II

Leicester House

‘Not a Day without Suffering’

‘A very handsome large square, enclosed with rails and graced on all sides with good built houses, well inhabited and resorted to by the gentry,’ Leicester Square – still, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, in some accounts referred to as Leicester Fields – lay north-west of Charing Cross, within walking distance of St James’s Palace.1 In the north-east corner of the square, behind a courtyard screened from the public way, stood early-seventeenth-century Leicester House – in Sutton Nicholls’s view of around 1720, a large brick-built structure of unremarkable aspect with views over formal gardens, small shops and rows of genteel townhouses, its own gatehouse and tall gates.2 Behind it lay a modest formal garden of statues and clipped yews, and a ribbon of deciduous trees offering spreading shade. In Alexander Pope’s account it boasted green-painted doors. It suffered infestations of bedbugs.3

In the wake of their expulsion it was here, on 25 March 1718, that George Augustus and Caroline installed the remnants of their court, after a short but unsatisfactory interval of homelessness spent partly at Grantham House, in nearby Dover Street. It remained their London home until George Louis’s death, the setting for the rival court they assembled in opposition to the king. For the house that had briefly belonged to his paternal great-grandmother, the ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth of Bohemia, George Augustus paid £6,858; he set in train year-long alterations supervised by architect Nicholas Dubois.4 Its immediate surrounds, altered by new building since Elizabeth’s death in 1662, were the haunt of footpads, ruffians and hoydens, noisy during waking hours, a lively, dark-seamed neighbourhood of night-time menaces. ‘Here lives a Person of high Distinction; next door a Butcher with his stinking Shambles! A Tallow Chandler shall front my Lord’s nice Venetian window and two or three brawny naked Curriers in their Pit shall face a fine Lady in her back closet and disturb her spiritual Thoughts,’ wrote a correspondent of the journal Old England about London in 1748.5 So it was three decades earlier in the vicinity of Leicester Square. Less charitable observers noted the proximity to Leicester House of middling shopkeepers’ premises, the row of lock-up shops at its gatehouse entrance.6 For its new incumbents, the house’s association with Elizabeth outweighed nicer drawbacks. It was to Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of James I, that George Louis traced his claim to the throne. In her later collecting, Caroline underlined the significance of this connection. Her purchases included a painting of 1634 by Bartholomeus van Bassen, The King and Queen of Bohemia Dining in Public.7

Caroline was thirty-five years old. Nearly four years had passed since she last saw her eldest child. Since December she had been parted from her daughters. In leaving behind St James’s, she even lost access to the royal library, a greater deprivation for this princess than many; George Louis had forbidden prince or princess to remove from their apartments in the palace a single piece of furniture. One month ago, husband and wife had sat at the bedside of baby George William and helplessly watched as life slipped away from the tiny child whose birth had occasioned so much anger. ‘His illness began with an oppression upon his breast, accompanied with a cough, which increasing, a fever succeeded with convulsions,’ one newspaper reported.8 As his condition worsened, George Louis had ordered the baby’s removal from smoke-lagged St James’s to the cleaner air of Kensington Palace. From the end of January he had relaxed his severity to the extent of granting Caroline permission to visit all four children. In the case of baby George William it was too late. There was no consolation for Caroline in his night-time burial in Westminster Abbey, accomplished with the full panoply of yeomen of the guard and a procession of royal coaches – ‘in Royal Tomb The little Bones you’ll find’, lamented one balladeer.9 Nor in the autopsy ordered by George Louis to prove that the child’s death could not be blamed on separation from his mother.

It was an older, sadder, grieving Caroline who set about establishing at Leicester House a setting for a princely court she modelled in part on Figuelotte’s lively Lützenburg. Less than two years earlier she had sat for Kneller’s official portrait, contentment in the smile that gently plays about her lips in that otherwise stiff and formal image. For the moment, equanimity failed her. In the aftermath of George William’s death, public sympathy was strongly in George Augustus and particularly Caroline’s favour. George Sewell’s Verses to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, Occasion’d by the Death of the Young Prince blamed political factionalism for the family rift, the children’s separation from their parents and the loss of the infant prince: ‘the Royal Infant bleeds;/The Royal Mother weeps for British Deeds’.10 Of little solace to Caroline, such sentiments reverberated across the Continent, where memories of George Louis’s vengefulness towards Sophia Dorothea persisted. Liselotte was predictably unconstrained. ‘My God, how I pity our poor dear Princess of Wales!’ she wrote on 24 February. ‘I heard from England yesterday that her last-born little prince died of catarrh on the chest. She saw him at Kensington just before the end. I wish she hadn’t seen him, for it will be even more painful for her now. God grant that this Prince’s death may extinguish all the flames kindled at his christening! But alas, there is no sign of that yet.’11

Signs would remain scant. Four months earlier, neither husband nor wife had anticipated the scale of George Louis’s anger and implacability. If she regretted at all failing to dissuade George Augustus from opposing his father, it was a chastened though unrepentant Caroline who, in Leicester Square, began the process of rebuilding the couple’s lives in the face of private suffering and public humiliation. At the same time, and without encouragement from George Louis, she kept up a sporadic attendance at the king’s drawing rooms.

Her challenge was considerable. Pressure of space at Grantham House had prevented prince and princess from holding court in their customary style. This, combined with George Louis’s order that anyone who wished to work or be received at his own court sever all connection with the households of George Augustus and Caroline, had eventually robbed their gatherings of any but their closest friends and the neediest hangers-on. ‘Many waited on them at their first going to Lord Grantham’s,’ it was noted, ‘but few since.’12

The Duchesses of St Albans and Montagu, both married to men close to the king, were first to leave Caroline’s service. The hastiness of their departure appeared akin to abandonment. The Countesses of Bristol and Pembroke replaced them. Lady Cowper, wife of the lord chancellor, and Mrs Clayton, married to a treasury official, shortly followed, in both cases reluctantly, Mrs Clayton, compelled by financial exigency, dependent on her husband’s exchequer salary of £1,500. For the wealthy Duchesses of St Albans and Montagu Caroline conceived a lasting enmity.

Caroline’s circle shrank accordingly, but she was not left wholly alone. William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury since January 1716, defied George Louis’s proscription and continued to visit both prince and princess in his role as spiritual mentor. Edmund Gibson, dean of the Chapel Royal, referred to Wake’s ‘intire interest in the prince and Princess’ – Wake himself had attributed a decisive role to Caroline in his promotion to the archbishopric.13 Throughout her marriage, Caroline had taken care to maintain amiable relations with Melusine von der Schulenburg. Now, pressed by the Cowpers, the king’s mistress intervened on Caroline’s behalf. Informally Lady Cowper was advised that she might continue to see Caroline until the princess was fully restored to health. This concession lasted only until December, when she was instructed ‘not to attend her any longer, having had leave to do it only during her illness’.14 Princess and bedchamber lady contrived to meet discreetly. Among Lady Cowper’s surviving papers is an undated letter detailing arrangements for one such secret meeting.15 Happily this cloak-and-dagger deception was of short duration. In April Lord Cowper resigned as lord chancellor, enabling his wife to return to Leicester House. From the country he urged her in vain to encourage ‘that good and serious disposition you found in ye Prince and Princess during your last waiting to submit to his Majesty and to live as becomes ye most dutiful children’.16

A similar leniency to that temporarily granted Mary Cowper was not extended to others of Caroline’s ladies, and Caroline resorted to further subterfuges. ‘The Princess … loves you mightily, and desires you would not come hither unless you find you can do it with safety,’ Lady Cowper wrote to Charlotte Clayton. ‘She has ordered me to tell you, that if you do think of coming, she desires … that you would be here by nine o’clock in the morning, and if you will give her notice of the day you will come, she will meet you in the garden-house, at the end of the terrace, that nobody may see you.’17 Caroline’s response to such an assignation suggests her longing for former companionship. On 30 July 1719 she wrote to Mrs Clayton, ‘the four hours you was with me past as two, I long for the time that will give me the satisfaction of seeing you without constraint as often as I can’.18

To both women Caroline continued to write regularly. In adversity she proved the sincerity of that affection she had expressed in happier times. She described Charlotte Clayton as ‘the best friend I have, whom I shall love as long as my heart has sense or motion’.19 A circumspect note colours several letters. Soon after leaving St James’s Palace, she requested of Mrs Clayton information from her husband about George Augustus’s financial position. ‘Your letters shall be burnt,’ Caroline reassured her, ‘you may send it by my son’s nurse who comes sometimes to see Geminghen [Baroness von Gemmingen].’20 A much-needed spark of humour was added by Mrs Clayton finding herself unable to decipher Caroline’s letters. ‘I laugh’d heartily that you could not read one of my letters, the Prince said to me, You write like a cat,’ Caroline replied to her.21

Of her women who remained eligible to visit St James’s Palace, or Kensington Palace, where George Louis had embarked on a programme of improvement and renovation, including apartments for Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline, the girls’ mother begged that they ‘goe & see my children’ and pass on to her all the news they could, much as she quizzed visitors to Hanover about Frederick.22 Her need of such reassurances redoubled following George Louis’s decision in May to replace as royal governess Caroline’s friend the Countess of Bückeburg with his own appointment, Jane, Dowager Countess of Portland, noted in court circles for her intelligence and the mother of a large family. George Augustus expressed the couple’s disapproval of the switch by offering Lady Bückeburg an annual pension of £500.

Those who remained with Caroline shared with their mistress an unavoidable sense of diminishment. In a letter of 12 July 1718, Baroness von Gemmingen confided to Lady Cowper how much she missed her.23 But Caroline, according to a posthumous verdict, was able ‘to bear up with patience and resolution against undeserved calumny or reproach’; from the outset, there was nothing funereal in the atmosphere at Leicester House.24 Indeed she had determined to create a court glittering and vibrant and, restraints notwithstanding, at least enjoyed in this her own house a degree of independence she could not have exercised under George Louis’s roof. Like Sophia and Figuelotte, she meant to attract not only politicians and noblemen, but the leading minds of the day.

She valued high spirits too; among the household installed at Leicester House in the spring of 1718 were a gaggle of Caroline’s maids of honour, including the court beauties Mary Lepell and Mary Bellenden, as well as woman of the bedchamber Henrietta Howard. A popular ballad claimed of the first that her charms ‘could warm an old monk in his cell’, and suggested that ‘Should Venus now rise from the ocean/And naked appear in her shell,/She would not cause half the emotion/That we feel from dear Molly Lepell.’25 Caroline’s relationship with the young women was of straightforward warmth, and was reciprocated in kind. Her maids of honour proved a lure for male visitors, including the poets whose tributes she craved. The young women’s enjoyment of their role in Caroline’s court says much for its vivacity, even at this low point. To Henrietta Howard, flighty Sophy Howe wrote of a visit to her parents in the country, ‘One thing I have got by the long time I have been here, which is the being more sensible than ever I was of my happiness in being maid of honour.’26 Walpole described Caroline’s ‘new court’ as made up of ‘the liveliest and prettiest of the young ladies’.27

At Hampton Court in the summer of 1716, Lord Townshend had suspected Henrietta Howard of an influence over George Augustus that she did not possess, mistaking her for the prince’s mistress. Over the course of 1718, Townshend’s misapprehension became fact. Determinedly, George Augustus had endeavoured to press his attentions on Mary Bellenden, exploiting his knowledge of her straitened finances to cajole her into his bed. She resisted with vehemence. ‘The Prince’s gallantry was by no means delicate,’ commented Horace Walpole, who described him ostentatiously emptying his purse and counting gold coins in front of Mary; his indelicacies – and the contents of his purse – failed to impress. Physically she defended herself against him by folding her arms across her breasts at his approach. Making her feelings clear, she ‘told him [she] was not cold, but … liked to stand so’.28 George Augustus did not feign love. Lust – and a desire for an amorist’s reputation – prompted him. More convincing proof of where his true affections lay that spring was offered by Caroline’s latest pregnancy.

