...by Matthew Dennison. A very readable and recent biography of Queen Caroline. Dennison would get the Horowski seal of approval: he spells all the German names correctly (which is a true challenge in the case of the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg), is aware that the Countess of Kielsmansegg was G1's half sister, not mistress, and while sympathetic to his main subject is able to investigate her less than stellar sides as well. (Though he thinks Wilhelmine has no idea what she's talking about with her powerhungry-as-Agrippina comparison, since she never met Caroline.) This is especially notable in the description of the increasingly toxic breakdown of the (non-)relationship between Caroline and her oldest son, but more about this in a moment.
The bibliography is impressive. (No books in German, but he's read all the English translations of Sophie's various correspondences he got his hands on, for example, as well as translated into English or French biographies.) I haven't come across an immediately noticable error save one, and because he's so good otherwise, I'm now actually confused and uncertain whether he could have been right. In every book except for this that I've read touching on the English Marriage Project, the cousin intended for Fritz (of Prussia) is named as Amelia/Emily. Dennison says it was her older sister Anne, and that Fritz of Wales and Anne as the oldest were intended for their counterparts Wilhelmine and Fritz of Prussia, also the oldest surviving kids. Like I said - I've always read that it was Amelia. I mean, even her wiki entry claims she kept a miniature of Fritz. And the famous letter Fritz was talked into writing to Caroline about vowingn to only marry her daughter I recalled as naming Amelia as well, but now I'm not sure anymore. Miiiiiiildred - could it have been Anne? (Until her marriage to yet another William of Orange, that is.)
On to the life of Caroline. Her father, the Margrave of Ansbach, already had several sons when remarrying Caroline's mother, so that marriage was seen as a love match Alas he died just a few years later, and Caroline's mother could not handle widowhood at all, hence Caroline's education being neglected to the degree that she had to teach herself how to write and read. (Dennison gives a few examples for the fact she was never able to spell well in any of the languages she spoke - German, French and English - despite being a passionate reader and lover of scholarly debates - which was the long term result.) Her mother eventually married again, another widower, which was social step up and a human step down, for her second husband Johann Georg was the older brother of August the Strong, Prince Elector of Saxony before him. Johann Georg had a mistress, Magdalen Sybille, aka Billa, whom he had no intention of giving up and insited on being treated as the true spouse. Her mother, Ursula, had been his father's mistress as well, and the question mark as to whether or not Billa could have been his half sister didn't seem to bother him. (One can see the family resemblance to August.) Billa eventually got infected by smallpox and died, Johann Georg, who had insisted on being with her, also got infected and died, and August the Strong started his ascendancy to the throne by putting about a hundred Bill-related people on trial for corruption and her mother Ursula for witchcraft (she'd been massively unpopular, so this was a cheap popularity gesture, and one of the last prominent witch trials).
What all this meant for Caroline was that she kept being shuffled between courts in her childhood: her mother's, her older half brother's at Ansbach (said older half brother, btw, eventually produced the son who'd marry Wilhelmine's and Fritz' sister Friederike, the first of the siblings to get married, and make her miserable), her stepfather's - and always in between the one of Sophie Charlotte and F1 in Berlin. The full name of Caroline's dad had been von Brandenburg-Ansbach, as the Margraves of Ansbach were an offshot of the Hohenzollern, too, so F1 was the ultimate overlord of the family, so to speak, and had offered her a home to stay. Caroline first did this at eight, but more long term and for years as a teenager, where, says Dennison, she adopted Sophie Charlotte - whom Dennison refers to by her family nickname of Figuelotte, presumably to cut down the number of Sophies and Charlottes in this book - as a life long heroine and role model.
Sidenote: this made me recall my puzzlement at Hervey claiming that Caroline told him Figuelotte had been "a silly, shallow woman", as opposed to G2 admiring her. Dennison - who quotes a lot from Hervey on other matters - never mentions this one. He does quote many positive and admiring statements from Caroline about Figuelotte from her own letters to back up his claim of Figuelotte - who was the first to encourage Caroline's hunger for books and to provide her with education and who had created the first intellectual court in Berlin - as her heroine. Now, could the letters have been for show and Caroline voiced towards Hervey her true feelings? Sure. But I suspect that Hervey, who self confessedly tuned out whenever G2 and Caroline talked about their German relations and couldn't be bothered to memorize who was related to whom, simply confused Prussian queens, and the one whom Caroline had been uncomplimentary about was in fact her sister-in-law Sophia Dorothea. (With whom she lived in Hannover close-up between marrying G2 and SD marrying FW.) After all, Caroline was writing positive things about the late Figuelotte even when she herself was Queen and the late Sophie Charlotte had probably been forgotten my many, i.e. when there was no profit to claim the connection.
