be inferred from the poem written in French that, despite their differences of rank, he subsequently addressed to Eleonore, and his assiduity in undertaking errands on her behalf.18 Eleonore appears poised and strikingly attractive in a portrait of the early 1690s, sumptuously swathed in ermine and heavy silks, every inch the baroque consort. But the outline of her face is less rounded than in John Frederick’s marriage portrait; ditto the fullness of that lovely décolletage.

Frederick III’s purpose in summoning his widowed kinswoman was Eleonore’s remarriage. His motive was neither altruistic nor prompted by affection. Improved relations between the mutually mistrustful electorates of Brandenburg and Saxony had recently been sealed symbolically by the inauguration by their rulers of a shared chivalric order, the Order of Sincerity. Frederick intended to consolidate diplomatic amity with a marriage between Eleonore and his Saxon counterpart, Elector John George IV. Her friendship with Frederick and his wife Sophie Charlotte of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and distant relationship, through her father, to the Saxon electoral family, ideally positioned Eleonore for the role of bridal pawn. In practice it proved a marriage of emotional barrenness and unusual acrimony, and spectacularly failed to benefit any of its key players.

The man who became the nine-year-old Caroline’s stepfather, in a service conducted with unceremonious haste at Leipzig on 17 April 1692, following a formal exchange of treaties on 10 February, was ‘round shouldered, of a sullen look, which … does not belie his humour … [and] of a saturnine temper’. He spoke little, ‘offer[ed] no jest himself and [was] not pleased when others [did] it’; his killjoy obstinacy was marked.19 So, too, his variable health, though he was six years younger than the bride who, by April, had seen enough to disabuse her of every romantic illusion. George Stepney described him as incapacitated by the smallest debauchery, but unable to resist the heavy drinking endemic in German courts; his kidney problems were well known. ‘I look upon him as a man that will not be long-lived,’ Stepney noted. Had Eleonore but known of it, this last observation would have constituted her single slender thread of hope in the nightmarish years to come. In the meantime, in Leipzig, ahead of the couple’s formal entry into the city of Torgau, their marriage was ‘consummated with such an air of debauchery’ that courtiers muttered their misgivings. Having ‘bedded his bride in her own apartments’, the sated but loveless John George abandoned her rooms for his own, returning to complete his night’s rest alone at five o’clock in the morning.20

The emotions of Eleonore’s second husband could not have been more different from those of her first. John Frederick had delighted in his comely bride; John George’s affections were already engaged elsewhere and, in Stepney’s assessment, ‘his humour … quite contrary’.21 Stepney drew attention to the family’s poor record of marital fidelity, stretching back ‘two generations at least’.22 In John George’s case, he embarked on marriage under duress. Courtier and captious memoirist Baron von Pöllnitz described Eleonore in Saxony as ‘a Princess, whose excellent accomplishments gain’d a great veneration’.23 Not on the part of her new husband. John George’s intentions towards Eleonore extended no further than fulfilment of his conjugal duties. Stepney described her position unenviably as ‘not unlike Penelope or good queen Catherine [of Braganza] in the reign of Charles II’, a combination of abandonment and clutching after crumbs of affection.24

How much the elector was master of his limited faculties his contemporaries were willing to debate. There were those in Saxony – including members of his closest camarilla – who considered their master a victim of witchcraft.

The source of the rot was the mistress of John George’s father, Ursula von Neitschütz, the wife of a compliant army officer. Die Generalin, as the obliging colonel’s wife was known, possessed boundless rapacity and the valuable asset of a beautiful but unintelligent daughter, Magdalena Sibylla, called ‘Billa’. Deprived of princely handouts at her lover’s death in 1691, Ursula von Neitschütz conceived a plan to prolong the good times by promoting her daughter to the role she herself had previously occupied. The possibility that the late elector was Billa’s father, making her John George’s half-sister, did not apparently trouble her mother. ‘Stories of filters [philtres] and incantations’, shortly circulating in the Saxon court, suggested she had resorted to spells and magic potions to sway John George’s emotions.25 Given the latter’s lack of imagination, and other instances in German courts of a single family providing royal mistresses over several generations, the real explanation is possibly less sensational. Nevertheless, in October 1695 Die Generalin would find herself on trial for her life, accused of being a witch. That her jurors were drawn from the law faculty of the University of Leipzig indicates the seriousness of both charge and proceedings.26

Eleonore was fully apprised of her new husband’s entanglement before the marriage contracts were signed. Under pressure from Frederick III, realistic in her measure of the precariousness of her position, brought up to understand that royal women’s purpose lay in dynastic diplomacy and with an eye to her own and her children’s security, she hesitated to muster objections. For appearance’s sake, Billa had been temporarily removed from John George’s entourage. On 25 April 1692, when, as part of their formal entry to the electoral capital, John George and Eleonore travelled by gondola along the River Elbe, the night sky illuminated with fireworks marking out the letters of their linked monograms, Billa was included among guests at the elector’s table for the banquet that followed. Eleonore’s feelings are easily imagined. In Stepney’s eyes she was sufficiently sensible ‘to dissemble her grievance’.27 Characteristically, John George did not stoop to dissimulation. On Eleonore’s side, the marriage was an exercise in good behaviour from the outset. She paid a high price for financial stability and the outward lustre of the electress title. Her powerlessness – how well she knew it – was simply in the nature of things.

With Frederick III’s departure from Torgau on 29 April, and Caroline and William Frederick still in Berlin, Eleonore found herself, less than a fortnight into her marriage, as much alone as she had been at Crailsheim. At least the splendour of Dresden, called ‘the Florence on the Elbe’, and the magnificent royal palace – contemporary with the old palace in Ansbach – put paid to recent memories of poverty. Behind iron shutters beyond a single door in the elector’s apartments lay the Secret Repository, known as the Green Vault, built in the previous century by the elector Maurice as a treasure chamber. Its glittering collections – priceless trinkets of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, amber and precious stones – dazzled even Peter the Great, visiting six years later. Artefacts prized for the technical virtuosity of their craftsmanship inspired admiration for the electors’ connoisseurship; rarefied materials suggested the wonder of the natural world.28 In the short term Eleonore could derive some satisfaction from the discovery that she was pregnant. While John George flaunted his infatuation for Billa von Neitschütz to the extent of lobbying the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, to grant her an imperial title, appearances were seemingly maintained by such obvious evidence of married relations.

Eleonore’s pleasure proved short-lived. In August she miscarried. A second miscarriage followed in February 1693. In late October she was described as ‘far gone with child’, and prayers for her safe delivery were said in churches across Saxony.29 Perhaps indicative of her state of mind, it proved a phantom pregnancy – as sympathetic bystanders were quick to discern, a victory for her enemies.30 Laconically, Stepney commented, ‘it seems a little wind could not find passage, and all the while we have mistook a fart for an heir to the Electorate’.31

In despair, Eleonore took to her sickbed. That she nevertheless granted audiences to visiting diplomats suggests her determination not to be sidelined.32 Unlike the wife of John George’s successor, she did not resort to the thermal springs in the Saxon town of Teplitz to encourage conception; probably her heart was no longer in it.33 Meanwhile, in a letter signed on 20 February 1693 by the imperial vice chancellor, Leopold von Königsegg und Rothenfels, the emperor had bestowed on Billa the title Countess of Rochlitz.34 Four months later, on 20 June, at the midpoint of Eleonore’s phantom pregnancy, the new countess had succeeded where Eleonore was to fail, and gave birth to John George’s child. The bastard girl was baptised Wilhelmina Maria Frederica.

Secretly, John George offered his mistress a written pledge: surviving documents include the marriage contract he presented to her.35 Publicly he extolled the pragmatism of bigamy. Stepney quoted claims that, among German princes, bigamy was more widespread than ever before, and that John George ‘va épouser formellement la comtesse de Rochlitz’ (will formally marry the Countess of Rochlitz). Already the Saxons were referring to the ‘young’ electress (Billa) ‘in opposition to the Old’ (Eleonore).36 Late in 1693, Stepney recorded ‘a report that apartments for the countess are being prepared at the court’.37 For Eleonore these were alarming developments: with good reason she mistrusted her husband’s intentions. Bigamy or divorce aside – and political considerations meant that John George dare not attempt the latter – Eleonore understood that her death alone could make good his promise to the countess. In an argument between husband and wife over John George’s gift to Billa of the valuable Pillnitz estate, only the presence of bystanders prevented the elector from stabbing Eleonore with the sword he drew on her.38

How much of her mother’s anxiety Caroline knew about or understood at this point is unclear. Aspects of adult life remain concealed from the most precocious and observant child. Even after Caroline and William Frederick’s return from Berlin, the requirements and formalities of court life separated Eleonore from her children for much of the time. It is possible that Caroline overheard gossip about John George’s behaviour, and probable that she noticed her stepfather’s frequent absences from the palace; she understood the extent of John George’s lack of interest in herself and her brother, and was surely aware of a febrile quality in the atmosphere at court, and her mother’s growing nervousness. At intervals Eleonore appears to have retreated to the safety of a house in Bayreuth with her lady-in-waiting, Madame du Mornay. When it suited him, and contrary to her intentions, John George followed her there.39

That she feared for her life, genuinely concerned that the Neitschütz faction intended to poison her, is not something Eleonore is likely to have shared with her nine-year-old daughter. To others she branded Die Generalin ‘a person guilty of black practices’.40 In explaining her decision finally to abandon the royal palace in favour of the estate, remote from Dresden, at Pretzsch on the banks of the Elbe, that had been settled on her at the time of her marriage, she doubtless happed upon a useful fiction. To the English authorities, Stepney explained that she intended to ‘spend the rest of her life [there] rather than be continually exposed to hard usage’.41 He had previously expressed concern that, in her own best interests, Eleonore should withdraw from court to the country.42 Even if he was unaware of the full extent of the threats to her, he clearly considered that, in Dresden, no good could come to Eleonore.

Once, smallpox had deprived Eleonore of a doting husband. Now the disease struck again. ‘Die Favoritin’, Billa von Neitschütz, succumbed first. ‘For fear her face should suffer’, her mother dispensed with doctors (such as they were) and concocted remedies of her own. The result was ‘agonyes speechless’. As death approached, ‘locked jaws prevent[ed] [Billa] from taking the sacrament’.43 A grief-stricken John George ordered deep mourning for the entire court.44 Weeks later, on 27 April 1694, smallpox claimed John George’s life too, the price this headstrong and intemperate prince paid for nursing his mistress himself.45 In the medieval church of St Sophia, the corpse of die Favoritin was placed on public view, her face alarmingly discoloured. An eyewitness account survives from 30 April, more than two weeks after Billa’s death.46 So, too, a scurrilous epitaph on John George’s foolish mistress and her scheming and ambitious mother.47

In 1692, George Stepney, then agent to the Brandenburg court, had correctly forecast a short life for the elector John George IV. His appointment the following year to the post of commissary and deputy to the court of Saxony offered Stepney ample opportunity for further observation. In the aftermath of John George’s death, he wrote an elegy to Eleonore, Pour la mort de SAE de Saxe à SAE Madame l’Electrice Eleonore. In it, he described the elector’s passion for Billa von Neitschütz as ‘unworthy’, their love ‘un indigne amour’.48 Finally free from the toxicity of mingled terror and humiliation, Eleonore’s only response was relief. In the witchcraft trial of Ursula von Neitschütz the following year she played no part.

Eleonore had endured the death of her first son. Sincerely she had mourned her first husband. With no option but to leave the palace in Ansbach, yet insufficiently provided for, she had spent almost six years lonely, unhappy and all but penniless in provincial retirement in Crailsheim. Velvet-gloved but iron-fisted cajolery on the part of her ‘friends’ had compelled her to marry again, this time a boor and a drunkard with a pronounced streak of mental cruelty. Either her second husband, or associates of her husband’s mistress, had threatened to poison her. John George himself had drawn his sword on her.