To Mary Bellenden, with a characteristic lack of couthness, George Augustus had suggested possible financial rewards for sex. Still entirely dependent on her court appointment for security, and frightened by any prospect of a return to her husband’s bullying, Henrietta Howard accepted the challenge her younger colleague had rebuffed. Neither affection nor physical attraction played any part in her decision. A memorandum of 29 August 1716 details Henrietta’s views on her own marriage: Charles Howard’s brutishness, she concludes, has invalidated their marriage contract, and so ‘I must believe I am free’.29 Lord Hervey considered that Mary Bellenden’s rejection ‘left Mrs Howard, who had more steadiness and more perseverance, to try what she could make of a game which the other had found so tedious and unprofitable that she had no pleasure in playing it and saw little to be won by minding it’.30 The decision that her own marriage had been effectively terminated by mistreatment helped Henrietta to reconcile herself to what would be a lengthy liaison based on limited compatibility.

That George Augustus was highly sexed is clear from Caroline’s willingness during her pregnancies to countenance his wandering attentions. So it had been in the summer of 1716 at Hampton Court, and so it proved two years later. With careful self-control she reacted to this liaison she had expected for five years. A courtier’s claim that ‘tho’ [Henrietta Howard] was at that time very handsome, it gave her Majesty no jealousy or uneasiness’, is a tribute to Caroline’s public demeanour as much as an accurate reflection of her state of mind.31 Certainly Henrietta’s eventual recognition as George Augustus’s mistress appears to have caused Caroline discernible distress only intermittently. A handful of instances survive of her exploiting her superior rank to score points at her rival’s expense. Lord Hervey records the iciness of her response to discovering a love letter from George Augustus to his mistress, accidentally dropped from its hiding place in her bodice.32 He quotes Caroline’s tart dismissal of Henrietta: ‘For my part, I have always heard a great deal of her great sense from other people, but I never saw her in any material great occurrence in her life, take a sensible step.’33 Such comments, querying Henrietta’s intelligence, arose from the double nature of the women’s rivalry. Not only was Henrietta George Augustus’s mistress, she was Caroline’s cultural rival too, a friend of Pope and Swift and the prominent Tory satirist and creator of John Bull Dr John Arbuthnot, whom she entertained in her apartments in the royal palaces. Like Caroline, Henrietta aspired to a literary salon; like Caroline, she would commission artists and architects. ‘I intend to improve myself in terms of art, in order to keep pace with you this winter,’ a friend wrote to Henrietta in 1724, ‘otherwise I know I shall make but a scurvey figure in your room.’34 Such commendations aggravated Caroline’s jealousy.

In her defence, and aside from her envy, Caroline shielded Henrietta from Charles Howard, firmly denying him access to his estranged wife. Throughout the royal quarrel she enabled Henrietta to remain a member of her household – and therefore George Augustus’s mistress – notwithstanding Charles’s place in George Louis’s employ. Initially George Louis acquiesced in this arrangement, an indication that his relationship with Caroline, however strained, was not consistently spiteful. In his later efforts to reclaim his wife Charles Howard would invoke the king’s approval.

Aphoristically, Hervey summed up George Augustus as ‘a man incapable of being engaged by any charm but habit, or attached to any woman but his wife’.35 The prince’s relationship with Henrietta never lessened his dependence on Caroline. His emotional attachment to her was undiminished, as was his overwhelming physical attraction to her, which she reciprocated in full. Horace Walpole later confirmed the prince’s preference: ‘King George II has often, when Mrs Howard, his mistress, was dressing the Queen, come into the room and snatched the handkerchief off [Caroline’s shoulders while her hair was being dressed], and cried, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen’s!”’36

By 1718, Caroline knew enough of discreet, unassertive Henrietta – acclaimed for her reasonableness by both Pope and her besotted admirer Lord Peterborough – to be certain she would never supplant her in George Augustus’s esteem. Undoubtedly she was gratified by something tepid in their relationship, grounds for Hervey’s mischievous suggestion later that George Augustus had never ‘entered into any commerce with [Henrietta], that he might not innocently have had with his daughter’.37 And she understood that it was George Augustus’s vanity that demanded the publicity of a mistress as much as he craved another woman’s sexual enticements. The previous summer, Caroline had chosen to ignore advice from Liselotte, based on her marriage to the Duke of Orléans – the older woman had described her relief when her husband had suggested separate sleeping arrangements.38 Caroline’s marriage was of a different complexion, her enjoyment of sex marked. She would fight to maintain George Augustus’s uxoriousness.

At the end of May, Caroline miscarried. It was not as a result of anxiety at Henrietta’s elevation, or the news that George Augustus had awarded her a generous annual pension of £2,000: more highly than simple sexual fidelity, Caroline prized emotional dependence. Instead, a large elm tree felled close to her window by a violent storm had startled her. Her decision to dismiss peremptorily a nursemaid who claimed that George Augustus had ogled her was just as likely prompted by her sense of the girl’s impertinence as jealousy at her husband’s roving eye.39

Caroline’s success in creating at Leicester House any sort of alternative to George Louis’s court at St James’s, Kensington or Hampton Court points to her decided strength of character, as well as wide-ranging social, cultural and intellectual interests. The interdiction on so many courtiers, added to the constraints of the prince and princess’s income – the latter exacerbated by George Augustus’s parsimony – made the competition between the two courts potentially a one-sided affair. While Caroline embraced the challenge energetically, George Louis – saturnine and retiring – triumphed through deliberate open-handedness. Lady Hertford described to her mother the lavish picturesqueness of his birthday celebrations in June: ‘The ball was in the greenhouse, … the way to it being through a garden of orange, lemon and bergamot trees … There was a great deal of new clothes and most of them as fine as the season would allow of.’40 Each evening that summer he entertained fifty to sixty guests to dinner, with balls held twice weekly.41 Such was royal hospitality at a ball at St James’s in the winter that the king’s vice chamberlain described ‘the room where the Side Board was kept’ as so ‘stained with claret [that] it was necessary to provide Sayl cloth against another ball to prevent like damage’.42

Locked into a competition for courtiers’ allegiance with George Louis that she could not win, cut off from her children and friends and publicly stripped of many of the trappings of her rank, Caroline found the period 1717 to 1720 one of considerable strain. Those who encountered her noticed her distraction. In April 1718, Archbishop Wake referred to an oversight on her part towards a struggling writer. ‘I shall … wait upon the Princess tomorrow, and will put her in mind of this charity, if her present trouble has made her forget it,’ he wrote.43 The couple lacked money. Caroline’s income of £18,000 a year was less than that of leading courtiers. Her grounds for not acquiring a set of Dutch tapestries that had previously belonged to Charles I – the sort of purchase that appealed to her sense of historical continuity – were almost certainly financial.44

Caroline’s thoughts were frequently occupied with her own more immediate problems. In the face of protests from within his family and hostile public opinion, George Louis remained determined to retain control over his grandchildren. In January 1718 he instituted legal proceedings described by the lord chancellor as deciding ‘whether the Education, and Care of the Persons of His Majesty’s Grandchildren, and ordering the Place of their Abode, & appointing their Governors, Governesses and other Instructors, Attendants and servants, and the Care and Approbation of their Marriages when grown up, belong of right to His Majesty, as King of this Realm, or not?’45 Unsurprisingly, a majority of the judges consulted concluded that they did. Equally unsurprising is Caroline’s tearful reflection to Lady Cowper, inspired by longing for Frederick, Anne, Amelia, Caroline and the unfortunate George William: ‘I can say, since the Hour I was born, that I have not lived a Day without Suffering.’46

At first too proud to accept the king’s offer of limited access to her children, and determined to make good her stand at George Augustus’s side, Caroline relied on intermediaries. Chief among them until her replacement by Lady Portland was the Countess of Bückeburg, whom George Louis allowed to visit Caroline every evening to deliver a daily report.47 No want of affection prompted Caroline’s decision not to visit her children in person. Several years later, an illness of Amelia’s left her frequently overwhelmed by worry; as it survives in her correspondence, her response is typical of her attitude to her daughters. ‘You cannot believe the anxiety I am in,’ she wrote. Her anguish brought on ‘a sore throat which hinders me from goeing today [to see Amelia] & … a little touch of feavour & a cold’, and her frustration at what she regarded as doctors’ incompetence provoked vigorous flashes of temper. Appalled by George Louis’s choice of physician and the latter’s ineptitude, she wrote disgustedly, ‘I believe I could … have pull’d out his eys.’48

As the eldest of the princesses, albeit only eight at the time of their separation, Anne took upon herself the task of writing to her parents. From Kensington she sent George Augustus a basket of cherries with assurances of all three girls’ affection: ‘their hearts, souls and thoughts were with their dear parents always’.49 To Liselotte, Caroline reported George Augustus’s tearful receipt of this gift. But there was no comfort for Caroline when Anne protested at the lovelessness of the princesses’ lives under their grandfather’s roof: ‘we have a good father and a good mother, and yet we are like charity children’.50

Anne’s brief notes to her mother were continual pinpricks, like the plaintive ‘j’espere … que vous seres en etat de venir se soir ce qui nous fera beaucoup de plaisir’ (I hope that you can come this evening, which will give us much pleasure).51 For all Caroline’s deliberate ‘Englishness’, parents and children communicated in French, which both parents found easier. Caroline’s letters were directed ‘pour ma chère fille Anne’, and written with a studied brightness that cost her dear.52 ‘You know too well how much I love you,’ she told her eldest daughter when illness prevented her from visiting.53 Parents’ and daughters’ notes reveal a craving on both sides for a close and loving family life, as does Lord Hervey’s claim that towards Lady Portland, who had usurped their place in the princesses’ lives, Caroline and George Augustus nurtured ‘a most irreconcilable hatred’.54

Fleetingly, Caroline was distracted by the acquisition of a house in the country, an escape from the heat and stench of London summers. ‘Very neat, very pretty’, the former Ormonde Lodge stood in parkland that had once surrounded the old Richmond Palace near Kew, a pedimented classical box rebuilt in the last reign. It had previously belonged to the Duke of Ormonde, a prominent Jacobite. For his well-known political sympathies the duke had forfeited his estates and hastily escaped to France. In his midnight flit he left behind a house fully furnished even down to the large Delft flowerpot in the dining-room fireplace, a ‘Yellow Damask bed compleat’ and, in the closet within the Yellow Dressing Room, ‘a Fine Turkey work carpet’ valued at £4.55 A contemporary verdict found ‘everything in it and about it answerable to the grandeur and magnificence of its great master’ – boon indeed for the couple who had been prevented from removing a single piece of furniture from George Louis’s palace.56

At a remove from the capital and bordered by the Thames, the house offered Caroline and George Augustus reminders of happier times at Hampton Court. Its setting resembled that of Pope’s villa at nearby Twickenham: ‘Our River glitters beneath an unclouded Sun … Our Gardens are offering their first Nosegays; our Trees, like new Acquaintances brought happily together, are stretching their arms to meet each other … The Birds are paying their thanksgiving Songs.’57 The duke’s garden, however, offered a vision of nature perfected, ornamented with trees in wooden planters: pomegranates and orange trees as at Herrenhausen; myrtle, bay and nut trees. In his Journey through England of 1714, John Macky judged it ‘a most delicious habitation’.58

George Louis was predictably displeased with the couple’s discovery. In a letter of July 1719 the Countess of Bristol referred to the ‘no small pains’ he had taken to ‘disappoint’ them in their hopes of ownership, and their friends’ happiness at the frustration of those pains. ‘Everyone,’ she noted, ‘took part in the Prince and Princess’s pleasure in having this place secured to them when they almost despaired of it.’59 For £6,000, George Augustus bought the house and its extensive gardens; for its contents, including fire shovels, blankets and a barn still stocked with peas, rye and wheat, he paid a further £709.1s.2d.60 Renovations were undertaken, and Caroline would set about constructing a sizeable library wing north of the main house. Up-to-the-minute sanitary arrangements are indicated by subsequent yearly payments to one John Bell for cleaning the ‘bathing copper’ and pipes.61