Through Figuelotte, Caroline also attracted the attention of Sophie of Hannover. (BTW, Dennison chronicles Sophie's changing emotions about Caroline - first very positive - she definitely wanted her for grandson G2 - , then cooling off after the marriage, than positive again , but doesn't quote or explain the letter from Sophie to SD where she refers to Caroline as a habitual liar. I was hoping he'd explain the occasion and/or lie, but no. His explanation for the cooling off period on Sophie's part is that she was mourning for her then very recently dead daughter, had been hoping Caroline would be a second Figuelotte, which of course no one could have been, was disappointed and held it against her, with relationships improving again once Sophie had worked through her immediate grief. For Caroline's part, she seems to sincerely have attached herself to Sophie and learned a lot from her. One of Dennison's proofs for this is that after Sophie had died, Caroline started to correspond with Liselotte, and an intense correspondence it was, too, twice weekly, according to Liselotte. The two of them had never met, and all they shared was Sophie; also, Sophie's death was quickly followed by Queen Anne's, which meant Caroline became Princess of Wales and moved to Britain, so it wasn't like she didn't have other things to do, while Liselotte was an old widow without political influence (yes, she was the mother of the French Regent, but no one thought Philippe II consulted her about politics), so writing to her was most likely out of the genuine need to have a maternal confidant whom the Sophies had previously filled. With the caveat that how we present ourselves in letters isn't necessarily how we're perceived in person, Dennison adds it's also worth noting down that Liselotte - who in her long life at Versailles had experienced all types of people - quickly took to Caroline and considered her both smart and engaging.
But back to Caroline, young princess of tiny Ansbach with no big heritage (remember, product of second marriage) hanging out a lot at Berlin. She was a youthful beauty by the standards of her age - bright blond hair, white, luminous skin, a good figure which only later would get heavy, but would almost to the end be perceived as voluptous -, and an impressive conversationalist. Given the lack of a dowry, the amazing thing is that her first proposal should come from a very impressive source - young Archduke Charles, future Dad of MT. Now, this proposal and Caroline's eventual refusal became quickly the stuff of legend, and in later years it cemented her standing as a Protestant heroine - the princess who had "scorned an empire for her faith" - so it's worth pointing out, as Dennison does, that when Charles proposed, he wasn't the Emperor yet, nor was it all that likely he'd be. He was the second son of the Emperor, there was no reason to assume his older brother Joseph wouldn't produce heirs, and the best he could hope for was being King of Spain. This still made him a likely monarch to be when proposing to Caroline and as Habsburg, he was pretty much the best she could hope to get in the marriage market. She wavered at first. Figuelotte and Sophie were conspiciously neutral about the prospect, which made Dennison wonder whether Figuelotte wanted Caroline for her son FW while Sophie wanted her for grandson future G2 already, but neither prospect was voiced, so he says it's also possible that they didn't, or that Figuelotte also thought G2 was a better match but didn't say so because FW was her son. They were neither encouraging nor discouraging about the Habsburg match, and Team Vienna did sent a Jesuit to convert Caroline, but talks with Father Orban had the opposite effect on her: they likely as not made her decide that no, becoming Queen of Spain wasn't worth this, she'd rather stay a Protestant, thanks, Charles.
It was an audacious gesture for a minor German princess - as I said, looking at the logistics of the time, it wasn't likely she could have hoped for a better proposal -, but it would pay off in dividends for the rest of her life, and not just because Sophie used it to sell her son on a Caroline/future G2 match.
Speaking of the Georges: in order to make it always clear who is who, Dennison calls G1 George Louis both before and after his becoming King, and G2 George Augustus (ditto). Why was Caroline's attachment to the Protestant faith a good selling point to convince George Louis she could make a good match for his son, despite the lack of a dowry? Because at this point, the prospect of the British succession became increasingly real. Cousins William and Mary had produced no living offspring. Cousin Anne's children had all died. And the reason why the ca. 50 people between Sophie and Anne were disqualified from the succession in the eyes of Protestant England was that they were all Catholics. Now, George Louis and Sophie cunningly let young George Augustus believe this was all his idea, and he went through that romantic undercover mission where he under a pseudonym showed up at Ansbach (Caroline after Figuelotte's death had gone to her half brother's court) and fell in love at first sight. But there was a lot of stage management behind the scenes there.