In Saxony, she was more fortunate than in Ansbach in her husband’s successor. John George’s heir, his brother Frederick Augustus, afterwards known as ‘Augustus the Strong’ on account of feats that included rolling up silver plates with his bare hands, ‘revel[led] and dance[d]’ at news of his death, then gave himself up to ‘frolicks and debauches’.49 In John George’s beautiful widow and her children he took a passing interest, as he would continue to do, and Eleonore’s life regained a semblance of normality. Among her surviving papers, for example, is the letter of recommendation – the equivalent of a reference – that she wrote in the summer of 1694 for a former page at Crailsheim.50 George Stepney reported in August that he had twice visited Eleonore since her widowhood, and that she permitted him to call on her frequently. On both occasions she had told him ‘old stories and some particulars of the disorders of the late reign which I should never have learn’d from anybody else’.51 The following summer, in company with Caroline, she revisited Dresden on her way to spas near Koblenz, and had supper with Stepney’s colleague Philip Plantamour.52 Her journey proved unhappy: ‘her wagons [were] plundered by snap-hawks [freebooters]’ and she was robbed of valuable plate and goods.53

Whatever the anticipated benefits of Eleonore’s Koblenz trip, the damage, it seemed, had been done. In the interval since John Frederick’s death, her health had deteriorated irreparably. On 9 September 1696, two years after her second husband, Eleonore died. She was thirty-four years old. Her daughter Caroline, just thirteen, found herself an orphan.

A letter changed Caroline’s life. It took the form of an invitation, and offered her a home – her fifth so far – and the security of guardianship. Its author was the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III – to date, as the tone of his letter implicitly acknowledged, an equivocal player in the life of Caroline’s family. With some warmth, Frederick wrote to her in the autumn of 1696, ‘I will never fail as your guardian, to espouse your interests, and to care for you as a loving father, and pray your Highness to have in me the same confidence as your mother always had, which I shall properly endeavour to deserve.’54 Events would prove his sincerity. Caroline had made her home in Berlin before, at Frederick’s glittering court, in the unsettled months preceding Eleonore’s disastrous remarriage. Now, insofar as the young Caroline could ever feel she dare anticipate stability, the shadow of unsettlement temporarily dispersed. Only her parting from her brother William Frederick increased her sorrow. He had returned to Ansbach as heir presumptive, following Christian Albert’s death in 1692 and the accession as margrave of the latter’s unmarried younger brother George Frederick.

Yet it was not the well-intentioned Frederick but his wife, Sophia Charlotte, a Hanoverian princess known to her family as ‘Figuelotte’, who would provide the guardianship that had the greatest impact on an impressionable young girl only fifteen years her junior. The elector was self-important, a little pompous, excessively absorbed by minutiae of etiquette and ceremony, a zealot for elaborate dress despite a spinal deformity and gout; in his own words one who possessed ‘all the attributes of kingliness and in greater measure than other kings’, alternatively one who ‘[went] out of his way to find more and more occasions for ceremony’.55 By contrast the electress disdained ‘the grandeurs and crowns of which people make so much here’;56 she described herself as well acquainted with ‘the infinitely little’.57 While Frederick was at pains to surround himself with a court as rigidly formal as Versailles, his wife – motivated ‘by the ardour that she had for the knowledge of the truth’ – preferred music, reading and ‘the charm of … philosophical conversations’.58 Court life, Figuelotte saw, threatened the truest friendships, the strongest bonds of love, however impassioned Frederick’s professed opposition to ‘Cabals and private Intrigues … [and] intermeddling in other People’s Business’.59 It offered, as the philosopher Leibniz noted, ‘everything that might dissipate the intellect’.60 She was impatient of Frederick’s hankering after royal gloire. And, until 1697, she had a powerful enemy in his close adviser and former tutor, Eberhard von Danckelmann. Studiedly detached from court politics, she occupied herself with less contentious pursuits.

To Agostino Steffani, her father’s director of court music in Hanover, Figuelotte described music as ‘a loyal friend that never leaves one and never deceives one, it never betrays one and has never been cruel. On the contrary all the charm and delight of heaven is there.’61 Within months of Caroline’s arrival, Figuelotte had enticed to Berlin as court composer the Italian organist and former composer to the Duke of Mantua, Attilio Ariosti. From 1702 she employed the composer Giovanni Bononcini. Both would later feature in the operatic life of London after Caroline’s marriage. Among Figuelotte’s costliest purchases was a harpsichord, commissioned from the court instrument-maker Michael Mietke, sumptuously decorated with panels simulating white Chinese lacquer; she also commissioned a folding harpsichord to take with her on journeys. Frederick meanwhile devoted his energies to worldly aggrandisement. In 1701, in exchange for military support for Habsburg ambitions in Spain, he won the emperor’s acquiescence in his elevation from Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia to ‘King in Prussia’. The previous year, in anticipation, he had given orders for a new suite of crown jewels. Like other mythomanes, at his coronation at Königsberg on 18 January, he placed the crown on his own head.

The interests of husband and wife were at variance. On closer observation the young Caroline recognised the astuteness of Figuelotte’s management of her pernickety and egotistical husband and the extent of Frederick’s admiration for his unconventional electress, a feeling unfettered by the acrid presence of his ambitious mistress, Katharina von Wartenburg. Over time Caroline understood that Figuelotte’s absorption in music and philosophy offered more than respite from the labyrinthine formalities of Brandenburg court etiquette and the falsity of ambitious courtiers. It was an antidote to worldliness and self-interest. It also represented one aspect of the role of consort, the soft power of cultural patronage, a division of royal influence typical of German courts in this period.

The scale of Figuelotte’s sway over the teenage Caroline was quickly apparent. In physical and verbal mannerisms, Caroline became her guardian’s mirror, Galatea to the electress’s inadvertent Pygmalion. Figuelotte was intelligent, uncompromising and beautiful. She was irreverent – a woman who took snuff in the middle of her coronation; and she was unconventional, accompanying the court orchestra in concert performances on her harpsichord. ‘She has big, gentle eyes, wonderfully thick black hair, eyebrows looking as if they had been drawn, a well-proportioned nose, incarnadine lips, very good teeth, and a lively complexion,’ runs one account.62 She also inclined to heaviness, the reason her mother had forbidden her to wear velvet prior to her marriage. A sequence of undistinguished portraits by the court painter Friedrich Wilhelm Weidemann indicates florid good looks and lugubrious stateliness. Caroline’s admiration, albeit she continued to mourn Eleonore, was wholehearted. Unreservedly she acclaimed her guardian’s wife as ‘incomparable’.63 But Figuelotte could not be fully satisfied with the decorative or reproductive roles typically assigned to royal spouses. The silliness of courtiers had killed her first two sons: a crown crammed on to the head of the elder at his christening, a gun salute fired too near the cradle of the second. After the birth of her third son, Frederick William, Figuelotte appeared unconcerned to provide her husband with additional heirs. By the time of Caroline’s arrival in Berlin, without any outward suggestion of a breach, husband and wife lived parallel lives. Figuelotte doted on Frederick William, an unappealing child given to violent tantrums, hair-pulling and kicking valets; she was ripe to form new attachments.

The palace of Lietzenburg, or Lützenburg, in open country less than five miles from the centre of Berlin, provided the setting for her independence. Building work had begun in 1695, to a workaday baroque design by architect Johann Arnold Nering. Four years later its first phase was complete, including Figuelotte’s own suite of rooms, hung with damask beneath ceilings of gilded plasterwork. Following her coronation as queen, she commissioned from court architect Eosander von Göthe a second, grander apartment aping the latest developments in French decoration. She added a sumptuously theatrical chapel and a glittering Porcelain Cabinet decorated with mirror glass and thousands of pieces of Chinese porcelain arranged on gilded brackets. Formal gardens were also French in taste, the work of Siméon Godeau, a pupil of Louis XIV’s garden designer André Le Nôtre: clipped box hedges, pristine lawns with gilded statues and, in emulation of her father’s summer palace, a man-made pond bobbing with real Venetian gondolas – ‘a paradise only without apples’.64 At Lützenburg, Caroline watched unfold a vision that was at the same time personal and political. Figuelotte’s palace expressed her own rarefied connoisseurship; it impressed visitors with a vision of Prussian wealth, refinement and cosmopolitanism. For Caroline it encapsulated all that was most remarkable and delightful in her guardian.

In this rural escape, a private domain of her own making, Figuelotte surrounded herself with a youthful court. Here etiquette gave way to spirited misrule, like the lively amateur theatricals in which Caroline played her part alongside courtiers and visiting royals, and the birthday festivities for Frederick in 1699, when the electoral couple and their guests leaped over tables and benches.65 Contradicting the statement of her cousin Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans, that ‘it is not at all suitable for people of great quality to be very learned’, at Lützenburg Figuelotte pursued interests that were explicitly cerebral.66 From across Europe she welcomed men of intellect, regardless of the orthodoxy of their views; even visiting diplomats were subjected to ‘metaphysical discourses’.67 ‘She loves to see Strangers,’ wrote the English rationalist philosopher John Toland, who counted himself among their number, ‘and to inform herself of all that’s worthy or remarkable in their several Countries.’68 A letter from the summer of 1698 draws attention to evidence of Figuelotte’s anglophilia, too – Caroline’s first introduction to pro-British views.69

Chief among Figuelotte’s ‘Strangers’ was polymath philosopher, mathematician and historian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the inventor of the forerunner of modern computing, infinitesimal calculus. Her father’s librarian and court adviser since 1676, engaged in writing the history of Hanover’s ruling family, the Guelphs, and a trusted confidant to her mother, Leibniz became Figuelotte’s correspondent late in 1697. Their letters were mostly philosophical in bent, and on 1 September 1699 Figuelotte declared herself Leibniz’s disciple and avowed admirer, ‘one of those who esteems you and respects your merit’.70 For his part, Leibniz wooed her with treacle. ‘The charms of an admirable princess have in all matters more power than the strictest orders of the greatest prince in the world,’ he oozed.71 He sent her a fossilised mammoth tooth unearthed near Brunswick; his accompanying commentary attempted to whet her appetite for science. Then, in 1702, in response to Figuelotte’s questioning, he wrote a short essay, ‘On What is Independent of Sense and Matter’.72 In time a self-appointed unofficial go-between for the courts of Hanover and Berlin, journeying whenever possible to Lützenburg in his coffee-coloured carriage painted with roses, Leibniz took his place at the centre of Figuelotte’s coterie of rationalists, free-thinkers and metaphysicians. With familiarity his admiration deepened. ‘There may never have been a queen so accomplished and so philosophical at the same time,’ he wrote to Queen Anne’s favourite, Abigail Masham.73 A painted fan of the 1680s depicting a French scientific salon, with men and women engaged in eager dispute over globes, telescopes, maps and books, points to the existence of other like-minded patronesses across the Continent. None eclipsed Figuelotte’s sincerity.74 At her side, winningly eager to share all her interests, Leibniz also encountered Caroline.

Contemporaries characterised Figuelotte as interested in ‘the why of the why’, omnivorous in her curiosity. She had inherited from her mother Sophia, from 1698 dowager electress of Hanover, a taste for disputatiousness, and her philosophical deliberations were conducted in person and by letter. Unsurprisingly she amassed an extensive music library. With Frederick she increased the collections 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 match for Caroline, in a letter written in 1698 to Figuelotte’s cousin Benedicta, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The proposed alliance concerned Duchess Benedicta’s nephew, Archduke Charles of Austria, the thirteen-year-old second son of the Holy Roman Emperor.84

Despite the incendiary quality of such a rumour, Caroline herself remained unaware of the scheme for five years. Her eventual enlightenment had a cloak-and-dagger quality. In the autumn of 1703 she received a breathless letter. By way of introduction, its clergyman-author claimed former acquaintance with her mother. The letter instructed Caroline to travel with all speed to Eleonore’s younger sister, Fredericka Elisabeth, Duchess of Saxe-Weissenfels, in Duchess Fredericka’s tinpot capital. ‘Immediately after receiving this letter, go without the very slightest delay to the Duchess at Weissenfels, because of extremely important matters concerning your Serene Highness’s greatest happiness, about which the Duchess will inform your Serene Highness.’85 In 1703, in the life of an unmarried princess, a single eventuality merited the description ‘greatest happiness’: an offer of marriage. The letter was directed from Vienna. A second letter, arriving at the same time, informed her that waiting at Weissenfels would be a ‘distinguished gentleman’ anxious to meet her.