In early September 1719, in line with current thinking that ‘there is some sort of pleasure in shewing one’s own fancy upon one’s own Ground’, Caroline invited gardeners and garden-makers, including royal gardener Henry Wise, Charles Bridgeman and Pope, to discuss plans.62 Bridgeman won the royal imprimatur. He planted a series of avenues lined with trees, dug a rectangular duckpond, constructed viewing mounts, one overlooking the river, built an amphitheatre within an elm copse. In line with emerging theories of ‘natural’ design, he dotted about ‘morsels of a forest like appearance’; he created wildernesses and a snailery. A riverside terrace planted with elms stretched as far as the village of Kew. ‘The beauties of the most stately Garden or Palace lie in a narrow Compass, the Imagination immediately runs over them and requires something else to gratify her,’ Joseph Addison had written in the Spectator in 1712. He contrasted such ‘stateliness’ with ‘the wide Fields of Nature [where] the Sight wanders up and down without confinement and is fed with an infinite variety of Images, without any Stint or Number’.63 In Richmond, for the first time Caroline put into practice these emerging theories. Extended, altered and set in modishly remodelled gardens, the house became the setting for the couple’s summers until the king’s death, a rural idyll shorn of the formalities of Hampton Court.64 Smaller than any existing royal residence, it required Caroline to build a terrace of four houses on Richmond Green to accommodate the overflow of her household.65

For George Augustus, Richmond Park and its surrounds provided extensive hunting, of foxes as well as stags. Husband and wife canvassed a comic actor called William Pinkethman, who made his fortune performing short plays or ‘drolls’ at Bartholomew and Richmond Fairs, to erect a temporary theatre. As at Hampton Court, prince and princess took an interest in the local community. They called the house Richmond Lodge and, to one another, simply ‘the Lodge’. In December 1719 the Weekly Journal reported the rat-catcher John Humphries clearing the house of more than five hundred rats and taking them all ‘alive to Leicester House as a proof of his art’.66 On a practical level, their Richmond summers became for George Augustus and Caroline an opportunity for retrenchment, the prince targeting the royal table as a focus for economies. ‘His diet’, reported one unimpressed visitor, was ‘so plain and the quality of his roasts and dishes so little and the ingredients for dressing them so little’.67 One-off household expenses included ‘a Dutch Fire Engine’.68

1718 was a year of rumours and denials. Claims of reconciliation were rapidly succeeded by counter-claims. On 10 February, The Criticks: Being papers upon the times interpreted Caroline’s appearance at a royal drawing room as proof of ‘the near prospect there is of a reconciliation between his Majesty and his Royal Highness. The Princess of Wales’s appearance at court can bode no less.’69 By contrast, in March, Liselotte wrote that the men’s quarrel ‘gets worse every day. I always thought [George Louis] harsh when he was in Germany, but English air has hardened him still more.’70 Despairingly she told a correspondent, ‘There is not a word of truth in the story that the King of England gave the Princess of Wales a present of lace. Unfortunately, everything is still in a very bad way.’71 So bad, in fact, that on 22 April George Augustus cancelled a visit to the Drury Lane Theatre to attend a performance of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor, after hearing that George Louis had threatened to dismiss every actor who performed in front of him. In May, the Earl of Oxford stated that ‘any persons that are turned out of doors at St James’s are sure to find entertainment at Leicester Fields, so that the happy reconciliation is as near as ever’.72 An attempted amnesty in the summer failed. Meanwhile, as part of his policy of eclipsing Leicester House socially, and also because he had conceived an instant liking for the house, George Louis set in motion plans for new state apartments at Kensington Palace.

The prescriptiveness of George Louis’s terms for reconciliation points to his angry intolerance: ‘Provided the Prince would dismiss such of his servants as were disagreeable to the King, and that for the future he would take none but such as should be approved of by His Majesty. That he should give up his children and such a sum for their education as His Majesty should appoint. That he should neither see nor keep correspondence with any but such as His Majesty should approve of, and lastly that he should beg the Dukes of Roxburgh and Newcastle’s pardon.’73 George Augustus’s rejection was comprehensive; he refused to offer assurances of better conduct in the future. His response reflected a decision reached jointly by husband and wife.

In supporting his continuing stand against his father, Caroline may have had reasons of her own. Liselotte wrote that George Louis had spread injurious rumours about his daughter-in-law, suggesting possible infidelity. ‘He will get laughed at by everybody for doing this,’ she wrote on 28 July, ‘for the Princess has a spotless reputation.’74 Poets including Nahum Tate acclaimed Caroline as ‘Cynthia’, an alternative name for Artemis, a goddess associated with chastity as well as wisdom. As the recipient of Caroline’s confidences, Liselotte was baffled by George Louis’s reported stance. She described Caroline as one who had ‘never done anything against him and has always honoured, respected and indeed loved him as if he were her own father’.75 The words may be Caroline’s own, parroted by the older woman. If so, they tell us the impression Caroline was determined to convey to the outside world.

In May 1719, George Louis embarked on the visit to Hanover he had unwillingly abandoned two years earlier; among those who accompanied him were the composer Handel. So far were father and son from any restoration of normal relations that George Augustus was denied his former role of guardian and lieutenant of the realm. Instead the king drew up a Council of Regency: he excluded his son from its number. He did, however, formalise arrangements for increasing access to the royal children. On 4 May he instructed Lady Portland: ‘We do allow our … most Dearly beloved Son and our most Dearly beloved Daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales, to see our said Grandchildren as often as they shall think fit, provided it be only in the Apartment of our said Grandchildren, & that whenever our said Son and Daughter-in-law, or either of them, repair thither for that purpose, they bring with them none but their Servants of their Bedchamber actually attending in the course of Duty upon their Persons, & not any other Person or Persons who are forbid Our Royal Presence.’76 To Caroline he extended the opportunity of spending the summer with her daughters at Hampton Court. This concession did not apply to George Augustus, and Caroline declined.

An undated letter to Charlotte Clayton, probably written in the first half of 1719, seems to demonstrate Caroline’s conviction that George Louis’s attitude was softening, with compromise increasingly a possibility. ‘The King himself is troubled,’ she wrote, ‘& these are his very words that He can’t forgive himself.’77 Whatever the accuracy of her assessment, it was for this reason, as much as a desire to maintain appearances, that Caroline later waited on George Louis to congratulate him on his safe return from the electorate. Wherever possible, and regardless of the truth of her feelings, she acted to sustain the fragile discourse between the warring households.

In the meantime, and sensibly, she provided herself with diversions. At Leicester House the adoptive daughter of Figuelotte established the equivalent of a salon. ‘She loved a repartee; was happy in making one herself, and bearing it from others. And as this talent was rendered … amiable by the greatest good nature and chearfulness of disposition … she was (without respect to the dignity of her rank) the life of every company’ – useful qualities in a saloniste.78 Even Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, acidulated in her jealousy of Caroline, granted her such personal qualities that she would ‘never want a full court of the best sort of people that this country affords’.79

Poets Thomas Tickell, John Gay and Joseph Addison paid court to her. She had met Addison, a Whig enthusiast, and Gay separately at Herrenhausen, and all three men had written poetry in celebration of the Hanoverian succession. Gay’s motives were pecuniary. Habitually cash-strapped, in 1724 he dedicated to Caroline his play The Captives. Her attendance at the first night, added to a financial gift, contributed to its £1,000 profit, proof of the value of royal endorsement. The following year Gay addressed a sequence of fables to her younger son, but no satisfactory court appointment was forthcoming, and acrimony supplanted partisanship.

A handful of intermediaries may have led Caroline to Alexander Pope: candidates include Henrietta Howard, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the architect Earl of Burlington, whom Caroline had met in Hanover in 1714, and whose wife would become a lady-in-waiting. Later, Henrietta’s perseverance was a factor in persuading Jonathan Swift briefly to play his part in Caroline’s circle. (Swift himself would tell the Duchess of Queensberry that only after eleven invitations from Caroline did he finally ‘yield her a visit’.80) Swift’s attitude to Caroline was one of wariness. ‘I have no complaint to make of her Royal Highness,’ he wrote to Henrietta with rebarbative equivocation, ‘therefore I think I may let you tell her that every grain of virtue and good sense in one of her rank, considering their bad education among flatterers and adorers, is worth a dozen in inferior persons.’81 Swift gave Caroline a dress length of gold-threaded Irish silk; he composed throwaway lines on the subject of breakfast at Richmond Lodge. But Caroline’s attempt to introduce to early-eighteenth-century London the salon culture she had encountered in Berlin and Hanover yielded mixed results. Key players protested at the meretricious nature of royal patronage: ‘Her Majesty never shall be my exalter/And yet she would raise me, I know by – a halter,’ Swift wrote.82

Pope’s ambivalence was undisguised. In The Dunciad he mocked what he considered Caroline’s lumbering intellectual pretensions. Following a misunderstanding over a broken promise about a present, Swift’s feelings proved similarly ambiguous. With heavy-handed irony he described Caroline as ‘a perfect goddess born and bred,/Appointed sovereign judge to sit/On learning, eloquence and wit’.83 Such bitter implications earned him Caroline’s lasting aversion. Aspersions on her intelligence provoked angry rejoinders, whatever Robert Molesworth’s claim of her combining ‘the Highest Wisdom with the least Pretences to it’. Caroline found fewer faults with versifying courtiers Lord Stanhope (from 1726 Lord Chesterfield) and Lord Peterborough, though a suspicion that the former had included her among objects of his ridicule, mimicking the thickness of her accent and certain gestures, earned a stinging rebuke: ‘You may have more wit, my lord, than I, but I have a bitter tongue, and always repay my debts with exorbitant interest.’84

Less vexed was Caroline’s acquaintance with Ann Oldfield, a leading actress and the mistress of an illegitimate nephew of the Duke of Marlborough. ‘Engaging Oldfield, who, with grace and ease,/Could join the arts to ruin and to please’ had taken the part of Lady Jane Grey in Rowe’s tragedy of 1715.85 The Catalogue of All the English Plays in Her Royal Highnes’s [sic] Library, compiled in 1722 and extending to several hundred entries, indicates the scope of Caroline’s interest in the theatre.86 Her conversations with Antonio Conti, a Venetian philosopher-scientist who was a protégé of George Louis’s half-sister Sophia Charlotte, ranged farther afield: they discussed Newton, Plato and Descartes. Conti’s knowledge of theology, mathematics and medicine recalled those men of learning Caroline had encountered at Lützenburg and Herrenhausen, chief among them Leibniz.87 In his breadth of knowledge he offered Caroline an intellectual stimulus absent from her marriage – like another distinguished Leicester House visitor, the French philosopher Voltaire. In memory of their meetings in 1726, two years later Voltaire dedicated to Caroline his eulogy of the French king Henri IV, La Henriade. ‘It was the fate of Henry IV to be protected by an English Queen,’ he addressed Caroline. ‘He was assisted by the great Elizabeth, who was in her age the glory of her sex. By whom can this memory be so well protected as by her who resembles so much Elizabeth in her personal virtues?’88 It was neither the first nor the last time Caroline’s name was linked with Elizabeth I’s.

Voltaire’s commendations aside, Caroline was fortunate that her interests extended beyond the brittle praise of poets and the syllabub froth of court gossip. In 1728, in his dedication to Newton’s posthumously published The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, John Conduitt wrote, ‘all Your hours of leisure are employed in cultivating in Your Self That Learning, which You so warmly patronize in Others’.89 One visitor to Leicester House described Caroline’s gatherings as ‘a strange picture of the motley character and manners of a queen and a learned woman … learned men and divines were intermixed with courtiers and ladies of the household; the conversation turned upon metaphysical subjects, blended with repartees, sallies of mirth and the tittle-tattle of a drawing room’.90 Formal receptions frequently included similarly ‘motley’ elements of new learning. Sir John Evelyn described demonstrations at Leicester House drawing rooms of a new sort of military device and a machine that produced colour printing.91

From her arrival in Berlin Caroline had been exposed to extensive theological and philosophical debate. Left behind in Hanover, Leibniz remained among her correspondents after 1714. Influenced by Figuelotte and Sophia, as well as by memories of Eleonore’s strong faith, she maintained an active interest in religious discourse; as queen she would involve herself in Church patronage, even recommending a bishopric for her clerk of the closet, Joseph Butler, on her deathbed.92 ‘The tittle-tattle of a drawing room’ was never enough for Caroline. In her first week in waiting, Lady Cowper reported Caroline’s request of works by Jacobean philosopher and politician Francis Bacon; weeks later the princess read John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690.93 Bacon had championed scientific enquiry, a rational and sceptical mindset. He claimed that ‘the inquiry, knowledge and belief of truth is the sovereign good of human nature’, a view compatible with Locke’s argument that understanding is acquired through experience.