As we've learned in the Schnath edited correspondence, F1 was miffed about this because he'd been toying with the idea of a Caroline/FW match (Dennison assumes, though F1 would deny it later), and if Morgenstern is to be believed, young FW was heartbroken. But Dennison thinks Caroline didn't consider him even for a microsecond, and I'm with him there. Otoh, Dennison also thinks George Augustus did know FW was interested in Caroline and that this - like the rejected Habsburg proposal - heightened her allure in his eyes. Then again, by the evidence of their remaining lives together, he was well and truly smitten. He adored her and would do so till her dying day and beyond, ordering that after his own burial the parting wood between their coffins would be lifted so that their dust could mingle.
Was Caroline felt is harder to say. Dennison doesn't think it was all power hunger and calculation that made her become the perfect wife to G2. On the one hand, he didn't share some of her most important interests - notably books (G2 liked music but not reading, and Caroline could only read when he was sleeping or otherwise not requiring her company) -, he could be petty, and his ego required constant massaging. Dennison along with Hervey thinks that while G2 clearly liked sex, his open preference for his wife over his mistress demonstrates that he mostly took a maitresse because a) it's what Kings post Louis XIV did, and b) people were noting his uxoriousness and making jokes that it was Caroline who was wearing the pants in the marriage, so taking a mistress was supposed to show he was the boss. Given such scenes as the one where when his mistress, Henrietta Howard, as lady-in-waiting was dressing his wife:
G2: *snatches the hankerchief covering Caroline's shoulders while her hair was being dressed* : Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen's!"
and the thirty pages love letters he wrote to Caroline from Hannover when not with her, his British subjects were less than convinced by this strategem of his.
On the other hand: after a childhood and youth as the poor relation with ever changing guardians, a husband who, whatever other faults he had, really is constant in his conviction that you are the best, sexiest, most wonderful woman on the planet and loves you - let's not forget, George Augustus, whose mother had disappeared into captivity when he was 11 and whose father was famouly a cold fish to almost anyone other than his mistress and illegitimate kids even before that frosty attitude would devolve into father/son warfare later, was something of a love starved teen himself - may have been someone made for Caroline in more ways than by eventually making her Queen. Among their contemporaries there was the wide spectrum of "she adores him, too" to "totally faking it for power's sake!" in how their marriage was seen from her side.
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The First Iron Lady: A life of Caroline of Ansbach - I: Cinderella
Date: 2021-07-27 01:50 pm (UTC)The bibliography is impressive. (No books in German, but he's read all the English translations of Sophie's various correspondences he got his hands on, for example, as well as translated into English or French biographies.) I haven't come across an immediately noticable error save one, and because he's so good otherwise, I'm now actually confused and uncertain whether he could have been right. In every book except for this that I've read touching on the English Marriage Project, the cousin intended for Fritz (of Prussia) is named as Amelia/Emily. Dennison says it was her older sister Anne, and that Fritz of Wales and Anne as the oldest were intended for their counterparts Wilhelmine and Fritz of Prussia, also the oldest surviving kids. Like I said - I've always read that it was Amelia. I mean, even her wiki entry claims she kept a miniature of Fritz. And the famous letter Fritz was talked into writing to Caroline about vowingn to only marry her daughter I recalled as naming Amelia as well, but now I'm not sure anymore. Miiiiiiildred - could it have been Anne? (Until her marriage to yet another William of Orange, that is.)
On to the life of Caroline. Her father, the Margrave of Ansbach, already had several sons when remarrying Caroline's mother, so that marriage was seen as a love match Alas he died just a few years later, and Caroline's mother could not handle widowhood at all, hence Caroline's education being neglected to the degree that she had to teach herself how to write and read. (Dennison gives a few examples for the fact she was never able to spell well in any of the languages she spoke - German, French and English - despite being a passionate reader and lover of scholarly debates - which was the long term result.) Her mother eventually married again, another widower, which was social step up and a human step down, for her second husband Johann Georg was the older brother of August the Strong, Prince Elector of Saxony before him. Johann Georg had a mistress, Magdalen Sybille, aka Billa, whom he had no intention of giving up and insited on being treated as the true spouse. Her mother, Ursula, had been his father's mistress as well, and the question mark as to whether or not Billa could have been his half sister didn't seem to bother him. (One can see the family resemblance to August.) Billa eventually got infected by smallpox and died, Johann Georg, who had insisted on being with her, also got infected and died, and August the Strong started his ascendancy to the throne by putting about a hundred Bill-related people on trial for corruption and her mother Ursula for witchcraft (she'd been massively unpopular, so this was a cheap popularity gesture, and one of the last prominent witch trials).