Caroline’s reaction to these clandestine strategies included a measure of astonishment. Whether she chose to confide in Figuelotte or her brother William Frederick, who had recently succeeded his second stepbrother as margrave in Ansbach, is unclear. So is the extent, if any, to which Vienna’s imperial court had communicated its intentions to Frederick as Caroline’s guardian. That Caroline reached her own conclusion about events afoot appears inevitable. The Austrian emperor, Leopold I, had two sons, of whom the elder, Joseph, King of Hungary, was married already. On 24 February 1699 he had married Duchess Benedicta’s daughter, Amalia Wilhelmine.

In Weissenfels, as if to emphasise to Caroline the honour of an imperial visit, Fredericka Elisabeth’s spendthrift husband provided for the young Archduke Charles a ‘generous and magnificent reception’ costing ‘tons of gold’. In September 1703, in accordance with an agreement brokered in 1699 by Louis XIV and England’s William III as a contingency plan following the death of Spain’s feeble-minded and childless Carlos II, Charles had been proclaimed King of Spain.86 Although the War of the Spanish Succession would deny him his Spanish pretensions, his behaviour in the meantime indicated in full measure consciousness of his eminence. A later observer commended Charles’s ‘art of seeming well pleased with everything without so much as smiling once all the while’.87 Leibniz labelled him ‘an amiable prince’, but he can scarcely have been an easy guest.88 It says much for the charms of the twenty-year-old Caroline that Charles’s aide-de-camp was able to assure her by letter that, after five hours in her company, their ‘most happy and delightful meeting had filled [the Archduke] with the liveliest admiration’.89 On 1 October, anticipating Caroline’s return from her brother’s court at Ansbach, Figuelotte described recent improvements in her looks as likely to attract a suitor.90

In the language of the time, this sort of lively admiration amounted to a decided expression of interest, albeit not a formal proposal. By a circuitous route, Charles set off from Weissenfels to claim his crown in Spain. His aide-de-camp informed Caroline of his progress and the golden opinions he won along the way, including at Queen Anne’s court at Windsor and in Lisbon, where, in honour of a new alliance, the Portuguese king, Pedro II, outdid himself in the splendour of his ceremonial welcome; Anne commissioned his portrait from Godfrey Kneller.91 For six months, these long-distance tweets proved Caroline’s only update on the ‘extremely important matters concerning [her] greatest happiness’. The question was out of Charles’s hands. In Vienna, the thoughts of the imperial court centred less on Charles’s admiration and Caroline’s charms of mind and body than on the issue of the princess’s religion.

Once, it was rumoured, Eleonore had considered conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Maximilian II of Bavaria. Now, for an infinitely greater marriage prize, Caroline’s change of faith would become the sine qua non. Insistence on such a condition cannot have come as a surprise to any of the key players in this unromantic drama. Nor did any doubt Caroline’s acceptance of this inevitable and overriding preliminary.

She had inherited from Eleonore, Stepney’s ‘princess of great virtue and piety’, a sturdy Lutheranism remote from Habsburg Catholicism. By 1703, time had tempered her unhappy mother’s influence. In exchanging the dower house at Pretzsch for the palaces of Berlin and Lützenburg, Caroline found herself in an environment in which religious faith, alongside philosophy and metaphysics, formed one strand of a continuous dialogue about the nature and governance of the universe. Sophia of Hanover, one clergyman claimed, ‘multiplied’ questions, one leading to another: no single answer satisfied her, and she failed to convince herself of any conclusion.92 This habit of intellectual restlessness her daughter Figuelotte shared. While religion for Eleonore had been a narrow matter of faith, Sophia’s approach was discursive and, above all, pragmatic. She had delayed Figuelotte’s confirmation until after her sixteenth birthday, in order to widen her marriage prospects to embrace Catholic as well as Protestant suitors. As an adult, Figuelotte disclaimed any attachment to dogma. Debate at Lützenburg centred on what she described as her ‘curiosity about the origin of things’, her desire ‘to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness’:93 a continuous creedless disquisition about ethics, free choice, love and the soul, through which Figuelotte set out to emphasise reason over superstition and relished verbal or epistolary skirmishes for their own sake. But no one forgot that the setting for these skirmishes was the palace bestowed on Figuelotte by an indulgent husband. Hers were the freedoms of a married woman.

From Weissenfels, Caroline had returned to Berlin. She could not avoid informing Frederick as well as Figuelotte of what had taken place. From now on Vienna would communicate with Frederick directly, albeit intermittently. Ever alert to worldly advantage, Frederick described the meeting between Caroline and the archduke as ‘God’s providence’.94 Nevertheless, the wheels of Habsburg statecraft revolved slowly. To her brother, the Elector Palatine, the emperor’s wife entrusted supervision of the process by which Caroline’s eligibility for marriage could be accomplished. Without Caroline’s conversion there could be no formal proposal. Six months after her single meeting with Archduke Charles, the Elector Palatine requested that Caroline return to Weissenfels. His purpose was to apprise for himself this future imperial bride and compile a report for the empress.

To Caroline, a portionless princess, the imperial court offered no incentive bar the incontrovertible lure of a Habsburg prince. Distant were the glory days of the Empire, when Austria had defended Christian Europe against the Turkish infidel; but still an aureole of greatness clung to the imperial family. Austria’s sons represented the greatest prize in the marriage market of the German-speaking world. After she had endured a six-month virtual silence, Caroline’s reaction was moderate to the point of obstinacy. She resented the requirement to return to Weissenfels, and retraced her steps with an ill grace. Having done so, she lingered at her aunt’s court for almost two months, awaiting the absent elector, before ignoring Frederick’s protests and journeying back to Lützenburg late in August. Tardily the Elector Palatine recognised the mettle of the young woman with whom he was dealing. His departure from Vienna was days too late. Instead he sent after Caroline his Jesuit confessor, Father Ferdinand Orban, with the request that she ‘[be] completely persuaded that what he will lay before your noble incomparable self … is the pure, undefiled, genuine, holy truth’.95

Until now Caroline’s exposure to Catholicism had been scant. In 1685 the Great Elector had passed the Edict of Potsdam, offering protection in Brandenburg to French Protestants in the aftermath of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Since 1701, and the religious conversion of her improvident third son Maximilian, Sophia of Hanover had nurtured a vitriolic hatred of Jesuits, which she certainly communicated to Figuelotte. The Lutheran orphan Caroline found herself living with Calvinist guardians in a state that was tangibly and proudly Protestant. ‘I feel assured that your Highness … will … accord [Father Orban] a patient hearing and then your fullest approval,’ the Elector Palatine wrote to her.96 It was an optimistic statement and one that, despite its measure of coercion, acknowledged likely obstacles.97

As summer turned to autumn, Frederick found himself on the horns of a dilemma. From an alliance with the imperial family he anticipated considerable boon; as his protests in the early 1690s against the proposed creation of a Catholic tenth electorate for ‘a prince of the house of Austria’ indicate, his was a Protestant outlook.98 That he anticipated the probability of Caroline’s resistance to apostasy, even in the face of arguments of powerful material persuasion, points both to aspects of Caroline’s character and the strength of her religious convictions. Frederick did not resort to sophism. There is a cynical truthfulness in his appeal to her that includes, as she understood, a reminder of what she owed to him and his guardianship. ‘For your part you may be able to exercise a moderating influence,’ he told her, ‘not to mention the advantages therefrom that might accrue to our royal and princely house. I do not very well see how your Highness can decline such an offer, since it is to be hoped that you will be so firmly established in your religion that no one need feel anxious about your soul.’99

For an instant, Caroline was persuaded. She yielded. To the Elector Palatine, who had sent her Father Orban, she wrote that she had perceived the errors of her Lutheranism.100 To the authorities in Vienna, the Austrian resident in Berlin reported that she ‘had already changed and was resolved to marry the King of Spain’.101 And Caroline agreed to a second proposed meeting with the Elector Palatine, this time in Düsseldorf.

The optimism of princess and imperial diplomat was ill-founded. Caroline’s meeting with the Elector Palatine never happened. Her confession of the errors of her faith masked considerable unease. Her discussions with Father Orban, attended by Leibniz, consisted of arguments ‘at length’ over an open Bible. Point-scoring oscillated between priest and princess, but the contest was unequal and the strain unsettled Caroline. ‘Of course, the Jesuit, who has studied more, argues her down, and then the Princess weeps,’ the electress Sophia explained to a niece.102 Afterwards Caroline told Leibniz, ‘I really think his persuasions contributed materially to the uncertainty I felt.’103 The result of their discourse was anything but the ‘fullest approval’ for which the Elector Palatine had hoped. Orban’s smooth coaxing made Caroline miserable, and reinforced all of her objections. Nevertheless, in the midst of her turmoil, mistaking the way the wind was blowing, on 25 October Leibniz claimed ‘everyone predicts the Spanish crown for her’.104

Those more finely attuned to Caroline’s state of mind saw that the matter remained unresolved. In the same week, during a visit to Figuelotte at Lützenburg, Sophia noted Caroline’s vacillation: ‘Our beautiful Princess of Ansbach has not yet resolved to change her religion.’105 A fortnight later, she added, ‘Sometimes the dear princess says “Yes,” and sometimes she says “No”; sometimes she believes we [Protestants] have no priests, sometimes that Catholics are idolatrous and accursed; sometimes she says our religion may be the better. What the result will be … I still do not know.’106 Unnecessarily, Sophia explained that, as long as Caroline remained firm, ‘the marriage will not take place’.107 On 1 November Figuelotte noted that Caroline was ‘still uncertain which course she will take’.108

In the circumstances, the doggedness of Caroline’s indecision is remarkable. Prior to her ‘adoption’ by Frederick and Figuelotte, her prospects had been limited, as she understood, and as the insignificance of her stepsister Dorothea Frederica’s match proved. In Brandenburg she had received an education and promotion beyond aspirations that she could have nurtured either at Pretzsch or, like Dorothea Frederica, fatherless in Ansbach. The result was an offer of marital jackpot, the hand of Prince Charming for this provincial Cinderella. ‘Neither shall I dwell upon her high birth and station any longer than to observe, that she seems to be the only person ignorant of that superiority. She has never been heard to give the most remote hint of it,’ a satirist wrote of Caroline, with vituperative irony, in 1737.109 Whatever the truth of Caroline’s self-importance at the end of her life, in the autumn of 1704 she could have been under no illusions that it was the archduke, not she, who conferred the favour in any proposed connection between them. Up to a point religious scruples and a wish to retain spiritual autonomy weighed as heavily as worldlier ambitions. Even if she was aware of contemporary views of Vienna as a region ‘where mirth and the muses are quite forgott [sic]’, she cannot have been anything but torn, this child of high-ranking penury alert to the frustrations of a princess’s life without position or means.110

She found herself surprisingly alone. She knew Frederick’s mind; less clear were Figuelotte’s thoughts, at first apparently concealed from her. In June, Figuelotte had explained to the Hanoverian diplomat Hans Caspar von Bothmer her belief that Caroline’s likelihood of marrying Charles depended on an improvement in Charles’s fortunes in Spain. In September she confided to him in secret her conviction that the marriage was imminent, and stoically she resolved to enjoy Caroline’s company while she could.111 She consoled herself that princess and archduke shared a love of music: ‘The Princess of Ansbach sings well. She acquits herself wonderfully [as a singer] and this will be very convenient, as the King of Spain is a skilled accompanist on the harpsichord.’112 Possibly the older woman cherished hopes of marrying Caroline to her own son Frederick William. If so, she kept her own counsel.

Sophia’s attitude was less ambiguous. She had already convinced herself of the suitability of her daughter’s ward for her grandson, George Augustus, and had discussed this conviction with Figuelotte.113 This being so, Caroline too may have been aware of the direction of Sophia’s thoughts. In this case, she possessed solid grounds for refusing Charles, since she could assume the likelihood of another proposal, namely George Augustus’s. Sophia, however, hardly dared to hope. ‘If I had my way, she would not be worried like this, and our court would be happy,’ she wrote on 27 October, ‘but it seems that it is not God’s will that I should be happy with her; we at Hanover shall hardly find anyone better.’114 Meanwhile, in Ansbach, William Frederick’s minister von Voit encouraged Caroline to accept Vienna’s offer. Powerful tugs in opposing directions did little to mitigate her difficult decision.