A fortnight after embarking on her study of Bacon, the dispute-loving Caroline was visited at St James’s Palace for the first time by heterodox divine Dr Samuel Clarke.94 Clarke was rector of the nearby church of St James’s, Piccadilly. A controversial figure, his religious views engaged with, and in part endorsed, findings on natural philosophy published by Newton, whose Opticks he had translated into Latin. He presented Caroline with books he had written. Of his Demonstration of the being and attributes of God of 1705, he claimed his argument was ‘as near to Mathematical as the Nature of such a Discourse would allow’, a line of reasoning guaranteed to intrigue the book’s recipient. Clarke shared Newton’s qualified belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, and in 1712 had published The scripture-doctrine of the Trinity: wherein every text in the New Testament relating to that doctrine is distinctly considered. His own view celebrated God’s transcendence: ‘The Father alone is Self-Existent … Independent.’95 For the unorthodoxy of these views, Church authorities had compelled from him a promise that he cease publishing on the subject of the Trinity. No such constraints curtailed his private conversation.

In November 1714 there was nothing accidental in Clarke’s visit to Caroline at St James’s Palace. In a letter to Caroline written earlier that year Leibniz had attributed a decline in religious belief in England to the writings of Isaac Newton. Newton, who considered his work as bolstering belief in God despite his private reservations about the Trinity, called on Clarke as go-between once he learned of the accusations against him. In refuting Leibniz on Newton’s behalf, Clarke could count on support from several of Caroline’s new household, including the Low Churchwomen Mary Cowper and Charlotte Clayton.

Caroline read Clarke’s books virtually at once, evidence of the extent of her interest. Not only read but approved. To the Countess of Nottingham, who dismissed Clarke as a heretic, she described him on 19 November as ‘one of my favourites’, his writings ‘the finest things in the world’.96 Yet neither Clarke’s treatises nor the intervention of her ladies played a persuasive part in the debate between Leibniz and Newton, in which both men embroiled a willing Caroline. The philosopher-scientists’ disagreement was only superficially theological. Its roots lay in a contest of longer standing concerning the invention of differential calculus. Newton dated his discovery to 1666, though he did not publish his findings until 1693. Leibniz also claimed the breakthrough, having published his own account in 1684.

For two years Caroline arbitrated in an epistolary debate in which Clarke took Newton’s part and letters passed nominally between Clarke and Leibniz, seen by Caroline. Her own first sympathies lay with Leibniz, a valued link to Figuelotte. It was he who in 1704 had been present at Caroline’s discussions with Father Orban and who had written her formal rejection of Archduke Charles’s suit. Shortly after her arrival in London, Caroline proved her attachment in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade George Louis to offer Leibniz a position as British royal historiographer. Now, however, with increasing exposure to Newton’s views, her position altered. This was partly attributable to the charisma of the man himself. Aged and infirm, carried by chair the short distance from his house in nearby St Martin’s Street to Leicester House, Newton was nevertheless a giant, compelling presence in Caroline’s drawing room. She ‘frequently desired to see him, and always expressed great satisfaction in his conversation’, wrote a relation of Newton’s by marriage; in February 1716, accompanied by Clarke, he made an afternoon visit to St James’s Palace to explain his ‘system of philosophy’ to her.97 Caroline’s shifting allegiance recognised Newton’s eminence in British life. Consistent with so much of her public behaviour, she understood the impossibility of championing Leibniz at the expense of his British counterpart.

Certainly Leibniz’s disdain for his rival was unremitting. On 10 May 1715 he decried Newton’s position to Caroline by drawing an analogy between the eucharist and gravity and concluding that, in relation to the former, Newtonian science undermined Lutheran doctrine. Caroline was unpersuaded by what sounds like sophistry. Such was the gulf between the men that Clarke refused to translate into English Leibniz’s Theodicy, although Leibniz intended to dedicate the translation to Caroline, and Clarke could have anticipated disappointment on her part at his refusal. In the event Caroline did not react amiss – Lady Cowper’s diary indicates that, far from a rift with Clarke, the princess’s household consulted him as scientist as much as divine. On the night of 6 March 1716, Lady Cowper records Clarke explaining the phenomenon of ‘an extraordinary light’ so irregular it inspired terror in the men carrying her sedan chair.98 According to Clarke’s first biographer ‘seldom a week passed’ in which, when in London, Caroline did not see him or read material he sent her.99 She ‘used frequently to pit Dr Samuel Clarke … on subjects of literature’ against the scholar and royal librarian Richard Bentley, despite Bentley’s aversion to such exchanges, and in allowing Clarke to publish his correspondence with Leibniz, she endorsed a dedication to herself and the accompanying statement that the letters had been written at her instruction.100 Her affection for the clergyman is indicated by later acts of charity. ‘If you see Dr Clarke,’ she wrote to Charlotte Clayton in 1718, ‘pray tell him in my name that I design 100 guineas per annum for his chair hire, & it shall begin at Christmas & pass through your hands.’101 That she discussed her encounters with all three men with her eldest daughter Anne is apparently indicated in a letter written in 1738 by the future Frederick the Great to Voltaire: ‘I spoke at length with the Princess about Newton; from Newton we moved on to Leibniz and from Leibniz to the late Queen of England [Caroline].’102

She allowed Clarke a degree of frankness in their dealings. According to one anecdote, Caroline ‘once pressed … Dr Clarke strongly to acquaint her with her faults. After evading this delicate business as long as he could without giving offence, he at length said; “As I am compelled, your Majesty must pardon me for saying that when people come from the country to St James’s chapel for a sight of the royal family, it is not a very edifying example to them, to see your Majesties talking during the whole time of divine service.” – The Queen blushed: told the Doctor he was right, and a hearty laugh ensued.’103 And Caroline was candid in her dealings with Leibniz. In the month of the ‘extraordinary light’, she described herself to him as ‘nearly converted’ by Newton’s theories on the ‘reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light’; in May she explained, ‘I am in on the experiments, and I am more and more charmed by colours.’104 For Leibniz, such admissions were so much wormwood and gall.

The triangular dialogue of Leibniz, Caroline and, in the role of Newton’s amanuensis, Clarke, continued until Leibniz’s death in November 1716. A year later, when the letters were published as A Collection of Papers which Passed between the Late Learned Mr Leibnitz and Dr Clarke in the Years 1715 and 1716 Relating to the Principles of Natural Philosophy, they bore Clarke’s statement that their publication was validated by Caroline’s patronage. Her participation in this altercation, which was complex and contentious, demonstrates her excitement at developments in contemporary thought. It also indicates the longevity of the influence of Figuelotte and Sophia. Caroline understood the critical importance of appearing to embrace Anglican orthodoxy, particularly given Queen Anne’s public record of wholehearted and rigorous piety. ‘As she knew she had the reputation of being a little heterodox in her notions, she often … denied herself the pleasure of seeing and conversing with men who lay under that imputation,’ recorded Lord Hervey; consistently she questioned religious truisms.105 In line with current thinking, her curiosity blurred distinctions between science, theology and philosophy. She enjoyed the company of those who shared her interests. In 1716 she granted audiences lasting up to three hours to Benjamin Hoadly, absorbed by the ideas on authority within the Church of this controversial Low Church bishop and his unwavering support for the Hanoverian succession.106 In turn, her own enthusiasms inspired those around her. Lord Hervey mocked Lady Deloraine’s absorption in philosophy in 1731, writing, ‘she has taken of late into the sweet fancy to study philosophy and talks all day, and I believe dreams all night of a plenum and a vacuum. She declares of all philosophers Dr Clarke is her favourite and said t’other day if there was any justice in Heaven, to be sure he took place there of the twelve apostles.’107 It was recognisably one of Caroline’s fancies.

Caroline’s earliest encounters with the Anglican priesthood date from the beginning of George Louis’s reign. Diligent in demonstrating the level of religious devotion she knew was expected of royal women, she nevertheless engaged in exchanges of views with priests of wide-ranging outlook. As a result of her Lutheranism, her instinctive sympathies were for Low Churchmen and Latitudinarians – those within the Church of England who favoured a liberal approach to liturgy and doctrine, like Clarke, Hoadly, who edited Clarke’s Sermons, and Robert Clayton. She also included among her circle High Churchmen: Archbishop Wake, who aspired to closer relations between Anglicans and French Catholics; leading Tory Churchman Dr Thomas Sherlock, Dean of Chichester, reported in 1727 as having ‘oftner access [to Caroline] in private than anyone of the clergy’; and the cleric who became her chaplain, Joseph Butler.108 For the remainder of her life, at Leicester House and beyond, Caroline continued to explore aspects of theological debate within informal conversation and in her reading. Lord Egmont concluded, ‘she reads and converses on a multitude of things more than [her] sex generally does’.109 It was a further instance of the continuing legacy of her first mentors.

As with his contempt for ‘boets’ and ‘bainters’ (poets and painters), George Augustus did not share his wife’s interest in religion. The couple were closer in their political outlook and their attitude to George Louis.

From the beginning, each understood the conditions necessary for ending the royal quarrel. Without an apology on George Augustus’s part, they recognised that reconciliation would remain impossible. The king was determined on control. Sunderland reported him as asking, with biblical rhetoric, ‘Did you not always promise to bring me the Prince bound hand and foot?’110 As early as February 1718 one journal pointed out that, without the prince’s submission, ‘’tis absurd to think of healing the breach’.111 The same publication identified Caroline as the ideal mediator, on the grounds of her ‘consummate conduct and goodness’ as well as her particular interest in the issue. A petition from ‘several loyal subjects, Englishmen and Protestants’ proposed ‘none so proper as your Royal Highness to assuage these jealousies and reduce both parties to a reunion’.112 And far from being damaged by the ongoing schism, Caroline’s popularity remained high: she was widely regarded as an innocent victim in the conflict between father and son, her task of intermediary a delicate one. In April 1719 a Catholic sedan-chair carrier, or chairman, called Moore insulted Caroline in her sedan chair. According to the report in the Weekly Journal of his trial and its aftermath, he found himself jeered by angry crowds, who followed him from Somerset House to the Haymarket. ‘The respect her Royal Highness has among all parties was remarkable in the general cry there was all the way he pass’d of “Whip him”, “Whip him”; and by the great number of people that caressed and applauded the executioner after his work was over.’113 In the event, however, it was not Caroline, working alongside her husband, who brought about the uneasy truce unconvincingly enacted on St George’s Day 1720, but a go-between of a different complexion.

