Matthew Dennison - The First Iron Lady - A Life of Caroline of Ansbach

Leibniz wrote that he ‘admired the equability and honour, the kindness and moderation, which this princess maintains amidst such great prosperity’. 157There 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’. 158George Augustus himself said that ‘her sweetness of temper … check[ed] and assuage[d] his own hastiness and resentment’. 159Her 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. 160Horace 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. 161If 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’. 163Adversity 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. 164Then 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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