Her willingness to convert, communicated to the Elector Palatine in good faith, unravelled over the course of the autumn. Anticipating opposition, in November Caroline announced to her guardians her inability to change her faith. To her surprise, Frederick commended her right-thinking in avoiding becoming the first Catholic princess in his family; Figuelotte encouraged her resolve, which Leibniz was instructed to convey in writing to Vienna.115 For the Austrians, there could be no such comfortable reflections as Frederick’s. On 4 November, Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby, reported to Robert Harley in London the concerns of the imperial resident in Berlin about Caroline’s new determination to remain Protestant.116 A week later, Raby confirmed that Vienna’s anxiety had given way to anger.117

Harried, bruised, a victim of nervous exhaustion but at last convinced of the conclusion she had reached, at the end of November Caroline withdrew to her brother’s court at Ansbach to recover and temporarily escape observation.118 Letters from Father Orban, the Elector Palatine and leading Habsburg courtiers followed her; each one bolstered her certainty. By contrast, Leibniz informed her that an admiring Duke Anton Ulrich of neighbouring Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel intended to include her in a romantic novel. A member of the Fructiferous Order of German literary enthusiasts as well as a reigning princeling, the ageing duke wrote poetry, oratorios and melodramatic novels of extraordinary length. As good as his word, he included passages inspired by Caroline’s recent history in his doorstopper, Octavia, a Roman Story.

A year after their only meeting, Caroline stated her belief ‘that the king of Spain no longer troubles himself about me’.119 From Protestant Hanover, Sophia wrote to Leibniz, ‘Most people here applaud the Princess of Ansbach’s decision.’120 In a letter to Bothmer, her response was delighted, her language high-falutin. ‘I left Lützenburg last Monday,’ she wrote, ‘after witnessing a great fight in the spirit of the beautiful princess. God’s love finally got the upper hand and she has scorned worldly grandeur and a prince she valued highly, in order to do nothing against her conscience, which might cause her what she describes as eternal anxiety.’121 For reasons of her own, Sophia exaggerated. She may have been swayed by a letter in praise of Caroline’s principles which she received in November from her eldest son, the elector George Louis.122

Caroline’s own feelings, although she described herself in December as ‘perfectly recovered’, lacked euphoria.123 To Leibniz, she was studiedly emollient. ‘[I] am glad to think that I still retain your friendship and your remembrance,’ she wrote. Her references to Figuelotte and Sophia were appropriately respectful.124 In truth she need not have worried about either. As long ago as November 1703 Figuelotte had described her as one who ‘understands with good reason her own quality’.125 Sophia too had taken the measure of that quality. She considered Caroline ‘a beautiful princess of great merit’.126

Caroline was not in love with Figuelotte’s son Frederick William. At seventeen that furious firebrand, whose upbringing she had partly shared, remained recognisably the young boy given to kicking and hair-tugging and bullying servants. In the estimation of his daughter Wilhelmina, Frederick William’s temper as an adult was ‘lively and hot’; he was ‘suspicious, jealous and frequently guilty of dissimulation’; ‘his governor had sedulously inspired him with contempt for the female sex’.127 In spirit, and despite Figuelotte’s doting, Frederick William was not the child of Lützenburg. Determinedly unlovable, he does not emerge from the sources as the grounds for Caroline declining the suit of Archduke Charles – either to gratify Figuelotte’s hopes, of which she was presumably aware, or, as British diplomatic correspondence in the spring of 1705 suggests, Frederick William’s own wish to marry Caroline and a similar hope on the part of her brother in Ansbach.128 Nor is there reliable evidence that Caroline had already directed her thoughts towards the man she subsequently married, Sophia’s grandson George Augustus, Hanoverian elector-in-waiting, or that Frederick offered her guidance in his role as guardian, despite his tendency to ‘[take] upon himself to such an extent to command her to do this, that and the other’.129 Instead Frederick occupied himself elsewhere. Denied one august connection by Caroline’s intractability, he set about planning another, a marriage between Frederick William and a sister of the King of Sweden. It was not to be, but in February 1705 diplomats reported that Frederick was sufficiently engaged with his plotting to be fully restored to good humour.130 It proved of short duration.

Vienna’s second choice fell on a princess renowned for her beauty, Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the granddaughter of the same Duke Anton Ulrich who, in cumbersome prose, fictionalised the heroism of Caroline’s sacrifice. Like Caroline the sixteen-year-old boasted a profusion of blonde hair, pale skin and what contemporaries regarded as perfectly formed arms and hands; she was ‘God-fearing and graceful to all’.131 Again the Archduke Charles was all admiration: theirs would be a genuinely loving marriage. Even in middle age, reduced by quack fertility remedies to an obese alcoholic scarcely able to shuffle unaided from chair to chair, her pale skin flushed an ugly red, her lovely arms pendulous with fat, Elisabeth-Christine would remain in Charles’s eyes his ‘weisse Liesl’ (‘white Lizzy’).

Her suit was vigorously promoted by Duke Anton Ulrich. Praise for Caroline’s resolution notwithstanding, the ambitious duke made no concessions to his granddaughter’s religious sensibilities. Like Caroline, Elisabeth-Christine had been brought up Lutheran. Like Caroline, she felt no inclination to convert to Catholicism. Ultimately she attributed her change of religion to family pressure: ‘I feel obliged to follow the divine direction and worthy opinion of my highly honoured grandfather graciously in all things.’132 Leibniz reassured her that salvation took no account of liturgical differences: neither Protestants nor Catholics could claim a monopoly, and in changing her faith she in no wise jeopardised her eternal prospects.

First her family set about her apostasy. Afterwards the empress, her future mother-in-law, played her part. Like Caroline in her early dealings with the Elector Palatine, Elisabeth-Christine appears to have done her best to satisfy expectations. She accompanied the empress on a pilgrimage to the statue of the Virgin Mary at Mariazell in 1706; a year later she was deemed ready for conversion. Her scruples had survived almost three years, and, as in Caroline’s case, the outcome during that period was at intervals sufficiently in doubt to form a subject of conjecture across the Continent. The marriage of archduke and princess was finally solemnised in 1708, a decade after first rumours of Caroline’s candidacy. In London, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Tenison received a letter informing him of Elisabeth-Christine’s conversion and subsequent marriage as late as July of that year.133 Three years later, following the death of Charles’s elder brother Joseph I, the Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, zealous in her new faith, found herself Holy Roman Empress. In the short term she was also ‘the most Beautifull Queen upon Earth’, with the added satisfaction, since 1710, of the late-in-life conversion of her ‘highly honoured grandfather’, Anton Ulrich.134

The former accolade might have belonged to Caroline. It was not an omission she regretted; indeed she would exploit it skilfully. Over time her refusal to exchange Protestantism for Catholicism – described after her death as ‘an early proof of her steady adherence to the Protestant cause’ – became a key aspect of Caroline’s identity and achievement.135 Four days after the coronation of her father-in-law as George I of Great Britain, on 24 October 1714, Joseph Acres reminded his parishioners in the church of St Mary in Whitechapel, ‘What a rare thing for a young Lady that has been bred up in the Softness of a Court, to decline the Pomp and Glory of the World.’136 Caroline’s upbringing had contained little of ‘softness’, and ‘the pomp and glory’ she rejected in 1704 was not the imperial crown that the Archduke Charles, as a younger son, did not then expect to inherit. Undoubtedly her decision contained its measure of religious unease. Her reservations were perhaps no more acute than those first experienced by Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. But while the latter succumbed to family pressure, Caroline, lacking parents or grandparents – and perhaps aware of likely overtures from a different quarter – resisted. As a later British encomium had it, she ‘chose rather to wait with a safe Conscience, in the Exercise of the true Protestant Faith, for any remote Rewards of her Merit and Vertue, than to accept the Imperial Dignity, when it must be connected with a false and idolatrous Worship’.137

‘He is very impertinent to suppose that I, who refus’d to be Empress for the Sake of the Protestant Religion, don’t understand it fully,’ Caroline later remarked when a well-meaning Bishop of London offered to ‘satisfy her in any Doubts or Scruples she might have in regard to our Religion, or to explain Anything to her which she did not comprehend’.138 Her lady-in-waiting described her on the occasion as ‘a little nettled’.

For the remainder of her life Caroline took pride in her renunciation, her determination to ‘slight th’Imperial Diadem’.139 To Leibniz, as late as November 1715, she wrote, ‘You know that I am not at all a Jesuit,’ a reminder of her hard-fought sacrifice.140 The vehemence of her feelings indicates the trouble it had cost her – and a certain shrewdness in her estimate of the value of her resistance that transcended Duke Anton Ulrich’s elaborate fictions.

II

Electoral Princess

‘The affections of the heart’

Caroline was wooed by a prince in disguise and in a hurry, Figuelotte’s nephew George Augustus, Electoral Prince of Hanover.

His departure for Ansbach – at midnight, under cloak of darkness – suggests romance, even derring-do. He was short in stature, vain, with pale bulbous eyes, fine hair of an indeterminate colour and a peppery self-importance – or, in Toland’s characteristically rosier assessment, of ‘a winning countenance, speaks gracefully, for his Years a great Master of History, a generous disposition and virtuous inclinations’.1 Unlike his intended bride he was fascinated by ghosts and werewolves, his religious outlook ‘without scruples, zeal or inquiry’.2

It was the first week of June 1705. George Augustus travelled in the garb of a Hanoverian nobleman and called himself ‘von dem Bussche’. His former tutor, Baron Philipp Adam von Eltz, a Hanoverian privy councillor, accompanied him under the alias ‘Steding’. With a single manservant, they directed their tracks southwards to Ansbach. There they presented themselves at the margrave’s court as travellers en route for Nuremburg. Only the elector George Louis knew their true destination and purpose. Afraid of the reaction of Frederick in Berlin, he insisted that both remain secret.

The prince was twenty-one, eight months younger than Caroline. From his grandmother, the dowager electress Sophia, and his aunt Figuelotte he had heard her charms itemised and magnified. For the better part of a decade his father had pursued fruitless negotiations with Charles XII of Sweden. His initial purpose had been to win for George Augustus the hand of the king’s stubborn, musical younger sister, Ulrike Eleonore. Following a switch of tactic in 1702, he had targeted Charles’s elder sister, Hedwig Sophie, recently widowed. In December Figuelotte wrote that the marriage was settled.3 She was mistaken. In both cases George Louis’s tenacity went unrewarded, and in February 1705 he had begun to look elsewhere for his son’s bride, with no apparent regret on George Augustus’s part.

Caroline’s blonde voluptuousness was quite to contemporary German tastes. Her natural good looks made a pretty contrast to the ‘rosy cheeks, snowy Foreheads and bosoms, jet Eyebrows, … scarlet lips … [and] Coal black Hair’ that, with crude cosmetic help, were universal among the ‘beauties’ of George Louis’s court.4 Her connection to Prussia’s newly royal Hohenzollerns had its value too. During the spring of 1705 the English envoy in Berlin repeatedly reported a rumour that Frederick’s family intended to reclaim their ward for themselves: the prince royal, Frederick William, wanted her for his wife.5 In Hanover the electoral family reacted with stealth and belated alacrity. ‘There is in this court a real desire of marrying the prince very soon,’ wrote Sir Edmund Poley.6 Thwarted by the secrecy of George Augustus’s midnight flit – ‘a mystery of which I know nothing’ – Poley correctly hazarded the amorous purpose of his journey. The prince’s attentions, he offered, would be directed at one of three likely candidates: princesses of Hesse-Cassel and Saxe-Zeitz, and ‘the Princess of Ansbach’.7

While Poley puzzled, George Louis’s plans progressed apace. Confident in his disguise, the mysterious von dem Bussche enjoyed a conversation alone with Caroline at her brother’s summer palace at Triesdorf. To what extent he hoodwinked Caroline, with her ‘ready and quick Apprehension, [and] lively and strong Imagination’, not to mention her familiarity with both his aunt and his grandmother, remains uncertain.8 To his father, George Augustus reported the result as love at first sight: ‘he would not think of anybody else’.9 It was an outcome shaped less decisively by Caroline’s ‘uncommon turn for conversation, assisted by a natural vivacity, and very peculiar talents for mirth and humour’ than her considerable physical attractions, described by one historian as ‘a bosom of exemplary magnitude … encased in the fairest and pinkest of skins’.10 As he wrote to Caroline herself, ‘I found that all I had heard about your charms did not nearly equal what I saw.’11 Job done, he returned with von Eltz post haste to Hanover.