Throughout the winter of 1719, ‘every Day … once, if not twice’, Caroline had been visited at Leicester House by Robert Walpole.114 Walpole was the political leviathan of the age, an abrasive, opportunistic Norfolk squire of redoubtable intellect, excluded from office since his quarrel with Stanhope and Sunderland but still a dominant presence in the House of Commons. In 1719 he helped defeat a government Peerage Bill meant to prevent George Augustus from creating new peers after his accession and thus perpetuate indefinitely the ministry’s own political hegemony.115 Displays of oratorical mastery, however, were not enough for Walpole, nor were George Augustus’s best interests his primary motive. He intended a full return to power and saw the long-term political dangers of a continuing royal rift. Assiduously he cultivated Caroline’s good opinion. Defeat of the Peerage Bill lay close to her heart. ‘The Prince & I work like dogs, & perhaps to as little purpose,’ she wrote as the Commons debate approached, a statement that indicates both the extent of the couple’s political engagement and their partnership.116

Walpole’s intervention ensured the outcome Caroline wanted. He avoided the mistakes of other politicians in paying court to Henrietta Howard or, like Stanhope, personally berating and offending Caroline. Instead, day after day through that long winter, in his own words he took the ‘right sow by the ear’. His behaviour included its measure of flattery. Through Caroline he was confident he could bend George Augustus to his will. For all Caroline’s initial misgivings – her dismissal of Walpole’s ‘gros corps … jambes enflées, et … villain ventre’ (fat body, swollen legs and vile belly) – politician and princess had much in common. Both inclined to coarseness of expression and strength of purpose; both were earthy, bold, determined. To Walpole, Caroline represented a shortcut to the future king. He was not a man to consume his energies looking backwards. It was another trait they shared.

Walpole successfully persuaded Caroline of the overlap in their interests. By the spring of 1720, a resentful Lady Cowper lamented that ‘Walpole has engrossed and monopolised the Princess to a Degree of making her deaf to Everything that did not come from him.’117 Walpole’s planned reconciliation between the royal combatants included a proposal for repaying George Louis’s £600,000 civil list debt and George Augustus’s debts of around £100,000. As immediately appealing to Caroline was the prospect of a politician at the heart of government sympathetic to prince and princess and the possible return of her daughters.

Walpole recommended the dispatch of a letter from George Augustus to his father. It was an idea the prince had previously rejected: a sufficient expression of contrition and a guarantee of future obedience. For Lady Cowper, who found herself summarily supplanted as Caroline’s adviser, it smacked of self-serving: ‘all this to procure Walpole and Townshend the Benefit of selling themselves and their Services at a very dear Rate to the King’.118 Caroline’s pragmatic response acknowledged that Walpole’s gain was likely to prove her own. She understood the vulnerability of her own and her husband’s position. She described herself as ‘oblig’d to the lower house for all the Prince enjoys of his possessions’, recognising Parliament’s power over them financially.119 To Charlotte Clayton she wrote of the proposal to cancel George Augustus’s debts, ‘You can easily judge … what I feel upon this head both as the wife and the mother of the persons who will reap the fruit.’120 Correctly she surmised that a quarrel at the heart of the royal family would ultimately benefit only the regime’s opponents, chief among them trouble-making Jacobites.121 ‘The Reputation of a Quarrel,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘is allways so ridiculous on both sides.’122

In the second week of April, Walpole made Caroline his ‘Offers of Reconciliation’. To Lord Cowper he explained, ‘the Princess was to have her Children again, and … the Prince was to write to the King … and should return to live again at St James’s; that Lord Sunderland had promised to come into all Measures of the Court, and in particular that of raising [£600,000] to pay the Debts of the Civil List, and that this was the only Opportunity for the Prince to make an advantageous Bargain for himself’.123 Despite Walpole’s daily and twice-daily visits to Leicester House, neither Caroline nor George Augustus accepted these assurances as certain. George Augustus insisted ‘he would write Nothing that should tie his Hands’, prepared to voice the bare minimum by way of apology.124 Nor did the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of Norwich, Charles Trimmell, sway either husband or wife. ‘The Bishop of Norwich offered to swear upon his Knees to the Prince and Princess that all terms should be made good and satisfactory to them; that all the Princess’s Friends were to be restored.’125 George Augustus remained sceptical, and Caroline correctly, upsettingly and frustratingly estimated her powerlessness in the whole process. According to Lady Cowper, she ‘cried and said, “I see how all these Things must go; I must be the Sufferer at last, and have no Power to help myself.”’126

And so it was. So it had been for Eleonore, so too for Sophia Dorothea and, save in the patronage she exercised at Lützenburg, for Figuelotte. If Lady Cowper’s account is trustworthy, both she and her husband implored Caroline’s resolution in insisting on the return of her children; behind the scenes Lord Cowper investigated the possibility of dismissing Lady Portland and replacing her with a governess of Caroline’s choice. Mary Cowper reported Caroline as telling Walpole, ‘This will be no jesting Matter to me; you will hear of me and my Complaints every Day and Hour, and in every Place, if I have not my Children again.’127 Walpole persuaded her that nothing could be gained from George Louis through demands; instead she must trust.128 On 15 April the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, visited Caroline. That she ‘said Nothing of the Affair to him’ proved to concerned courtiers the extent of Walpole’s influence over her: ‘the Archbishop … was entirely kept out’.129 Encouraged by Walpole and Caroline, George Augustus wrote to his father. Lady Cowper described him as ‘governed by the Princess as she is by Walpole’, a verdict that would persist.130

Lady Cowper considered the couple had been ‘half frighted, half persuaded’ by Walpole, but the letter Caroline wrote to Charlotte Clayton on the eve of George Augustus’s formal reception by his father indicates both excitement and relief: ‘I give you, my dear Clayton, the good news that the reconciliation will be made today, & that I shall soon have the satisfaction of naming you, my dear Clayton, without constraint mine.’131 Three years was a long time to have been separated from virtually everyone bar George Augustus of whom she was fondest. The prospect of closure, even without gain, was a welcome one for Caroline.

By contrast, George Louis’s response does indeed suggest ‘half’ persuasion. He received his son coldly, Caroline not at all. In return for his pains, on his departure for Leicester House George Augustus was once again attended by beefeaters, ‘drums and guards and fine things’, as Walpole commented dismissively.132 With some vehemence – and to the relief of George Louis – he refused to move back into St James’s Palace. Caroline’s tears notwithstanding, and despite the warnings of the Cowpers and Walpole’s asseverations, mother and father were not reunited with their children, and Lady Portland continued as governess. Four days earlier, Princess Anne had been diagnosed with smallpox, ‘in such a dangerous way that I very much feared for her life’, wrote royal physician Sir Hans Sloane.133 George Louis allowed Caroline to visit her daughter, but no part in her treatment. ‘Every Day, from Eleven to Three, and from Six to Eleven’, Caroline sat at Anne’s bedside until she recovered.134 Her illness, with its attendant anxieties, exposed just how unsatisfactory for Caroline Walpole’s compromise was, particularly when a letter from Archbishop Wake to Lord Sunderland, requesting permission to visit Caroline, ‘not knowing how soon he might be sent for to do his Duty to the afflicted Mother in her comfortless State’, found its way accidentally into Caroline’s hands. It was proof of the very powerlessness she had bewailed. A reflection of her resignation, ‘the Princess said Nothing but “Voyez quel Homme!”’135

Her own reconciliation with her father-in-law took place on 24 April, in a small closet off her daughter’s sickroom. Unlike George Augustus’s five-minute exchange with his father, their conversation lasted an hour and ten minutes. To Lord Cowper, Walpole reported that ‘the King was very rough with the Princess – chid her very severely in a cruel Way. He told her she might say what she pleased to excuse herself; that she could have made the Prince better if she would, and that he expected from henceforward she would use all her Power to make him behave well.’136 Caroline’s response has not survived. With her customary concern for appearances, as well as her pride, she ‘came out transported at the King’s mighty kind Reception, and told the Doctors and Everybody how mighty kind he had been to her’.137 ‘The Germans used to say,’ Lady Cowper noted, ‘the Princess of Wales was “grandissime Comédienne” [a great actress].’138 At her mother’s knee, Caroline had learned that royalty was a performance art. On 24 April 1720, maintaining the dignity of her rank demanded dissimulation. She had no intention of advertising her humiliation, nor would she acknowledge publicly any justness in Lady Cowper’s argument that prince and princess had been made a ‘cat’s foot’ by Walpole to serve his own ends. Instead she wrote to George Augustus’s sister Sophia Dorothea in Berlin, informing her of her pleasure in the happy outcome.139

She did not attend the premiere of Handel’s Radamisto at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, three days later. King and prince made what was probably a carefully orchestrated first public appearance together, albeit in separate boxes.140 Popular excitement ran high. Inside the theatre the crowd was sizeable, proof of public interest in the royal peace-making. ‘Many [women], who had forc’d their way into the house with an impetuosity ill suited to their rank and sex, actually fainted through the excessive heat and closeness of it,’ remembered Handel’s biographer Mainwaring in 1760. ‘Several gentlemen were turned back, who had offered forty shillings for a seat in the gallery, after having despaired of getting any in the pit or boxes.’141

If they hoped for visible signs of affection between monarch and heir, the eager audience was as thoroughly disappointed as the courtiers who had thronged George Louis’s drawing room two nights earlier, when ‘the King spoke not to the Prince nor none of his Friends’.142 George Louis had recently answered a letter from his daughter. As Caroline had known she would, Sophia Dorothea had reported Caroline’s expressions of joy at the royal reconciliation. The king’s reply betrays the full ambivalence of his feelings for Caroline by this stage. ‘I do not know if the joy the Princess has indicated to you is sincere,’ he wrote. He explained his conviction that, had she been of a similar mind previously, there were several occasions when she could have taken care not to have made things worse.143 It was a clear apportioning of blame, and accurate insofar as it recognised Caroline’s support for George Augustus’s opposition to his father. This view was shared by others among George Louis’s intimates. Mary Wortley Montagu claimed that Caroline ‘never resented anything but what appeared to her a want of respect for [George Augustus]’, the light in which she presented to the prince his father’s intransigence.144 In truth, in their mutual mistrust and antipathy, there was little to choose between the feelings of all three senior royal figures. George Louis suspected that Walpole and Townshend had forced his son into a reconciliation; George Augustus and Caroline knew they had been manipulated. At least George Louis’s dislike fell short of Sunderland’s. The minister, George Louis’s groom of the stole since 1719, toyed with plans for having George Augustus transported overseas.

‘I fear I am with child,’ Caroline wrote simply to Charlotte Clayton that July.145 She was thirty-seven years old, and greeted the discovery with mixed emotions. Two years had passed since her miscarriage at Richmond Lodge; still vivid were her memories of George William’s death and the protracted labour that had resulted in a stillborn son the year before that. Referring to the unhappy outcome of all three recent pregnancies, she added, ‘the accidents which have lately happen’d give me noe encouragement’. As ever, gossip in Caroline’s household uncovered the news almost before the princess herself was aware of it. ‘I hear she is a-breeding,’ wrote one of her ladies, ‘but I believe nobody knows she is, so that at most it is but suspicion.’146

In this instance Caroline would prove more fortunate in her pregnancy. Her thoughts, however, dwelt on her two last births. A letter written by Lady Cowper shows Caroline questioning the right of members of her household to entry to her bedchamber for the delivery. ‘I spoke to [Lord Cowper] last night, according to the Princess’s command, about the people proper to be present at the labour; he bids me say that the Princess is at her perfect liberty in that point to do as she pleases, neither the law, nor any rule or custom, having fixed upon anybody to be present.’147 On 15 April 1721, without attendant duchesses, Caroline gave birth to her fourth baby boy.

On this occasion no opposition met her decision to call him William Augustus, nor her choice of godparents: husband and wife Frederick William and Sophia Dorothea of Prussia and, as previously, George Louis’s brother Ernest Augustus. Sophia Dorothea learned of the compliment from her father. In a letter written at the beginning of May, George Louis communicated news equivalent to that which, four years earlier, had provoked the royal rift. That he did so may point to a softening – however mild – in his attitude to George Augustus and Caroline.148 For their part the royal couple’s names for their son indicate anything but conciliation.

At best the news of her pregnancy was a distraction from Caroline’s disappointment at the outcome of events in April, described by the Duchess of Marlborough as ‘deficien[cies] in the late reconcilement’.149 To British representatives at foreign courts and foreign ministers at St James’s, George Louis had sent notice of the restoration of family harmony. Stubbornly, with a zeal born of love, Caroline had held out for the return of her daughters, only to be thwarted by Walpole and George Louis.