What all this meant for Caroline was that she kept being shuffled between courts in her childhood: her mother's, her older half brother's at Ansbach (said older half brother, btw, eventually produced the son who'd marry Wilhelmine's and Fritz' sister Friederike, the first of the siblings to get married, and make her miserable), her stepfather's - and always in between the one of Sophie Charlotte and F1 in Berlin. The full name of Caroline's dad had been von Brandenburg-Ansbach, as the Margraves of Ansbach were an offshot of the Hohenzollern, too, so F1 was the ultimate overlord of the family, so to speak, and had offered her a home to stay. Caroline first did this at eight, but more long term and for years as a teenager, where, says Dennison, she adopted Sophie Charlotte - whom Dennison refers to by her family nickname of Figuelotte, presumably to cut down the number of Sophies and Charlottes in this book - as a life long heroine and role model.
Sidenote: this made me recall my puzzlement at Hervey claiming that Caroline told him Figuelotte had been "a silly, shallow woman", as opposed to G2 admiring her. Dennison - who quotes a lot from Hervey on other matters - never mentions this one. He does quote many positive and admiring statements from Caroline about Figuelotte from her own letters to back up his claim of Figuelotte - who was the first to encourage Caroline's hunger for books and to provide her with education and who had created the first intellectual court in Berlin - as her heroine. Now, could the letters have been for show and Caroline voiced towards Hervey her true feelings? Sure. But I suspect that Hervey, who self confessedly tuned out whenever G2 and Caroline talked about their German relations and couldn't be bothered to memorize who was related to whom, simply confused Prussian queens, and the one whom Caroline had been uncomplimentary about was in fact her sister-in-law Sophia Dorothea. (With whom she lived in Hannover close-up between marrying G2 and SD marrying FW.) After all, Caroline was writing positive things about the late Figuelotte even when she herself was Queen and the late Sophie Charlotte had probably been forgotten my many, i.e. when there was no profit to claim the connection.
Through Figuelotte, Caroline also attracted the attention of Sophie of Hannover. (BTW, Dennison chronicles Sophie's changing emotions about Caroline - first very positive - she definitely wanted her for grandson G2 - , then cooling off after the marriage, than positive again , but doesn't quote or explain the letter from Sophie to SD where she refers to Caroline as a habitual liar. I was hoping he'd explain the occasion and/or lie, but no. His explanation for the cooling off period on Sophie's part is that she was mourning for her then very recently dead daughter, had been hoping Caroline would be a second Figuelotte, which of course no one could have been, was disappointed and held it against her, with relationships improving again once Sophie had worked through her immediate grief. For Caroline's part, she seems to sincerely have attached herself to Sophie and learned a lot from her. One of Dennison's proofs for this is that after Sophie had died, Caroline started to correspond with Liselotte, and an intense correspondence it was, too, twice weekly, according to Liselotte. The two of them had never met, and all they shared was Sophie; also, Sophie's death was quickly followed by Queen Anne's, which meant Caroline became Princess of Wales and moved to Britain, so it wasn't like she didn't have other things to do, while Liselotte was an old widow without political influence (yes, she was the mother of the French Regent, but no one thought Philippe II consulted her about politics), so writing to her was most likely out of the genuine need to have a maternal confidant whom the Sophies had previously filled. With the caveat that how we present ourselves in letters isn't necessarily how we're perceived in person, Dennison adds it's also worth noting down that Liselotte - who in her long life at Versailles had experienced all types of people - quickly took to Caroline and considered her both smart and engaging.