There, discussions with George Louis lasted two hours and left the dour and fractious elector in uncommonly good humour. All that remained was for von Eltz to retrace his steps to Ansbach and, following to the letter George Louis’s careful instructions, prosecute the prince’s suit first with Caroline and afterwards with her brother. A single injunction dominated von Eltz’s orders: that he ‘guard in every way against the Princess having any kind of communication with the Court of Berlin until such time as this project of marriage is so far established as to prevent any possibility of its being upset’.12 Fixed in his purpose, the elector did not intend his Prussian brother-in-law to thwart him.

Darkness, disguises and the utmost discretion were no shield against the compulsive gossip of courtiers and diplomats. As George Louis had predicted, speculation reached its most intense in Berlin, Caroline’s home until the previous winter. From there, Lord Raby wrote to George Stepney on 5 July, ‘Some are uneasy at this Court at the late journey incognito of the prince Electoral of Hanover.’ Again, Raby reported, many cited the Princess of Hesse-Cassel as George Augustus’s object. Her brother had married Frederick’s daughter Louise Dorothea, and ‘they can’t help being jealous of so audacious an allegiance for the House of Luenburg [sic]’. Others came closer to the mark. They ‘say that the prince was at Ansbach to see that princess who refused last year to Change her Religion to have the King of Spain Charles the 3rd’.13 Already, her resistance to apostasy defined Caroline. For good measure Raby enclosed a description of Figuelotte’s funeral. Catching up from behind, belatedly Poley described Caroline as the ‘most agreeable Princess in Germany’.14

What neither Raby nor Berlin’s gossipmongers realised was that, two weeks before Raby’s letter, both Caroline and her brother William Frederick had accepted a highly secret formal proposal of marriage on the part of George Augustus. Vienna, too, remained misguidedly optimistic. On 24 June, more than six months after Leibniz composed Caroline’s written refusal, an imperial emissary requested a meeting of members of the courts of Vienna and Ansbach ‘to make a final representation on behalf of the King of Spain’. To add ballast to his request, he wrote on the joint instructions of the Elector Palatine and the emperor.15

By the end of July the marriage contract had been signed. By early September, Wilhelmine Karoline, acclaimed in the formal documentation as ‘Princess of Brandenburg in Prussia, of Magdeburg, Stettin and Pomerania, of Casuben and Wenden, Duchess of Crossen in Silesia, Electress of Nuremburg, Princess of Halberstadt, Minden and Cannin and Countess of Hohenzollern’, had exchanged Ansbach for Hanover, and the uncertainty of spinsterhood for marriage to the Electoral Prince of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Generous within his means, her brother bestowed on her a dowry equivalent to around £4,000 and a trousseau that included ‘a splendid outfit of jewels’, items of silver and, inevitably, clothes; her later claim of having come to George Augustus ‘naked’ was a conventional enough exaggeration.16 George Louis assigned to Caroline the castle of Herzberg as her dower house in the event of George Augustus’s death, and a guarantee of 14,000 thalers for her widowhood.17

Neither Frederick in Berlin nor Sophia in Hanover had been aware of the first parries of this lightning matchmaking. Predictably, their reactions were at odds. Confirmation of the forthcoming marriage was general knowledge by late July; Frederick’s ‘dissatisfaction’ and ‘ill humour’, directed at the court of Ansbach as well as that of Hanover, persisted throughout August and beyond.18 With arch disingenuousness and in words that mimicked his own, Sophia told Poley, ‘the Princess of Ansbach hath always been talked of at this court as the most agreeable Princess in Germany’. Less truthfully, given George Louis’s behind-the-scenes role as puppet-master and her own contribution in focusing attention on Caroline in the first place – as early as November 1704 she reported conversations with George Augustus, and ‘in talking with him about her [Caroline], he said, “I am very glad that you desire her for me”’ – she added that ‘the Elector had left the Prince entirely to his own choice’.19 In the long term such fine points of equivocation proved of no importance. It suited George Augustus’s preening nature to believe that ultimate credit for his ‘discovery’ was his own. At least Sophia did not dissemble her pleasure. Without sparing Frederick’s irritation, she told him, ‘I have never made a secret of loving the Princess from the moment I set eyes on her, or of desiring her for one of my grandsons.’20 Letters from Liselotte at Versailles confirmed Caroline’s exemplary reputation and ignored Frederick’s wounded amour propre: ‘A great many people here have seen the Princess of Ansbach, and they are full of praise. I hope the marriage will be a happy one … It is very lucky when such a marriage gives everyone pleasure: it is not often the case.’21

Frederick’s fulminating was a risk George Louis was prepared to take. For Frederick, who had lived in close proximity to Caroline for almost a decade, the princess previously singled out by the emperor’s younger son and forged in Figuelotte’s image promised advantages to his newly royal dynasty as well as to Brandenburg-Prussia at large. In Hanover, however, the electoral family had more specific and more pressing reasons for courting Caroline.

In 1701, at an age when many of her contemporaries were dead, the dowager electress Sophia had experienced an upturn in her fortunes. With uncharacteristic but deliberate extravagance, she had welcomed to Hanover an English embassy led by the Earl of Macclesfield in mid-August that year. Its purpose was to present her with a copy of recent legislation passed by Parliament in Westminster and, on William III’s behalf, to invest George Louis with England’s highest order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter.

This was more than ordinary diplomatic flummery. In the Act of Settlement of June 1701, Hanover’s electoral family were named as heirs to the thrones of England and Scotland in the event of the death without issue of the current heir, Princess Anne, younger daughter of the deposed James II. First in line was Sophia herself. After her, in the Act’s key wording, came ‘the heirs of her body, being Protestants’: George Louis, then George Augustus.

This was not unexpected. William III had applied pressure to Parliament to pass a similar resolution as early as 1689. England’s Dutch king was well disposed towards Sophia. His friendship with the ‘good old duke’, her brother-in-law George William of Celle, was warm and of long standing, and he had been impressed by George Augustus after meeting him at George William’s court in October 1698. For all that, the Act’s implications were momentous. Hanover in 1701 was a region of limited international profile and territorially insignificant, mostly confined between the North Sea and the Harz Mountains and bounded by the Elbe and Weser rivers. It had been granted electorate status only within the last decade. Months earlier, it had been outflanked by the promotion of neighbouring Brandenburg, now effectively the Kingdom of Prussia, a piece of political leapfrogging decried by Sophia as ‘the fashion for Electors to become Kings’.22 In return for Protestantism, however, the Act of Settlement offered Hanover’s ruling family promotion to sovereigns of one of Europe’s oldest kingdoms, shortly to be formally ‘united’ by the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. That the bride of George Augustus, now fourth in line to the British throne, should already have proven so convincingly her Protestant mettle ‘and in all her words and actions … declared herself to be on the most reasonable conviction, a sincere Christian, a zealous Protestant’ was an obvious recommendation in the aftermath of this seismic adjustment.23

The significance of Caroline’s stand was increased by the nature of Sophia’s claim. Like England’s current heir Anne, Sophia was a granddaughter of James VI and I. She was the twelfth of the thirteen children of James’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, by her marriage Electress Palatinate and, briefly, Queen of Bohemia. Anne’s happy marriage to Prince George of Denmark had resulted in seventeen pregnancies but only a single child who survived infancy, William, Duke of Gloucester. He in turn died on 30 July 1700, aged just eleven, of acute bacterial infection exacerbated by pneumonia and water on the brain.24

But his death did not make Sophia Anne’s closest heir. The second marriage of Anne’s father had produced a son, James Edward Stuart, who as a result of James’s religious conversion in the 1670s was a Catholic. In 1688, Catholicism had accounted for James’s own loss of his throne. Apparently in accordance with the will of the people, certainly in accordance with the will of sections of parliamentary opinion, James was replaced that year as England’s sovereign by his elder daughter from his first marriage, Mary, and Mary’s husband, the Dutch prince William of Orange, both of them Protestants, Mary devoutly so. Parliament’s Bill of Rights, passed the following year, sought to legitimise this dynastic shuffle, the so-called Glorious Revolution. The Bill formally excluded Catholics from the succession in perpetuity, and damned government by any ‘papist prince’ as ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom’. It was by this means that James Edward Stuart, brought up in exile on the generosity of Louis XIV of France, was stripped of his right to the throne. By the same means, more than fifty cousins and family members who were more closely related to Anne than Sophia, but who were Catholics or married to Catholics, including descendants of Sophia’s elder brothers and of Charles I’s daughter Henrietta, also forfeited their claims. Sophia’s ‘legitimacy’ as England’s heir stemmed from the rejection by Members of Parliament of the principle of hereditary succession. It was grounded in religious intolerance.

Her understanding of the contentious nature of her candidacy and its potential for divisiveness prompted Sophia’s commission of a commemorative medal, the ‘Mathilde medal’, ahead of Macclesfield’s embassy. Its two sides bore a profile of Sophia herself and, in a markedly similar portrait on the reverse, an English princess called Mathilde, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1156 Mathilde had married George Louis’s most warrior-like forebear, Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. More than Sophia’s Protestantism, the Mathilde medal celebrated former glories and the Hanoverians’ specifically ‘English’ descent. It was among Sophia’s gifts to the suite that accompanied Lord Macclesfield in the summer of 1701. The earl himself received a gold basin and ewer that had cost his hostess half her annual income, while to William III Sophia wrote tactfully, ‘we await [the] event without impatience here, and pray with all our hearts “God save the King”’.25 Periodically she took care to deny any personal desire to occupy England’s throne, a politic deceit on the part of this ambitious princess who, despite her age, was not above opportunism. Piously she wrote to Archbishop Tenison, ‘I live in quiet and contentment, and have no reason for desiring a change.’26

Little wonder, then, that her thoughts should have turned to Caroline as a wife for George Augustus. Whatever sleight of hand was employed to convince this strutting, eager prince that the selection of Caroline for his future consort was his own, his grandmother as well as his father had reached the same conclusion ahead of him. Caroline’s desirability in George Augustus’s eyes was almost certainly sharpened by the interest she excited in Charles of Austria and his own younger cousin Frederick William. He also anticipated increased standing and greater autonomy at his father’s court as a result of his marriage. For Sophia and George Louis, other princes’ partiality mattered not a jot. Caroline’s commitment to Protestantism was a powerful weapon in the dynasty’s British aspirations, and an essential counterweight to family crisis.

In 1658, Sophia’s own marriage contract had included a clause permitting her, in Lutheran Hanover, to continue to practise the Calvinism of her upbringing. This concession was made at her father’s request rather than her own, and she did not value it highly. Later she had shown pragmatism – calculation too – in the matter of Figuelotte’s faith, placing her daughter’s marriageability above doctrinal allegiance. With Leibniz as her sounding block, she had since entertained herself with philosophical rather than specifically religious discourse, and read a number of key texts, including Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy.27 She was aware of Leibniz’s attempts in the early 1690s to win support for a reunion of Catholic and Protestant Churches in the electorate and, equally, was not opposed to the initiative.28 And she approved her husband’s acquiescence in a plan for building a Catholic church in Hanover, as a means of wooing the good opinion of the emperor.29

This easy-going position inevitably changed following the Act of Settlement. There were other factors too that contributed to a religious stance on Sophia’s part that appeared (although in fact it may not have been) increasingly hardline. The conversion to Catholicism of her son Maximilian in 1701 explained aspects of the permanent rupture in their relationship; until his death at the battle of Munderkingen in 1703 she was troubled by the possibility of her fifth son, Christian, following in Maximilian’s footsteps. Happily George Louis’s plodding Lutheranism permitted no grounds for concern. Caroline had demonstrated that she was likewise sound in her allegiances. Recent events appeared to indicate that she would buttress George Augustus’s faith, an essential prerequisite since the 1701 Act. For, if George Augustus failed to provide the dynasty with Protestant heirs, the family’s claims to the English crown evaporated. With Maximilian a Catholic and Sophia’s youngest son, Ernest Augustus, almost certainly homosexual, the long-term position of the electoral family was scarcely less precarious than that of the Stuarts they meant to displace.