At least the nursery regime devised by Lady Portland was in accord with Caroline’s own priorities. Surviving exercise books belonging to Princess Anne point to ambitious aspirations in the royal schoolroom: extracts from Plutarch, Herodotus and Thucydides translated into French, German transcriptions of theological texts, the history of the Roman Empire rendered in Italian.150 To the music lessons for which Handel received £200 a year were added lessons in drawing and painting from artist Philippe Mercier, afterwards responsible for the best-known image of Caroline’s children, The Music Party of 1733. Crucially, however, and devastatingly for Caroline, the girls remained in their grandfather’s care, in apartments close to his own, or with access to those of Madame Schulenburg, at St James’s, Kensington and Hampton Court. George Louis required control over the princesses; more than that, he expected their affection. To Anne, he wrote, ‘all that I wish my dear granddaughter is that you further nurture your friendship towards me’.151 From an early age, Anne, Amelia and Caroline struggled to balance conflicting loyalties. Forgiveness or no forgiveness, apologies accepted or otherwise, family ‘unity’ would remain elusive.

After William, there would be two more children for Caroline and George Augustus: Mary, born in February 1723, and Louisa in December 1724, when Caroline was forty-one. A letter written by maid of honour Bridget Carteret after Louisa’s birth demonstrates the extent to which Caroline’s principal function continued to be seen as securing the royal line: ‘It is with great pleasure that I congratulate dear Mrs Clayton upon her Royal Highness’s safe delivery. We think it such a blessing her being safe and well, that we do not repine at not having a Prince at some proper time.’152

By 1724 there would be no ‘proper time’ left for Caroline: William was the couple’s last son. Caroline’s recovery from Louisa’s birth was unusually protracted. More than a month later, George Louis described her as almost ready to leave her bedroom, following an unspecified ‘violent attack’ either of pain or of illness.153 Like even those closest to Caroline, he had no idea that his daughter-in-law had suffered an umbilical rupture following Louisa’s delivery. It was a secret Caroline would guard determinedly, concealed from all but George Augustus, who agreed never to mention it, and one for which she paid dearly. Six months later, in July 1725, her eleventh and final pregnancy ended in another miscarriage. A letter of 27 July from the Countess of Pomfret to Charlotte Clayton highlights concern among her female attendants about her health in the aftermath.154

The absence of the three eldest princesses, added to Frederick’s continuing residence in Hanover, divided Caroline’s family permanently. Not only age but location separated the children of Leicester House from their older siblings. William, Mary and Louisa were a decade younger than Frederick, Anne, Amelia and Caroline. They had no experience of electoral life in Hanover, and lived full-time with their parents. Frederick’s upbringing had been entrusted to courtiers and George Louis’s Hanoverian ministers: his governor, Johann Friedrich Grote, was the brother of a treasury minister.155 Attempts by George Augustus in 1718 to secure Frederick’s transfer to London had predictably failed. For Anne, Amelia and Caroline, regular visits from their mother contrasted with constant exposure to a court environment in which their father was regarded with contempt, Caroline with suspicion. For each princess George Louis provided a gentleman usher, dresser, chambermaid, page of honour and page of the back-stairs. All were his own appointments.156 While the regime’s adherents would continue to celebrate George Augustus and Caroline’s royal ‘family’, the togetherness of siblings and parents was illusory. Inevitably it was Caroline’s happiness that suffered most.

With no alternative, she responded pragmatically. She visited her elder daughters as often as she was able, and took a close interest in the upbringing of her ‘second’ family of William, Mary and Louisa. According to Stephen Philpot’s Essay on the Advantages of a Polite Education joined with a Learned One, published in 1747, Caroline was usually present at the children’s lessons; on other occasions she requested a report from their tutor.157 The younger princesses’ routine was based on that of their sisters, and included an hour-long walk each morning between seven and eight, and regular prayers.158 George Augustus shared aspects of his wife’s involvement. At Leicester House, according to Sir Hans Sloane, husband and wife ‘always took most extraordinary, exemplary, prudent and wise care of the health and education of their children’.159 An associate of Isaac Newton’s commended Caroline’s ‘singular Care for the education of the Royal Issue, and earnest desire to form their minds betimes, and lead them into the knowledge of Truth’.160 Unsurprisingly, the woman whose own handwriting was disastrously self-taught employed a writing master for her youngest daughters, a Mr Palairet.161

The input of Caroline and George Augustus extended to discipline, as Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough discovered on a visit to Leicester House. The duchess’s arrival coincided with Caroline physically punishing one of her daughters. When the visitor attempted to console the child, George Augustus responded by remarking, ‘Ah, see there, you English are none of you well bred because you were not whipped when young.’162 Momentarily overlooking the couple’s habitual masquerade of Britishness, he identified Caroline’s parental severity as distinctively German. But British childhood too contained its measure of brutality. The cause of death of a four-year-old girl in the family of diarist John Evelyn was identified as her corset: the child’s ribs were broken by over-tight lacing. She died when her broken ribs pierced her lungs.163 And George Augustus shared Caroline’s strictness. In 1751, he remembered, ‘I know I did not love my children when they were young: I hated to have them running into my room.’164

Set against this severity, Caroline and George Augustus commissioned a third portrait from Martin Maingaud soon after the reconciliation. Completed in 1721, Maingaud’s image of Anne, Amelia and Caroline, aged eight to thirteen, depicts the princesses as the Three Graces in a composition that points to a degree of parental pride.165 A letter from Caroline to the youngest of the princesses shows a mother’s concern for good behaviour, coloured by the mildest asperity: ‘Caroline, I pray you quit your indolence which prevents you from expressing your pretty thoughts and makes you act as if you had neither feeling nor reason.’166 In addition, a verdict of the Duchess of Buckingham, illegitimate daughter of James II, concerning ‘the little care and regularity that is taken in the prince’s family’ with regard to the tidiness and arrangements of Leicester House, points to parents more interested in family life than the appearances of rooms or a visitor’s good opinion.167

With some success, Caroline took pains to encourage the six siblings in Britain to think of themselves as a single family. A letter translated by Mary from Latin into English as part of a series of exercises set by the royal tutor Jenkin Thomas Philipps reports, ‘The Duke, your Brother [William], has this morning caught a great Fish two foot long, which he gave to his sister Amelia for her Dinner.’168 In another letter in the same series, Mary translated ‘His serene Highness William, your most dear Brother, has turned the Roman History of Sextus Rufus into English, which he designs to dedicate to your Highness, that it may be a Monument of his Brotherly love towards you.’169 Family togetherness is a constant theme of the ‘letters’ William and Mary exchanged under Philipps’s tuition – the emphasis surely arose at Caroline’s request. ‘I pray God that it may not rain tomorrow, but be a fine day,’ Mary translated, ‘that your Highness may go out in the Coach with the Queen and your Sisters, to catch a great Buck, who is swift of feet, but the Dogs are swifter.’170 A similar emphasis on the siblings’ good fortune, although conventional enough, may also have arisen at their parents’ request. ‘You live a very happy life, you see horse races,’ Mary translated, in a letter that contrasted the blessings of her own life with the ‘privations’ of her tutor’s. ‘I am forced to stay at home for I have no Coach nor horse, & I cannot walk, because it rains very fast.’171

The education of the younger royal children also included specific sops to their mother’s predilections. On 5 December 1727, Philipps set six-year-old William the following translation: ‘When first I knew you, you seemed to have a great Quickness of Wit & you was not born for Trifles, as other Boys are, but for learning. Yesterday you asked me a very curious Question but hard to be explained, for Instance you asked me if everything could return to Nothing?’172

This was precisely the sort of philosophical speculation Caroline had encountered at Lützenburg and Herrenhausen, a question of the sort debated by the mixed company at Leicester House. It was a question she might have asked herself, this Princess of Wales at odds with her king, denied the company of her older children, still – when the formalities of reconciliation were done – exiled to Leicester Square.

Caroline’s affection for her children was shortly tested by an undertaking that engrossed and appalled her contemporaries. In April 1722, at their mother’s instigation, ten-year-old Amelia and eight-year-old Caroline were inoculated against smallpox.

Two years earlier, Caroline had kept an anxious bedside vigil as Anne battled the disease that she herself had suffered early in her marriage. So serious was Anne’s condition that the Archbishop of Canterbury anticipated her death; her recovery left her badly scarred. The following year, in February, began a two-month smallpox epidemic in London. One doctor reported that it seemed ‘to go forth like a destroying Angel’; it was ‘epidemical and very mortal’.173

Its terrible toll among acquaintances and her extended family galvanised into action Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, recently returned from Turkey, where she had encountered the process of inoculation that she described as ‘engrafting’. Into the skin of a healthy patient, matter from the pustules of a smallpox victim was inserted; the recipient, in subsequently succumbing to a mild dose of the disease, acquired lasting immunity from its severer forms. Lady Mary’s four-year-old son Edward had been inoculated in 1718. In 1721 her infant daughter Mary was also successfully treated.

Little Mary’s inoculation was performed by Charles Maitland and witnessed by a handful of members of the College of Physicians, as well as ‘Several Ladies, and other Persons of Distinction’.174 Inevitably the procedure attracted public attention. Physicians petitioned George Louis for permission to experiment with the miraculous process on condemned inmates of Newgate Gaol; royal physician Sir Hans Sloane directed the king’s attention to the breakthrough. For her part, Lady Mary attributed the medical men’s interest to Caroline. She claimed the princess ‘was her firm support and stood by her without quailing’.175

At George Louis’s agreement, Sloane oversaw the inoculation by Maitland of six prisoner volunteers at the end of August. Five survived. (The sixth was already ill at the time of the inoculation.) Their reward was a royal pardon. Maitland wrote an Account of Inoculating the Small Pox, but deferred publishing. Inspired by Sir Hans and Lady Mary, Caroline had conceived a plan to inoculate ‘all the Orphan Children belonging to the Parish of St James’s, Westminster’.176 Opposition was widespread – from an incredulous public, sceptical physicians, and clergymen who considered the disease ‘a divinely instituted check against sin’.177 In the event only six charity children were inoculated, and Maitland published his account in February 1722. Caroline consulted Hans Sloane following the successful treatment of his own grandchildren. Cautiously, the doctor refused to commit himself. ‘The Princess then asked me if I would dissuade her from it,’ he recorded, ‘to which I made answer that I would not, in a matter so likely to be of such importance.’178 Added to the Wortley Montagus, Newgate prisoners and Westminster orphans, it was endorsement enough for Caroline. With George Louis’s permission, Princesses Amelia and Caroline were inoculated on 17 April. Caroline’s response to what happened next has not survived, but any anxiety she may have felt was soon dispelled by her daughters’ full recovery. Lady Mary described herself as ‘so much pull’d about and solicited to visit people’ due to fashionable interest in the experiments, ‘that I am forc’d to [run] into the Country to hide my selfe’.179

From Versailles, where medical practice was bungling even by contemporary standards, Liselotte expressed concern. ‘I must confess that I worried a great deal about the Princess of Wales and the two Princesses. I am not so brave, and if my children were quite well I couldn’t possibly steal myself to make them ill, even though it was for their own good.’180 Hers was the prevailing view of the times, that of Caroline and George Louis, who took an active interest in scientific research promoted by the Royal Society, considerably in advance.181 ‘God grant … that the dear little Princesses are protected for the rest of their lives from this horrible disease,’ wrote Liselotte. ‘My doctor doesn’t think this remedy is safe, he says he doesn’t understand it.’182

In 1723 Maitland travelled to Hanover to inoculate Frederick, whose indifferent health, including glandular pains and ‘fevers’ treated by bleeding and a diet of asses’ milk, was a further cause of Caroline’s concern. For his efforts Maitland received handsome payment of £1,000. The younger royal children were inoculated in 1726. ‘A great Part of the Kingdom follow’d her Example, and since that Time ten thousand Children, at least, of Persons of Condition owe in this Manner their Lives to her Majesty,’ Voltaire wrote in 1733.183 Acknowledging the vital importance of royal sponsorship in overcoming objections, in 1724 James Jurin of the Royal Society dedicated to Caroline his Account of the Success of Inoculating the Smallpox.184

The formalities of reconciliation accomplished, George Louis had returned to Hanover in the summer of 1720. In his absence, he allowed the three elder princesses to rejoin their parents. It was a lone concession, made with Caroline in mind. For all his reservations, George Louis did attempt to rebuild his relationship with his daughter-in-law, greeting her at a drawing room in May with the unequivocal ‘Je suis ravi de vous voir ici’ (‘I am delighted to see you here’) and, on another occasion, singling her out for conversation when he ‘said not a Word to the Prince, nor any Soul belonging to him’.185 Lady Cowper recorded a conversation between Caroline and Archbishop Wake’s wife at the beginning of July: ‘“Our Children we shall have, and the Regency they promise us, but the Last I don’t believe; and I tell you naturally, my dear Mrs Wake, I will venture my Nose we shan’t have it.” I was pulling on her Gloves, and said, “Yes, Madam; if your Highness had thirty Noses you might venture them all without the least Danger to them.”’186

For three years during the courts’ split, George Augustus and Caroline had provided a focus for opposition politicians. With Walpole, along with Townshend, restored to the ministry, the couple’s closest political associate returned to George Louis’s service. The king’s visit to Hanover was the first of four he would make before his death; on each occasion he denied his son powers of regency or guardianship. Mistrustful of Walpole on account of his part in the reconciliation, George Augustus turned instead for political advice to his treasurer Sir Spencer Compton, speaker of the House of Commons. But Compton was an ally of Walpole’s: he cautioned compromise. Caroline’s mistrust of Townshend predated the family split.