But back to Caroline, young princess of tiny Ansbach with no big heritage (remember, product of second marriage) hanging out a lot at Berlin. She was a youthful beauty by the standards of her age - bright blond hair, white, luminous skin, a good figure which only later would get heavy, but would almost to the end be perceived as voluptous -, and an impressive conversationalist. Given the lack of a dowry, the amazing thing is that her first proposal should come from a very impressive source - young Archduke Charles, future Dad of MT. Now, this proposal and Caroline's eventual refusal became quickly the stuff of legend, and in later years it cemented her standing as a Protestant heroine - the princess who had "scorned an empire for her faith" - so it's worth pointing out, as Dennison does, that when Charles proposed, he wasn't the Emperor yet, nor was it all that likely he'd be. He was the second son of the Emperor, there was no reason to assume his older brother Joseph wouldn't produce heirs, and the best he could hope for was being King of Spain. This still made him a likely monarch to be when proposing to Caroline and as Habsburg, he was pretty much the best she could hope to get in the marriage market. She wavered at first. Figuelotte and Sophie were conspiciously neutral about the prospect, which made Dennison wonder whether Figuelotte wanted Caroline for her son FW while Sophie wanted her for grandson future G2 already, but neither prospect was voiced, so he says it's also possible that they didn't, or that Figuelotte also thought G2 was a better match but didn't say so because FW was her son. They were neither encouraging nor discouraging about the Habsburg match, and Team Vienna did sent a Jesuit to convert Caroline, but talks with Father Orban had the opposite effect on her: they likely as not made her decide that no, becoming Queen of Spain wasn't worth this, she'd rather stay a Protestant, thanks, Charles.
It was an audacious gesture for a minor German princess - as I said, looking at the logistics of the time, it wasn't likely she could have hoped for a better proposal -, but it would pay off in dividends for the rest of her life, and not just because Sophie used it to sell her son on a Caroline/future G2 match.
Speaking of the Georges: in order to make it always clear who is who, Dennison calls G1 George Louis both before and after his becoming King, and G2 George Augustus (ditto). Why was Caroline's attachment to the Protestant faith a good selling point to convince George Louis she could make a good match for his son, despite the lack of a dowry? Because at this point, the prospect of the British succession became increasingly real. Cousins William and Mary had produced no living offspring. Cousin Anne's children had all died. And the reason why the ca. 50 people between Sophie and Anne were disqualified from the succession in the eyes of Protestant England was that they were all Catholics. Now, George Louis and Sophie cunningly let young George Augustus believe this was all his idea, and he went through that romantic undercover mission where he under a pseudonym showed up at Ansbach (Caroline after Figuelotte's death had gone to her half brother's court) and fell in love at first sight. But there was a lot of stage management behind the scenes there.
As we've learned in the Schnath edited correspondence, F1 was miffed about this because he'd been toying with the idea of a Caroline/FW match (Dennison assumes, though F1 would deny it later), and if Morgenstern is to be believed, young FW was heartbroken. But Dennison thinks Caroline didn't consider him even for a microsecond, and I'm with him there. Otoh, Dennison also thinks George Augustus did know FW was interested in Caroline and that this - like the rejected Habsburg proposal - heightened her allure in his eyes. Then again, by the evidence of their remaining lives together, he was well and truly smitten. He adored her and would do so till her dying day and beyond, ordering that after his own burial the parting wood between their coffins would be lifted so that their dust could mingle.
Was Caroline felt is harder to say. Dennison doesn't think it was all power hunger and calculation that made her become the perfect wife to G2. On the one hand, he didn't share some of her most important interests - notably books (G2 liked music but not reading, and Caroline could only read when he was sleeping or otherwise not requiring her company) -, he could be petty, and his ego required constant massaging. Dennison along with Hervey thinks that while G2 clearly liked sex, his open preference for his wife over his mistress demonstrates that he mostly took a maitresse because a) it's what Kings post Louis XIV did, and b) people were noting his uxoriousness and making jokes that it was Caroline who was wearing the pants in the marriage, so taking a mistress was supposed to show he was the boss. Given such scenes as the one where when his mistress, Henrietta Howard, as lady-in-waiting was dressing his wife:
G2: *snatches the hankerchief covering Caroline's shoulders while her hair was being dressed* : Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen's!"
and the thirty pages love letters he wrote to Caroline from Hannover when not with her, his British subjects were less than convinced by this strategem of his.
On the other hand: after a childhood and youth as the poor relation with ever changing guardians, a husband who, whatever other faults he had, really is constant in his conviction that you are the best, sexiest, most wonderful woman on the planet and loves you - let's not forget, George Augustus, whose mother had disappeared into captivity when he was 11 and whose father was famouly a cold fish to almost anyone other than his mistress and illegitimate kids even before that frosty attitude would devolve into father/son warfare later, was something of a love starved teen himself - may have been someone made for Caroline in more ways than by eventually making her Queen. Among their contemporaries there was the wide spectrum of "she adores him, too" to "totally faking it for power's sake!" in how their marriage was seen from her side.