Meanwhile, the year after Macclesfield’s official presentation, the English envoy extraordinary in Hanover, James Cresset, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting the loan of communion plate, ‘a dozen or two’ prayerbooks and a Bible. He meant to set up a chapel in his house in Hanover and make it available to leading dignitaries. He explained his aim to Tenison as a means of ‘inspir[ing] in the Court esteem for the Established Church’.30 The archbishop, however, although he referred to himself disparagingly as ‘an uncourtlie, but well intention’d, old man’,31 was already in regular communication with Hanover’s court, via Sophia, and would take his own measures to convince the new heiress of the importance of religious conformity. Sophia responded in kind. On 16 August 1701 she had written to Tenison to express thanks for his support, and that of his fellow bishops in the House of Lords, for the Act of Settlement.32 In letters to Tenison written in French, she labelled herself with statesmanlike nicety ‘votre tres affectionée amie’. Whatever Cresset’s misgivings, Sophia understood clearly that Protestant orthodoxy was paramount among her claims on England. It was a conviction she was assiduous in broadcasting, and one she did her best to impress upon her family. Evidence like Giuseppe Pignata’s dedication to George Louis, in June 1704, of his anti-Catholic Adventures with the Inquisition suggests she succeeded.33

The lapse of almost a year between Caroline’s rejection of Charles’s suit and her marriage to George Augustus was attributable to several causes, including George Louis’s reluctance to antagonise the emperor. Equally important was the death, on 1 February 1705, of Figuelotte.

Figuelotte was thirty-seven. She died of pneumonia on the journey from Berlin to Hanover, and her sudden loss inspired near-universal regret. For five days and nights a grief-stricken George Louis immured himself in his rooms, refusing to eat, kicking the walls in his misery, talking to and seeing no one; ‘by hitting his Toes against the Wainscot … he had worn out his Shoes till his Toes came out two Inches at the Foot’.34 Rumour – lurid but unsubstantiated – suggested an alternative cause of Figuelotte’s death: that she had ‘been poisoned, before she left Berlin, with Diamond Powder, for when [her body] was opened her Stomach was so worn, that you could thrust your Fingers through at any Place’.35

Frederick devoted five months to planning funeral obsequies of surpassing magnificence, as Figuelotte had known he would. More touchingly, he renamed Lützenburg ‘Charlottenburg’ in her memory. To Leibniz, writing from Ansbach, Caroline confided devastation on a scale with George Louis’s: ‘The terrible blow has plunged me into a grievous affliction, and nothing can console me save the hope of following her soon.’ Her recovery from the strain of recent ordeals suffered a setback, and she was once again ill. Her letter betrays the extent to which Figuelotte had come to occupy a mother’s place in her emotions. ‘Heaven, jealous of our happiness, is come to carry away our adorable queen.’36 If the rhetoric is conventional, the sentiments were sharply felt. In her illness, Caroline did not attend Figuelotte’s funeral. Nor, in the short term, did she see or communicate with Sophia. But in her response to von Eltz’s proposal on George Augustus’s behalf in June, the baron reported to George Louis, she ‘admit[ted] that she would infinitely prefer an alliance with your Electoral House to any other; and she considered it particular good fortune to be able to form fresh and congenial ties to compensate for the loss she had suffered by the death of the high-souled Queen of Prussia’.37

To the prospective father-in-law whom she had never met these were honeyed words. Equally accommodating was her willingness to fall in with George Louis’s requirement that Frederick remain in the dark, a circumstance that reveals something of Caroline’s own anxiety that the match come off. Not for the last time in their lives, Caroline’s measured diplomacy contrasted with the impulsiveness of her husband-to-be. George Augustus wrote to her on the eve of her departure for Hanover, ‘I desire nothing so much as to throw myself at my Princess’s feet and promise her eternal devotion,’ and there is puppyishness even in the copybook posturing. ‘You alone, Madam, can make me happy; but I shall not be entirely convinced of my happiness until I have the satisfaction of testifying to the excess of my fondness and love for you.’38 Undoubtedly Caroline reached her own estimate of this ‘fondness and love’ that was based on a single meeting. But with memories of her mother’s treatment at the hands of the elector John George still painful, she could only be reassured by such effusive auguries. Like Eleonore’s second marriage, Caroline’s marriage to George Augustus represented a step up the ladder; her response to von Eltz’s proposal indicates her assessment of the prize at stake. At twenty-two, ambitious and clear-sighted but with a genuine attachment to the electoral family based on her affection for Figuelotte and Sophia, she was still young enough to hope for love too.

Like Hollar’s etching of Ansbach, the view of Hanover by an unknown draftsman published by printmaker Christoph Riegel in 1689 depicts a Gothic town compact within its walls and dominated by church spires.39 At intervals along the city boundaries, fortified towers bristle above undulations of the Leine river. The only building identified in the key that is not a church is the Fürstlich haus, the home of Hanover’s ruling family called the Leineschloss. From its extensive but otherwise unremarkable façade long views unroll across the water. Behind it, hugger-mugger along busy streets cluster the tall houses of townsfolk, their steep roofs red-tiled and gabled, modest in their dimensions since Hanover’s nobles lived elsewhere, in castles and country manor houses. From Versailles Liselotte remembered the market square as overrun with street urchins and, at Christmas, its box trees decorated with candles.40

A windmill in the foreground denotes the proximity of farmland: British diplomat George Tilson described it as ‘flat Country … very full of fir and Corn; mostly rye’.41 It is grazed by sheep for the lucrative wool trade or set aside for hops. Out of sight, nearby forests are plentifully stocked with game. Within tranquil surrounds lies this small, unassuming town of no more than ten thousand inhabitants, ‘neither large nor handsome’ in the estimate of the well-travelled Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and lacking magnificence, rich only in ‘miserable’ taverns.42 The main gates were closed every night.

Despite its middling size, smaller and so much less impressive than the Dresden and Berlin of her childhood, the town that greeted Caroline at the end of her ten-day journey from Ansbach, undertaken in the company of her brother, offered intimations of a grandeur absent from many provincial capitals. Sophia’s late husband Ernest Augustus, the eldest of four brothers, had ultimately succeeded to the bulk of the brothers’ joint inheritance, united under his rule as the Duchy of Hanover. Ambition had prompted his campaign for electoral status, which was granted in 1692, six years before his death. Like his Brandenburg son-in-law Frederick, he had exploited cultural initiatives to support his political aspirations, to the benefit of his old-world capital. In addition to the masquerades, gondola festivals, illuminations and Venetian-style annual carnival that raised the court of Hanover above many of its neighbours for style and splendour, these included a theatre in which French comic actors performed nightly, and an opera house within the Leineschloss hung with cloth of gold and crimson velvet and capable of seating 1,300 spectators. Lady Mary rated the latter as ‘much finer than that of Vienna’.43 Its completion at breakneck speed within a single year stemmed from competitiveness with the neighbouring court of Wolfenbüttel, which had embarked on a similar endeavour at the same time.44 Ernest Augustus sealed his victory with an inaugural performance of Steffani’s opera Enrico Leone, a celebration of the dynasty’s superhero, Henry the Lion. Three years later the Leineschloss opera house staged ‘the finest operas and comedys that were ever seen … [including] the opera of Orlando Furioso’.45 Ernest Augustus also oversaw the embellishment of a palace begun by his father in 1665: Herrenhausen.

For Caroline, as for Sophia before her, Herrenhausen would become the glory of Hanover. Two miles outside the city walls, it occupied three sides of a large courtyard, a sprawling two-storey expanse designed in its first phase by Venetian architect Lorenzo Bedoghi and completed by his countryman Hieronymo Sartorio ten years later. Where Lützenburg aimed to delight and to showcase the refinements of its savant princess, the purpose of Herrenhausen was magnificence. Its stables accommodated six hundred horses. An outdoor theatre, overseen for Ernest Augustus by Steffani, suggested an Italian opera house. Here in 1702 George Louis and Figuelotte took part in a dramatic performance based on Petronius’s account of Trimalchio’s banquet in the Satyricon, written for the occasion by Leibniz. As at the Leineschloss the palace exterior was unassuming. Within, Gobelins tapestries, damask-lined walls and coffered ceilings painted and gilded conjured the heavyweight majesty of divinely ordained princely rule.

Beyond lay the gardens. South of the palace was the Great Garden, bordered by poker-straight avenues of trees, and on three sides by an artificial canal on which gondolas floated under the watchful eye of a Venetian gondolier, Pierre Madonetto. Largely Sophia’s creation, it was laid out from 1683 in conscious emulation of the baroque formal gardens she remembered from her childhood in the Dutch Republic. In 120 acres, melons grew under Murano glass cloches, a mulberry plantation fed silkworms, pomegranate and fig trees, date palms, apricot and peach trees defied a changeable climate, and hothouses warmed by tiled stoves nurtured the orange, lemon and pineapple trees which so astonished Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visiting in the chill of December in 1717.

At the garden’s heart lay the Great Parterre, created by court gardener Henry Perronet to designs by Sartorio. It featured swirling arabesques of low box hedging, gravel paths and classically inspired statues by Dutch sculptor Pieter van Empthusen carved from white Deister sandstone from nearby Barsinghausen. Imported from Paris were twenty-three busts of Roman emperors. There was a grotto and a cascade, a maze, hedges and screens of hornbeam and, in time, an allée of more than 1,300 lime trees. A wooden temple, filled with doves, occupied the centre of a labyrinth. Additional designs devised by Sophia’s gardener Martin Charbonnier, a Huguenot exile, extended the parterre’s doily-like geometry. Like Siméon Godeau, whom Figuelotte had employed at Lützenburg, Charbonnier was a pupil of the great Le Nôtre. However powerful Sophia’s attachment to the gardens of The Hague, the influence of Versailles was all-pervasive. Fountains animated circular pools – Leibniz had advised on the necessary hydraulic mechanisms. Afterwards George Louis consulted English architect and politician William Benson to create ever more spectacular jets and falls, ‘great and noble’ waterworks of the sort commended during his visit of 1701 by John Toland. The result was a fountain thirty-six metres high whose installation cost George Louis the enormous sum of £40,000.

In her widowhood Sophia occupied one wing of the palace. Daily she made a lengthy circuit of the gardens she described as her life, ‘perfectly tiring all those of her Court who attend[ed] in that exercise’, a promenade of two or three hours which one English visitor considered the sole ‘gaiety and diversion of the court’.46 Herrenhausen was not, as her niece Liselotte assumed, Sophia’s dower house. In 1699 she had made over to George Louis the income willed to her by Ernest Augustus for its upkeep, and the palace continued to serve as the court’s summer residence from May to October.47 In the year of Caroline’s marriage, George Louis embarked on an extensive refurbishment. Under Sophia’s influence furniture, tapestries and objets d’art were commissioned from the Dutch Republic. For the large building in the garden called the Galerie, a little-known Venetian painter, Tommaso Giusti, created a fresco cycle depicting the story of Aeneas, that epic tale of filial piety and the foundation of an empire.48

In Dresden and Berlin, Caroline had learned to recognise visual culture as a conduit for 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, was born a year after their wedding. At the outset, irrespective of bridal aversion, youthful sexual excitement contributed its precarious bond.

Even taking into account George Louis’s repeated absences during the first years of his marriage, on campaign with the imperial army fighting the Turks, the interval between Sophia Dorothea’s two pregnancies – in 1683 and 1688 – tells its own tale of marital harmony unravelling. In 1689, the year after she gave birth to a daughter named after her, Sophia Dorothea met the man who three years later became her lover, Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck. Their relationship tracked a familiar course: acquaintances, correspondents, bedfellows. The pretty electress’s infatuation was stoked by boredom, a comprehensive rejection of every aspect of her married life from Hanoverian court etiquette to behaviour on George Louis’s part that encompassed neglect, overt hostility and even acts of frightening physical violence, described in some accounts as close to attempted strangling. Above all she was jealous.