Compton’s advice was intended for both prince and princess, and was probably unnecessary. For Caroline, as well as George Augustus, stark lessons emerged from their three-year estrangement from the king. Both understood the futility of continuing opposition. After April 1720, a number of disaffected politicians renounced Leicester House for St James’s Palace, their defection proof of the real centre of patronage and influence. To George Augustus’s lasting chagrin, Walpole and Townshend headed the stampede. Lacking an alternative, and with his father embarked on his seventh decade, the heir to the throne settled down to play a waiting game in the unlikely company of Walpole’s Tory opponents, Lords Bolingbroke and Bath. At Richmond Lodge each summer George Augustus put behind him the politics of the capital for up to six months at a stretch, returning in late autumn for official celebrations of his birthday on 30 October. The retirement of the couple’s life in Richmond, in an environment of family and friends without courtly ceremonial, reflected their efforts at increasing detachment. Few official images of either George Augustus or Caroline survive from this period. With retirement came a decline in their public profile. There was some comfort for Caroline in the return to the ‘publick’ days at Leicester House of those courtiers George Louis had forbidden to visit either prince or princess. In May 1720 Sir John Evelyn noted ‘a great deal more company than used to be here before ye reconcilement of ye King and Prince’.187

Instead husband and wife made political capital by alternative means. Unlike George Louis, his mistress Madame Schulenburg, created Duchess of Kendal in 1719, and half-sister Sophia Charlotte, Countess of Darlington from 1722, George Augustus and Caroline emerged largely unscathed that year from the collapse of the South Sea Company. Established in 1711 to secure government borrowing at a fixed rate, the company had become an El Dorado scheme offering investors the profits on a trade monopoly with South America as a means of servicing the national debt. Serendipitously, in 1718 the disgraced George Augustus had lost his position as governor of the company, to be replaced by his father. George Louis’s holdings of South Sea Company stock represented at least £20,000. Bribes of shares worth £15,000 apiece netted support from Melusine and Sophia Charlotte, while two of Melusine’s daughters were each given shares worth £5,000. But the fabled trade with South America was virtually non-existent. Stoked partly by the company’s association with George Louis, Melusine and members of the ministry, the manic speculation of the summer of 1720 was founded, as one commentator marvelled, ‘upon the machine of paper credit supported only by imagination’.188 Share prices rocketed almost tenfold. The fortunate profited mightily. And the inevitable bursting of the South Sea Bubble in September reduced others, including John Gay, to beggary.

The involvement of monarch, mistress and ministers in so catastrophic a financial fraud shattered confidence in government probity. Allegations of corruption centred on leading players. Lady Cowper borrowed money secretly to acquire stock that swiftly plummeted. It is in this context that we ought to measure her claim that Walpole had won Caroline and George Augustus’s support for reconciliation with bribes of share handouts: ‘pleas[ing] the Princess … by making her a Stockjobber in the South Sea’.189 If this statement is true, the gift represented a change of heart on the part of politician and princess, according to a letter written by Caroline late in 1719: ‘I can assure you upon my honour that Walpole is sincere & has not entered into that ugly scheme,’ she insisted. ‘He is furious in the affair & violent against all those who have bought.’190 In February 1720, Walpole had attacked government plans to make use of the South Sea Company to lessen the national debt; in December he won parliamentary support for proposals to deal with consequences of its collapse. Although he was not the sole architect of the government’s response, it was Walpole who, politically, would benefit most from recovery efforts that included shielding George Louis from censure. The aftermath of the crisis sealed his pre-eminence. Ditto the death from a cerebral haemorrhage of Stanhope in 1721, and that of Sunderland from pleurisy the following April. Neither man had proved himself a friend to George Augustus and Caroline. For the moment their successor was George Louis’s first minister, and distasteful to George Augustus for this reason; he called him ‘rogue and rascal without much reserve, to several people, upon several occasions’.191 Caroline’s response was surely mixed. For Lady Cowper, at whose expense Walpole had achieved his ascendancy over Caroline, the relationship between mistress and bedchamber lady would not recover.

Meanwhile, in 1722 Walpole embarked on the rebuilding of his family home at Houghton in Norfolk to designs by Colen Campbell. The work was funded by profits of his South Sea Company stock, of which Caroline apparently knew nothing. Like Caroline at Richmond Lodge, he employed as landscapist Charles Bridgeman. And Caroline maintained a polite interest in the after-effects of speculating. In July 1729, hapless equerry Peter Wentworth recorded her ‘ask[ing] me if I was not in the Bubbles. With a sigh I answered: “Yes, that and [other mishaps] had made me worse than nothing.” Some time after, when I did not think she saw me, I was biting my nails. She called to me and said: “Oh, fie! Mr Wentworth, you bite your nails very prettily.”’192 Later still, a Colonel Graham is recorded as delivering to Caroline an account of George Louis’s South Sea stock, compiled by Sir Charles Vernon.193

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described the pastoral revelry of Richmond Lodge: racing boats on the Thames, outdoor entertainments in the new gardens Caroline had commissioned from Bridgeman following her garden-makers ‘summit’ in 1719, and, as summer gave way to autumn, ‘His Royal Highness hunts in Richmond Park, and I make one of the Beau monde in his Train.’194 ‘On Monday night last,’ reported the Daily Post on 23 August 1721, ‘Mr Penkethman [sic] had the honour to divert their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales, at his theatre at Richmond, with entertainments of acting and tumbling, performed to admiration; likewise with his picture of the Royal Family down from the King of Bohemia to the young princesses, in which is seen the Nine Muses playing on their several instruments in honour of that august family.’195 Undoubtedly Caroline was better pleased with this flattering dynastic tableau vivant than with any amount of acting and tumbling, however admirably performed.

‘The Prince, and everybody but myself, went last Friday to Bartholomew Fair; it was a fine day, so he went by water,’ wrote one of Princess Amelia’s maids of honour on 31 August 1725. ‘After the Fair, they supped at the King’s Arms, and came home about five o’clock in the morning.’196 For her part Caroline was described as ‘walk[ing] about there all day’ when at Richmond Lodge.197 Indoors she indulged the taste for ceramics, including Chinese and Japanese porcelain, that she shared with Mary II. On 12 June 1724 Lady Hertford reported the East India Company making ‘the Princess a present of Japan which they say cannot be equalled by any in the world. It is indeed the finest that, I believe, ever came to England.’198

In a contemporary engraving of the house by Joseph Goupy, it appears a Watteau-esque backdrop to holiday diversions. Gate piers frame long views over lawns that are swept and raked by gardeners. Pockets of courtiers disport themselves languidly. High walls and banks of trees shelter decorous enclosures and, behind the matchbox house, with its steep roof and heavy triangular pediment, sunlight washes suggestively. ‘Nothing can be pleasanter than this place. Every field looks like a garden,’ Lady Hertford wrote to her mother.199

Intimations of princely bliss were only partly misleading. Future sovereigns, George Augustus and Caroline retained influence and consequence. ‘I write to you at this time piping hot from the Birth night, my Brain warm’d with all the Agreeable Ideas that fine Cloths, fine Gentlemen, brisk Tunes and lively dances can raise there,’ wrote Lady Mary to her sister after the ball to mark George Augustus’s fortieth birthday in 1723.200 Celebration of Caroline’s forty-first birthday the following spring was equally enthusiastic. In honour of her position as Princess of Wales, representatives of the Society of Antient Britons presented leeks at Leicester House. The Weekly Journal described the formal birthday reception as ‘the most splendid and numerous that has been known, the concourse being so great that many of the nobility could not obtain admittance and were obliged to return without seeing the Prince and Princess’.201 A roster of bishops, judges and ambassadors from as far afield as Morocco offered congratulations. ‘At one o’clock the guns in the park proclaimed the number of her Royal Highness’s years, and at two their Royal Highnesses went to St James’s to pay their duty to his Majesty, and returned to Leicester House to dinner, and at nine at night went again to St James’s, where there was a magnificent ball in honour of her Royal Highness’s birthday.’202 A year later, at his house near Greenwich the Duke of Leeds marked Caroline’s birthday with night-time illuminations. Bonfires, fireworks and flaming obelisks provided a setting for toasts drunk to royal family and government.

It was not only royal birthdays that provided diversion. The endowment of a Royal Academy of Music in 1719, the list of subscribers headed by George Louis and George Augustus, made London for a decade the operatic centre of the world. To a succession of new operas by Handel were added works by the newly resident Giovanni Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti; Caroline had encountered both composers previously at Figuelotte’s court in Berlin. In February 1724, Handel’s librettist Nicola Francesco Haym dedicated to Caroline the word-book to the composer’s latest opera, Giulio Cesare in Egitto, with its contrasting feminine paradigms: Pompey’s faithful widow Cornelia and the ambitious seductress Cleopatra. Haym praised Caroline’s ‘perfetta e giudiziosa conoscenza della Musica’ (‘perfect and judicious knowledge of music’), which he attributed to Pistocchi’s early teaching.203 Notwithstanding the period’s perfidious flattery, it is clear that Caroline had maintained her early interest in music. The royal dedication in this instance was happier than Handel’s dedication to George Augustus, three years previously, of Floridante. This middling work dramatises the challenges of a Thracian prince whose jealous father attempts to strip him of his rights to the throne.204

Caroline witnessed an undignified spat between supporters of rival sopranos Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni at a performance of Bononcini’s Astianatte on 6 June 1727. The British Journal reported that ‘on Tuesday-night last, a great Disturbance happened at the Opera, occasioned by the Partisans of the Two Celebrated Rival Ladies, Cuzzoni and Faustina. The Contention at first was only carried on by Hissing on one Side, and Clapping on the other; but proceeded at length to Catcalls, and other great Indecencies: And notwithstanding the Princess Caroline was present, no Regards were of Force to restrain the Rudenesses of the Opponents.’205

On 16 April 1726, Jonathan Swift noted a new resident at Leicester House. In the words of less enlightened commentators ‘more of the Ouran Outang species than of the human’, the feral child offered as a gift by George Louis to Caroline walked on all fours, laughed, snorted and whinnied and, publicly and unconcernedly, soiled himself. He was called Peter. Villagers had discovered him in woodland close to Hanover, a child of twelve or thirteen who lived among the trees, fending for himself and foraging. He spoke no German and gave no evidence of previous exposure to humans. On George Louis’s orders he had been brought to St James’s Palace. There, at a crowded drawing room on 7 April, he encountered Caroline, resplendent in black velvet and heavily jewelled. Entranced, he listened to her ‘gold watch that struck the hours … held to strike at his ear’.206 She was equally entranced, this princess absorbed by science, philosophy and religion. Peter had no soul, observers insisted; he was a savage, accustomed to eating acorns and moss. He had leapt, Daniel Defoe commented, ‘from the woods to the court; from the forest among beasts … to the society of all the wits and beaus of the age’.207 There is no indication that George Louis’s courtiers identified Defoe’s irony.