Infidelity was a prerogative of princes. Sophia tolerated Countess von Platen, Figuelotte mostly overlooked Madame von Wartenburg; Ernest Augustus indicated to his daughter-in-law that she must make similar concessions. In 1690, George Louis had acquired the mistress to whom he would remain faithful for life, tall, thin, plain Melusine von der Schulenburg, whom his mother disparaged as a ‘malkin’, a picturesque noun applied equally to scarecrows and slatterns.65 Within three years Madame Schulenburg had two daughters, referred to as her nieces, and, like the elector John George IV in his affair with Billa von Neitschütz, George Louis all but lived with her. Sophia Dorothea’s retaliation had a tit-for-tat quality, but husband and wife inhabited a world in which men and women were not judged as equals, and women’s faithlessness, with its danger of pregnancy and illegitimacy, threatened the integrity of royal succession. ‘Does the young duchess not know that a woman’s honour consists of having commerce with no one but her husband, and that for a man it is not shameful to have mistresses but shameful indeed to be a cuckold?’ Liselotte asked rhetorically.66

A predictably tight-lipped nineteenth-century verdict casts Königsmarck as a ‘handsome, wicked, worthless reprobate’; his sister judged him ‘an equal mixture of Mars and Adonis’.67 To Sophia Dorothea, the raffish Swedish mercenary provided an exhilarating contrast to George Louis, with his brusque neglect, eruptions of physical violence and, when it suited him, perfunctory love-making. In suggestive French, in letters written in code in invisible ink, Königsmarck wooed his princess. He called her his ‘divine beauty’, he signed his name in blood. He courted her lady-in-waiting, Eleonore von dem Knesebeck, who acted as go-between for the lovers, concealing Sophia Dorothea’s replies to his letters in hats and gloves and stitching his own letters into curtain linings safely out of sight. He also cultivated the good opinions of Sophia and Ernest Augustus. In 1692 Stepney reported Königsmarck directing ‘splendid ballets … all in maskeradings’ in the Leineschloss opera house.68

‘Maskeradings’ on the electoral stage were an apt metaphor. Princess and count progressed from artless dalliance to desperate longing, fuelled in part by their shared talent for self-dramatisation. In their letters and dizzy assignations they slipped between the worlds of fairy tale and melodrama, their emotions heroic in intensity, in daring, in urgency. Königsmarck labelled himself ‘a poor butterfly burnt by the flame’; he confided to Sophia Dorothea a terrifying but prophetic dream in which his actions were punished by execution; he was exaggeratedly jealous of George Louis’s continuing conjugal rights and begged God to kill him if Sophia Dorothea failed him.69 Neither lover accepted responsibility for behaviour they knew to be perilous. But Sophia Dorothea’s posturing included a measure of genuine unhappiness.

That she crossed the Rubicon from flirtation to infatuation was plainly ill-advised. That she disdained discretion or concealment was still more injudicious. Sophia and Figuelotte were among those who counselled against the dangers of transgression. Determined to divorce George Louis and marry Königsmarck, she ignored their warnings. Unaware of the impossibility of her financial position, she fixated on the idea of elopement. ‘Let us love one another all our lives and find comfort in one another for all the unhappiness brought on us,’ she pleaded.70

Four years after their first exchange of letters, desperate measures brought to an end the romance of Sophia Dorothea and her dashing Swede. On the eve of his departure for Dresden to take up a position as major general in the Saxon army, Königsmarck was murdered en route to his mistress’s apartments in the Leineschloss. Orders for his killing probably originated with Ernest Augustus or, on his behalf, Countess von Platen. A particularly gruesome version of events has a vengeful and incensed countess grinding his face beneath her high-heeled shoe. George Louis was absent on a visit to Figuelotte in Berlin.71 The deed itself, on 1 July 1694, was the work of a quartet of Hanoverian loyalists, including von Eltz and an architect called Nicolò Montalbano, who shortly received from Ernest Augustus an enormous one-off payment of 150,000 thalers.72 Königsmarck was stabbed over and again. His body was concealed in a weighted sack and thrown into the Leine river, where it settled into muddy wastes alongside general debris and the drowned carcasses of cattle. Sophia Dorothea knew nothing of this squalid butchery. With mounting apprehension, she continued to await her lover.

In her ignorance she was not alone. The best the ever-vigilant George Stepney could manage was to describe the circumstances of Königsmarck’s disappearance as ‘doubtfull’ and, with a degree of accuracy, point to the probability of ‘daggers and poyson’ in Hanover.73 But the nature of the count’s infraction was widely understood: ‘I believe his amours made that court too hot for him,’ Stepney wrote during one of Königsmarck’s regular absences the month before Montalbano’s blow.74

Sophia Dorothea retreated to Celle and her parents; she refused to return to George Louis. Anxious about the effect of such a scandal on Hanover’s standing in the Empire, Ernest Augustus took refuge in cod legalities. In a punitive divorce settlement finalised in December, Sophia Dorothea alone was accounted culpable. Cresset reported that ‘the sentence was pronounc’d upon malicious desertion’.75 The Englishman considered the elector guilty of sharp practice: ‘Hannover has made a pretty good hande of this match. She brought ’em in land of purchas’d estate 50,000 crowns, besides jewels which they are now takeing from her and she is pack’d off with about £800 a year in bad rents.’76

Sophia Dorothea was banished to the castle of Ahlden, a timbered and moated manor house in Celle, more than thirty miles from the town of Hanover. She spent the remainder of her life as a prisoner there, writing ‘most patheticall letters’ to her mother, who visited sporadically, but denied any contact with her children or the possibility of marrying again.77 To preserve an illusion that the newly styled ‘Duchess of Ahlden’ had retired voluntarily after forsaking her marriage, she was provided with an annual income of eight thousand thalers and a roster of servants appropriate to her rank as former electress: ladies-in-waiting, two pages and gentlemen-in-waiting, two valets, a butler, three cooks, a confectioner, a head groom, a coachman, fourteen footmen, twelve maids and a garrison of forty infantry- and cavalrymen to ensure her confinement.78 A handful of visitors were closely supervised.

George Louis embraced tranquil domesticity with Madame Schulenburg and a princely establishment that, in one contemporary estimate, eventually ran to more than 1,100 servants and retainers.79 The ravages of smallpox, which left Melusine pockmarked and virtually bald, in no way diminished George Louis’s affection. She wore a red wig and a thick varnish of make-up, and gave birth to the couple’s third and last daughter, Margarete Gertrud, known as ‘Trudchen’, 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 in Caroline’s character. From the outset her fidelity to George Augustus was more than sexual or emotional. She kept faith with something in herself too.

In April 1708, once more bound for war against the French, the Duke of Marlborough, commander in chief of Queen Anne’s forces, described his reception at the court of Hanover.92 Present at the audience granted him were Sophia – who considered Marlborough ‘as skilled as a courtier as he is a brave general’, ‘his manners … as obliging and polished as his actions are glorious and admirable’ – George Louis and George Augustus.93

As electoral princess, the Hanoverian equivalent of Princess of Wales, Caroline played a visual role in court ceremonial: her primary function was dynastic, a provider of heirs and progeny. That she was not present at Marlborough’s audience indicates the perimeters of her sphere of activity. For Caroline, the decade before Queen Anne’s death and the family’s move to London was overwhelmingly domestic in character. George Louis vigorously excluded George Augustus from politics. By continuing to oversee court entertainments, Sophia as effectively barred Caroline from key aspects of a consort’s role.94 With the exception of Sophia herself and Caroline’s favourite of Sophia’s ladies-in-waiting, intelligent, beautiful Johanna Sophia, Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe, afterwards Countess of Bückeburg, whose husband, like George Louis, preferred the company of his mistress, Caroline mostly lacked rewarding female friendship. She had little in common with rapacious and dreary Melusine von der Schulenburg; she knew enough of courts to maintain friendly relations with her father-in-law’s favourite and her ‘nieces’. Although Leibniz had been urged in 1705 to ‘cultivate her good qualities assiduously, for there you have a spirit naturally beautiful, and an intellect completely disposed to reason’, the philosopher’s frequent absences from Hanover meant Caroline also lacked intellectual stimulus.95 The period was not without its strains.

Her husband and her sister-in-law were her closest contemporaries. Neither had benefited from the irregularities of their childhood. George Augustus was splenetic, irritable and prickly in his self-esteem. In his grandmother’s eyes he lacked good sense.96 His aunt Liselotte attributed his bad temper to Duchess Eléonore’s inferior bloodlines; he was niggardly, boastful and, at moments of strain, intemperate.97 Toland excused his restlessness as ‘great vivacity’ of a sort that did not ‘let him be ignorant of anything’.98 An indifferent portrait by Kneller, painted in 1716, captures something of his Cock Robin self-regard.99 George Louis preferred his daughter. Superficial but spirited, Sophia Dorothea the younger shared her mother’s want of serious-mindedness. ‘All the pride and haughtiness of the House of Hanover are concentrated in her person,’ her own daughter wrote in the early 1740s, when Sophia Dorothea was in her fifties. She insisted her mother was ‘benevolent, generous and kind’, but also claimed ‘her ambition is unbounded; she is excessively jealous, of a suspicious and vindictive temper, and never forgives those by whom she fancies she has been offended’.100

If even part of this assessment was true in 1705, Caroline can hardly have found proximity easy. She was closer in temperament to the dowager electress, whose interests resembled Figuelotte’s, but the two women initially saw little of one another. George Augustus’s early attentiveness to Caroline was marked. ‘The peace of my life depends upon … the conviction of your continued affection for me,’ he would write to her. ‘I shall endeavour to attract it by all imaginable passion and love, and I shall never omit any way of showing you that no one could be more wholly yours.’101 He did not conceal his preference for her company above that of the court, and he and Caroline spent as much time as possible together. As late as May 1712, an English agent reported, ‘the Court is all gone to Herrenhausen for the whole summer, only the Prince electoral and his wife the princess remain here’.102 Such uxoriousness – influenced in part by the aimlessness of George Augustus’s life, which George Louis ensured lacked official responsibility – inspired mixed reactions, including in Caroline herself. Liselotte dismissed her nephew’s cosy behaviour as inappropriately unprincely, another malign legacy of non-royal Duchess Eléonore.103 Within weeks of their marriage Sophia wrote to Baron von Schütz, ‘I have never seen a lovelier friendship than that between the Prince Electoral and his wife. It appears as if they were made for one another, which causes us great joy.’104 But, despite earnest protestations of devotion, the prince struggled to suppress argumentative instincts.

Whenever possible, Caroline sought out fleeting opportunities for time alone with Sophia at Herrenhausen. Their shared interests were wide-ranging and included philosophy, music and politics. During these first months of adjustment, disjointed encounters placed even this relationship under strain. Sophia’s letters to Liselotte make clear her frustration and disappointment: Caroline’s presence failed to staunch the older woman’s grief for Figuelotte, and the new electoral princess was cast firmly on her own resources. She oscillated between gratitude for George Augustus’s attachment and the need to cultivate, or indeed placate, others of her new family. Reading and singing offered her an outlet of sorts. Like Sophia she took lengthy walks in the palace gardens. In 1711, Handel wrote a set of twelve chamber duets for Caroline, described by his first biographer in 1760 as ‘a species of composition of which the Princess and court were particularly fond’.105 That Caroline hazarded the challenging soprano part is testament to the success of the singing lessons begun in her childhood at Ansbach by Antonio Pistocchi.106

A phantom pregnancy during the first year of her marriage, reported by Sophia as early as November, indicates Caroline’s anxiety to provide the necessary heir.107 At twenty-two she could anticipate more than a decade of childbearing; it was George Augustus’s determination to play his part in the long-running War of the Spanish Succession that contributed a note of urgency. Supported by his privy council, George Louis had consistently thwarted his son’s military aspirations. To date the latter’s nearest approach to the theatre of war was a journey to the Dutch palace of Het Loo, undertaken in the autumn of 1701 with his grandfather, the Duke of Celle, as part of William III’s efforts to create a coalition against Louis XIV. Following his marriage, George Augustus again requested permission to join the fight against the French. ‘The court is against it and will not give their consent to let him go into the field until he has children,’ noted a British envoy.108 Repeated prohibitions failed to depress his ardour. Instead his resentment of his father mounted, adding a further note of asperity to a fissured relationship, with inevitable implications for Caroline.

On 31 January 1707, despite gainsayers who attributed her increasing girth to distemper or even wind, and ‘the court having for some time past almost despaired of the Princess Electoral’s being brought to bed’, Caroline succeeded in her primary task.109 Early in the evening, with the windows shuttered against the cold and the doors barred to court flunkeys, she gave birth to a delicate-looking baby boy, Frederick Louis. Unusually – and ill-advisedly, given speculation that Caroline’s pregnancy was once again imaginary – only a midwife and the court surgeon, de la Rose, were present at the birth in the Leineschloss. Responsibility for this break with tradition lay with George Augustus, whose concern was for Caroline’s comfort. His actions irritated the British envoy Emmanuel Scrope Howe and, in the absence of the usual crowd of official witnesses, facilitated lurid rumours that the baby’s father was not George Augustus but one of George Louis’s Turkish valets. Portraits of the prince throughout his life refute such spiteful calumnies. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu afterwards noted in Frederick ‘the fine fair Hair of the Princesse’ and ‘an Air of Sprightliness’ reminiscent of George Augustus’s 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, he comes/To gentler Love’s Alarms.’122

Caroline’s satisfaction in the fulfilment of her own public role, as mother of a new generation of the electoral house, was less straightforward. With the self-containment habitual to her, she kept her own counsel. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my soul, that her Royal Highness, whom I value above all persons liveing, continues in so good health, and, as I am inform’d, in as good humor & temper as ever,’ John Toland wrote to Leibniz on 6 October.123 Her good humour was an aspect of Caroline’s infectious zest for life: she had learned long ago the value of counterfeiting even-temperedness.

Three further children completed the nursery in Hanover. Daughters Anne, Amelia – whom Caroline called ‘Amely’ – and Caroline were born at two-yearly intervals from 1709. Although Caroline would later tell one of her ladies of the bedchamber that ‘she thought the principal Duty of a Woman was to take care of her Children’, and at least one contemporary account claimed ‘she took infinite pleasure in amusing herself with the sportings and innocence of young children’, she was not consistently cosily maternal with her children when young.124 Even a sympathetic observer like her future woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Clayton protested at Caroline’s preference for ‘settling points of controversial divinity’ over vigilance in the matter of her children’s development; she was attentive to discipline, and the royal schoolroom included lessons in Latin, German, French, Italian and the work of ancient historians.125

Caroline’s apparent failure to react either swiftly or effectively to the infant Frederick developing rickets suggests negligence, but should be read within the context of contemporary parenting habits and widespread medical ignorance, and balanced by George Augustus’s assurance to her, in a letter written two years later, of his instinctive love for their new baby Anne, a clear indication that she valued affection between parents and children.126 In the event, credit for Frederick’s recovery mostly belongs to Sophia, who, by directing that ‘Fritzchen’ spend time outdoors in the gardens at Herrenhausen, exposed him to the light and fresh air which effected a cure around the time of his third birthday. In her letters, Sophia intimated that her contribution extended to supervising Fritzchen’s wetnurse and feeding regimen: first smallpox then pneumonia had separated Caroline from her baby.127 A subsequent appraisal would absolve Caroline of the besetting flaw of royal and aristocratic parenting, that ‘Parents of rank … have so little regard to … the happiness of their children, as by leaving them in the hands of their servants, to suffer them to receive their earliest impressions from those, who are commonly taken from the dregs of their people.’128 In Caroline’s case it was an assessment of variable accuracy, and Frederick benefited from the doting ministrations of his still energetic great-grandmother.

Caroline had miscalculated Frederick’s delivery date. Two years later, she made the same mistake with her second pregnancy. Ernest Augustus, Sophia’s youngest son, complained that the combination of Caroline’s muddle-headedness and George Augustus’s secrecy in relation to his ‘petite famille’ had left him again unsure whether Caroline was in fact pregnant. Perhaps she had lately miscarried or was on the brink of miscarriage?129 All doubts were resolved on 2 November 1709.

George Augustus was absent from the birth of his first daughter. Mindful of the restlessness of his nursemaiding two years earlier, Caroline had encouraged him to join the remainder of the court at the recently renovated electoral hunting box at Göhrde in the Celle forests. In his absence, he committed to paper effusions of love. ‘I am only a little bit angry that it [the birth] has caused you pain,’ he wrote with clumsy fondness. ‘You should know me well enough, my very dear Caroline, to believe that everything that concerns you attaches me the more deeply to you, and I assure you, dear heart, that I love the baby without having seen it. I pray you, take care of yourself, that I may have the pleasure of finding you well, and that still greater joy may be conferred upon a heart deeply desirous of it.’130 Sophia’s letters from Göhrde, full of the coldness of the weather and the splendour of the palace’s remodelling, echoed a similar strain, proof of an improvement in the women’s relationship since 1705. ‘I am sure you do not doubt that my heart is completely yours,’ the older woman wrote, ‘and that I defy even your Prince to love you more than I will do all my life.’131 To Bothmer she described the speediness of Caroline’s second labour.132

With a view to the family’s future prospects, the baby was christened Anne. At George Augustus’s invitation, the queen agreed to stand as godmother to her infant namesake. Further missives from Hanover prompted a christening gift of Anne’s own portrait miniature set in diamonds. To Caroline she wrote, ‘I take keen pleasure in giving, as often as I am able, proofs of the perfect friendship I bear for your husband as well as the whole electoral family,’ and added, ‘I believe the diamonds are very good.’133 Neither Sophia nor George Louis accepted either of these statements at face value, and indeed the gift had only been forthcoming after a number of tactful reminders. Loftily, Sophia dismissed Anne’s trinket as ‘the sort one gives to ambassadors’. Like her son, she was predictably irked by the queen’s request that Duchess Eléonore stand proxy for her at the baby’s baptism.

Anne’s stipulation may well have been a piece of calculated mischief-making. Certainly it was a reminder to her Hanoverian heirs that, for the moment at least, the balance of power tilted in her favour. The prize represented by the British throne was a considerable one. It had lately been augmented by the passing of the Act of Union, which prevented Scotland’s Parliament from nominating its own successor to Anne, thereby guaranteeing her heirs the double inheritance. Correctly Anne estimated Sophia’s greed for her crown, revealed in the elaborate courtesies she extended to British visitors to Hanover and her ‘many questions about [British] families, customs, laws, and the like’, noted by Toland as early as 1701.134 Diplomats kept the queen informed of efforts made by members of Sophia’s family to prepare themselves for coming apotheosis: lessons in English; the acquaintance of British politicians, men of letters and military men like Marlborough assiduously cultivated; Leibniz’s faulty attempts to master the intricacies of parliamentary opinion, including the divisions between those ‘vile enormous factions’, the Whigs, who supported the Hanoverian succession, and the Tories, who included those opposed to it, as well as the nature and extent of support for Jacobitism; the reception of a delegation from the University of Cambridge in 1706 and, following his appointment in the autumn of 1713, new English books dispatched from London by the Hanoverian resident George von Schütz. George Augustus had begun to learn English in 1701, soon after the Act of Settlement; Sophia extolled his speedy progress the following spring.135 Bilingualism would form a cornerstone of Frederick’s education. At necessary intervals Sophia also protested her fondness for her British niece: ‘I believe that it would be for the good of England that the Queen should live for a hundred years,’ she wrote cumbrously to the Duke of Marlborough.136 Out of earshot she grumbled at the failure of Anne’s government to grant her a pension or civil list payments, or to invest her with the title Princess of Wales. ‘I quite agree, “Altesse Royale” [Royal Highness] has become very vulgar now, much more common than “Your Electoral Serene Highness”,’ Liselotte consoled her.137

In this process of preparation, Caroline acted independently. Sophia was thirty-five years older than Anne. For all she invoked a Dutch proverb about creaking wagons going far, her chances of surviving even so sickly an individual as Anne were slight. George Louis was a man of middle age, dogmatic, unenthusiastic about leaving Hanover. He shared Liselotte’s view that ‘what one is familiar with is always better than anything strange, and the fatherland always appears best to us Germans’, and perhaps 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 George Augustus had the vanity of a royal first-born, a double entitlement of sex and status. Caroline was spouse, orphan, poor relation, as conscious of her disadvantages as of her strengths.

Leibniz wrote that he ‘admired the equability and honour, the kindness and moderation, which this princess maintains amidst such great prosperity’.157 There were gaps within the couple’s marriage. Caroline combined clear-sightedness about her husband’s limitations with emotional warmth commended by George Ridpath, editor of the Flying Post, as ‘exemplary’.158 George Augustus himself said that ‘her sweetness of temper … check[ed] and assuage[d] his own hastiness and resentment’.159 Her later behaviour would indicate her pride in his sexual thraldom. She did not forget that she owed her ‘great prosperity’ to him.

We should not be surprised that George Augustus took mistresses, nor that the woman he ultimately chose for this role was modest and self-effacing and, like Caroline, sufficiently sensible to shield him from exposure to his own shortcomings. He did not love her, and her sexual allure never eclipsed Caroline’s. Like heroics on the battlefield at Oudenaarde, George Augustus’s acquisition of a mistress was another facet of princely gloire, ‘a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince [more] than an addition to his pleasures as a man’ – important twice over in the case of this posturing, insecure prince-in-waiting, whose father denied him purpose or employment.160 Horace Walpole suggested he was motivated by the ‘egregious folly of fancying that inconstancy proved that he was not governed [by his wife]’ and that he, not Caroline, had the upper hand in their relationship.161 If so, as we shall see, he failed.

Henrietta Hobart was a woman of good family, good-looking without beauty and forced by the early deaths of her parents to hasten into marriage, which she did, aged seventeen, in March 1706. Unlike Caroline in a similar position, she badly miscalculated. ‘Wrong-headed, ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, extravagant, brutal’, Charles Howard was an impoverished good-for-nothing despite aristocratic connections. He swiftly reduced his teenage wife to penurious misery and, in his cups, a state of near-constant fear for her own safety.162

Like Caroline, however, Henrietta Howard was resourceful and courageous; she was serious-minded and intelligent, ‘a complete treatise on subjects moral, instructive and entertaining … [her] reasoning clear & strong’.163 Adversity had schooled her in compliance and made her cynical too. Seven years of humiliating marriage had reduced her to the cunning of an adventuress. In 1713 she conceived a plan to escape the disastrous financial straits to which her husband’s profligacy had reduced them. For a year in dreary London lodgings she scrimped and saved; she sold the last of their possessions, including even their bedding; she received from a maker of periwigs an offer of eighteen guineas for her ‘extremely fair, and remarkably fine’ hair; and with heroic self-sacrifice, she entrusted to the care of relations her adored seven-year-old son, Henry.164 Then husband and wife, bound together only by need and intense mutual dislike, crossed the North Sea from England to Hanover. Their intention was to salvage their fortunes by securing paid employment with Britain’s future rulers.

Henrietta’s target was the dowager electress Sophia, heiress to the throne. Her introduction, easily procurable for a well-born Englishwoman, was a success. Henrietta’s natural emollience, pleasing appearance and, most of all, her knowledge and reading, commended her rapidly. Her visit to Herrenhausen was repeated, then repeated again. She met Caroline. Henrietta’s professed admiration for Leibniz, possibly a careful deceit, impressed both princesses. Caroline offered her a position as dame du palais, or lady-in-waiting, beginning immediately; Sophia extended the promise of a greater prize, an appointment as bedchamber woman in the event of her accession to the British throne, with a salary of £300. More surprisingly, the unprepossessing Charles Howard – ‘a most unamiable man, sour, dull and sullen’ – secured a promise of equivalent employment from George Louis, as groom of the bedchamber.165

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