At Leicester House, Caroline invited Dr Arbuthnot – physician, satirist, mathematician, philosopher and a ‘character of uncommon virtue and probity’ – to educate Peter.208 The boy resisted. Arbuthnot diagnosed him as mentally handicapped; courtiers tired of antics that ceased to charm. So Peter was lodged in Hertfordshire with a family paid for their surrogacy. For sixty years he worked as an agricultural labourer, spared the scarlet stockings royal courtiers had wrestled him into. At Caroline’s intervention and thanks to the efforts of Dr Arbuthnot he avoided a return to the house of correction in Celle where he had first been brought to George Louis’s attention. His reign as court jester was brief.

Briefly Peter’s misrule had recalled the high spirits of the first years of Caroline and George Augustus’s court. His departure was one of several from Leicester House. By the mid-1720s the households of the middle-aged prince and princess lacked their former effervescence. Maids of honour Mary Bellenden and Mary Lepell had left Caroline’s service on marriage, the latter to fellow courtier Lord Hervey. Sophy Howe had lost her post in 1720 after an ill-judged elopement, disguised as a boy, and an illegitimate pregnancy. Appointed in Miss Howe’s place in February 1721, Mary Howard was beautiful but foolish – Hervey refers to her ‘wretched head’ – and failed to inspire the admiration her predecessors had excited. Caroline’s later appointments, although she continued to value intelligence, suggest her primary requirement from her ladies was seamless integration into the increasingly domestic court circle. Of a new lady of the bedchamber, Henrietta, Countess of Pomfret, she wrote in October 1725, ‘I am very well satisfied with Lady Pomfret. She seems as if she lov’d me, & has wit & the experience of the world, & the advice of a good friend will make her a real woman of quality. She behaves wonderfully well in the family, & everybody is satisfied with her.’209

Among remaining royal attendants there were murmurs of dissent. As early as November 1714, ‘ill from standing so long upon my feet’, Lady Cowper had protested against the physical strain of court appointments.210 After 1720 her resentment of Walpole, attributable to his part in the royal reconciliation, corroded her admiration for Caroline. Relations between the women were further strained by Caroline’s choice of the Countess of Dorset as the Duchess of St Albans’s replacement as groom of the stole.211 Mary Cowper had coveted the position herself; she considered herself slighted. Certainly Caroline’s handling of the new appointment lacked transparency. Following Lord Cowper’s resignation in 1718 against George Louis’s will, Lady Dorset was a less contentious choice than Cowper’s wife for the senior position in Caroline’s household, and perhaps, given pressure on her from George Louis to reinstate the duchess, Caroline’s only alternative. Lady Cowper remained at court until her death in 1724; a rancorous note colours her later diary entries. ‘Nothing was more evident than the Transports of Joy in which the Princess was with this new Accession of Flatterers, and Mr Walpole had so possessed her Mind, there was no room for the least Truth,’ she wrote on 20 May 1720.212 Inevitably such all-consuming sourness tarnished the atmosphere of the royal bedchamber.

Lady Cowper was not alone in her disenchantment. After George Augustus’s birthday in 1726, the Honourable Mrs St John wrote a poem to Caroline’s lady of the bedchamber, the Countess of Hertford: ‘My rambling thoughts are strayed from home, –/Why need they farther than St James’s roam?/When now perhaps, you’re stifled in the crowd,/On hearing P[rince]’s jokes so coarse and loud;/Or else retired behind the Chair of State,/Where you’re compelled to praise what most you hate,/Or listen to some idle page’s prate/Till midnight strikes.’213 In the same year the Duchess of Shrewsbury died. Caroline’s account of her death, which she attributed to the incompetence of royal physician Sir John Shadwell, indicates dry humour: ‘He gave her something very strong to ease her stomach, & when that was too strong, he gave her laudanum, which laid her asleep for this world.’214 The death of the spirited, louche-tongued duchess further diminished the stock of cheer at Caroline’s court.

Henrietta Howard, described as ‘much in the vapours’, felt it sooner than most. As early as 1722 Mary Bellenden, now Mrs Campbell, had written to her, ‘I was told before I Left London, that somebody that shall be nameless, was grown sour & crosse & not so good to you as usual.’215 The relationship of Caroline’s bedchamber woman and George Augustus was built on flimsy foundations: Henrietta’s desire to escape her dislikeable husband and the prince’s need, via the face-saving measure of a mistress, to counter suggestions of an emasculating attachment to Caroline. In sensibility, outlook and motive mistress and prince were misfits. Even George Augustus’s sexual attraction to Henrietta failed to rival the earthy passion Caroline still inspired in him. Recent events had not altered him. He remained of a testy, exacting nature, preoccupied with what Figuelotte had once dismissed as ‘littleness’, ‘calm when great points go as he would not have them … but when he is in his worst humours and the devil to everybody … it is always because one of his pages has powdered his periwig ill or a housemaid has set a chair where it does not use to stand’.216 His ‘love’ was a routine matter. He ‘was the most regular man in his hours: his time of going down to [Henrietta Howard’s] apartment was seven in the evening: he would frequently walk up and down the gallery, looking at his watch, for a quarter of an hour before seven, but would not go till the clock struck’.217

In letters to her friends, Henrietta expressed her longing to escape her life at court and a position she had embraced through expediency; she described herself as ‘Jealous for Liberty and property’.218 Ongoing, occasionally violent attempts by Charles Howard to reclaim his wife, his motives pecuniary, malevolent, trouble-making, added to her strain. He involved Caroline in his threats – in April 1726 he warned her that George Louis commanded that Henrietta ‘immediately retire from her employment under Your Royal Highness’.219 For reasons of her own, namely her determination that George Augustus retain this mistress she controlled, Caroline stood her ground. Later Henrietta described the ‘malicious pleasure’ with which Caroline showed her a letter from Archbishop Wake, urging her to relinquish Henrietta to her lawful husband, an instance of Caroline making clear to her rival her power over her.220

First impressions long abated, the women cherished little warmth for one another. Caroline was not above reminding Henrietta ‘that it was in my power, if I had pleased, any hour of the day, to let her drop through my fingers – thus –’.221 Unsurprisingly, Henrietta felt the indignity of her role as bedchamber woman. Her less congenial tasks included holding a bowl of water on bended knee while Caroline washed her hands or cleaned her teeth. Henrietta minded enough to investigate past precedents to provide her with grounds for refusal. In her frustration she chose, Caroline wrote, to ‘quarrel with me about holding a basin of ceremony at my dressing, and to tell me, with her fierce little eyes and cheeks as red as your coat, that positively she would not do it; to which I made her no answer in anger, but calmly, as I would to a naughty child: “Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will; indeed you will.”’222 Precedents went against Henrietta, and Caroline’s calm patronising did little to win her rival’s affection.

For his part, as time passed, George Augustus derived scarcely more satisfaction than she from his relationship with the woman Caroline labelled his ‘trull’.223 To his credit, in an unusual act of generosity, in 1724 he gave Henrietta the enormous sum of £11,500. She would use it to build Marble Hill House, a Palladian villa close to Pope’s house in Twickenham, on the opposite bank of the Thames from Richmond Lodge, a two-hour barge journey from central London. Like Caroline, Henrietta employed Charles Bridgeman as landscapist. In October 1728 she heard from Lord Chesterfield of an ‘extreme fine Chinese bed, window curtains, chairs, etc, to be sold for between 70l and 80l: if you should have a mind to it for Marble Hill’.224 Lady Hervey refers to Henrietta stealing nights away from court at Marble Hill in 1729.225

Condemned to enforced intimacy with husband and mistress, the smooth running of her household periodically shattered by Charles Howard’s malign bluster, Caroline can hardly have avoided the dampening effect of their shared disaffection. Yet she relied on Henrietta for respite from George Augustus – the hours he spent in his mistress’s rooms each evening, their walking together in the morning – and she did not intend to relinquish her. In this difficult atmosphere her children provided distractions, so too the interior life she stimulated with ‘the reading of choice authors … always one of her greatest pleasures’.226 ‘When I had the honour to see [the Princess of Wales] She was Reading Gulliver, & was just come to the passage of the Hobbling prince, which she Laughed at,’ Dr Arbuthnot wrote to the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, on 5 November 1726.227

In the same letter, Arbuthnot indicated the success of Swift’s recent present to Caroline of Irish plaid: ‘The princess immediately seizd on your plade for her own use, & has ordered the young Princesses to be clad in the same.’228 Still separated from her elder daughters, Caroline could enjoy nevertheless the affinity of dressing alike. Testament to her considerable physical girth by this stage, she ordered twenty-five yards of Swift’s Irish silk for her own dress, and twenty to provide dresses for her three elder daughters.229 Behind her back, she learned, the corpulent Walpole described her as ‘a fat old bitch’.230

Caroline’s marking time ended on 11 June 1727. In the early hours of the morning, in the town of Osnabrück where he had been born, George Louis died. He had broken his journey en route to Hanover, following a stroke brought on by indigestion from the surfeit of strawberries or oranges or melons he had eaten two nights earlier at a hefty supper in the Dutch town of Delden. For the sixty-seven-year-old monarch it was a straightforward, unheroic death.

Too straightforward in the event to escape the lurid impulses of romancers. Legend attributes George Louis’s death to fear. A letter, it was rumoured, was handed to him in his travelling coach. Its author was his estranged wife Sophia Dorothea, whose death on 13 November 1726 George Louis had marked by going to the theatre on two consecutive nights. He had forbidden court mourning for her in London or Hanover, and prevented George Augustus from acknowledging in any manner his unhappy mother’s demise. So slow were his orders concerning her burial that the River Ahler surrounding the dismal manor house of Ahlden had overflowed its banks in winter storms by the time his instructions arrived. Logged with water, the manor garden could provide no burial place for the lead coffin, which threatened to float away. For want of an alternative it was removed to a church in the town of Celle, where the simplest of plaques commemorates this unfortunate princess.

Perhaps those responsible for the story of a letter from beyond the grave imagined that Sophia Dorothea had anticipated just such an ignominious end. In the bitterness of her final days she reminded the man who had destroyed her happiness of a prophecy that within a year of her death, he too would die.

Flaming torches lit the procession that bore George Louis’s body into Hanover. Trumpeters ‘rest[ed] their trumpets bottom upward’, silent in respect. Even at one o’clock in the morning ‘a great concourse of people from all parts [of the electorate]’ had gathered to witness, ‘with tears in their eyes, this last honour paid to their late sovereign, once the joy and delight of his subjects’.231 He was buried in the church within the Leineschloss, close to his mother Sophia. Sixteen colonels of the Life Guards carried his coffin.

Days later, the news reached London. Roused by Robert Walpole from his afternoon nap at Richmond Lodge, his breeches in his hands, his mood discouraging, George Augustus succeeded his father as George II in a vignette that lacks dignity. His accession was proclaimed at Leicester House, Charing Cross, Temple Bar, Cheapside and the Royal Exchange. And Caroline became queen. Among the new king’s first actions, according to Horace Walpole, was to hang at Leicester House two portraits of his mother, against walls draped in purple and black. He placed the larger portrait in Caroline’s dressing room – out of sight of the crowds of politicians and place-seekers who Lord Hervey described as rapidly thronging George Augustus’s house until it resembled the floor of the Royal Exchange in the middle of a busy trading day.232 ‘All the nobility of both sexes now in town attended at Leicester House and had the honour to kiss their Majesties’ hands,’ wrote Lord Polwarth.233 It was in stark contrast to the doldrums of the royal split.