W. H. Wilkins

“ Every one, both in England and Hanover, felt that a crisis was imminent, yet no one, on either side of the water, prepared for it. The Queen’s death was likely to be accelerated by her own mental struggles with regard to the succession to her crown, and by the fierce quarrels and jealousies that raged among her advisers. The rival ministers could scarce forbear coming to blows in her presence, the rival claimants to her throne were eager to snatch the sceptre from her failing hand almost before she was dead. ”

“ Caroline could not mourn for ever, and thanks to a strong constitution, youth and health asserted themselves, and she quite recovered her beauty and her vivacity. The Ansbach burghers knew all about her refusal of the future Emperor, and they honoured her for her courage and firmness, and were proud of their beautiful young princess, whom the greatest prince in Europe had sued in vain. Caroline interested herself in many schemes of usefulness in her brother’s principality, and went in and out among the people displaying those rare social gifts which stood her in good stead in later years. ”

“ Newton, an old man then, came sometimes to Leicester House, carried across in his chair from his house in St. Martin’s Street, hard by. Caroline had a great veneration and love for him, and she always gave him the first place at her gatherings, and listened with reverence to all he had to say. She often saw Newton in private, and consulted him about the education of her children. It was Caroline who made the remark, absurdly credited to George the First, that it was the greatest glory of the House of Hanover to have such subjects as Newton in one country and Leibniz in another. ”

“ A month after the Queen’s death the new King departed for the Hague, without any ceremony. He took with him a train of Hanoverians, including Bernstorff, his Prime Minister, and Robethon, a councillor, two Turks, Mustapha and Mahomet, and his two mistresses, Schulemburg and Kielmansegge. The former was even more reluctant than her master to quit Hanover, and feared for the King’s safety. But George consoled her with the grim assurance that “in England all the king-killers are on my side,” and like the others she came to regard England as a land of promise wherein she might enrich herself. ”

“ And so it proved, for when the hour appointed for the council drew nigh, the royal victim, worn out with sickness of mind and body, and dreading the strife, was seized with an apoplectic fit. She was carried to bed, and her state was soon seen to be hopeless. The news of the Queen’s illness got known to Bolingbroke and his friends first, probably through Lady Masham, and they hurried to the palace. Lady Masham burst in upon them from the royal chamber in the utmost disorder, crying: “Alas! my lords, we are undone, entirely ruined—the Queen is a dead woman; all the world cannot save her”. ”

“ The Duke of Newcastle was a mean-spirited and ill-favoured nobleman, whose eccentricities rendered him the laughing-stock of the Court, and he had made himself especially obnoxious to the Prince and Princess of Wales. All this the King knew full well, and to appoint him godfather to the Prince’s child was a studied insult. The Prince of Wales was furious, but his royal sire refused to give way, and the christening took place, as arranged, in the bedroom of the Princess of Wales at St. James’s. ”

“ He had always to be reckoned with. He kept the appointments in his own hands, and his care to exclude the great Whig Lords from his Government, in favour of younger men with less influence, showed that he was determined not to be dictated to. But his policy of forming his first Administration entirely of Whigs made him of necessity the King, not of the whole nation, but of a faction. George the First was not a great statesman, and his little knowledge of English affairs made it difficult for him to include in his first Government some of the more moderate among the Tories. ”

“ They determined to show how brilliant a Court they could hold, and how gracious they could be; their object being to bring out in sharp contrast the difference between their regency and their father’s reign. They gathered around them a galaxy of wit and beauty; the youngest, wealthiest and most talented among the nobility, the wittiest among men of learning and letters, the fairest and youngest of the women of quality, all came to Hampton Court in addition to the lively and beautiful ladies of the Princess’s household. ”

“ He was a contemptible character, but his wife never manifested any contempt for him; her conduct indeed was a model of all that a wife’s should be—from the man’s point of view. The little prince would rail at her, contradict her, snub her, dash his wig on the ground, strut up and down the room, red and angry, shouting at the top of his voice, but, unlike her mother-in-law, Sophie Dorothea, Caroline never answered her husband ”

“ Neither the Electress Sophia nor the Duchess of Orleans realised that the crown of England was not in the Queen’s gift, or that there was a power behind the throne greater than the throne. If this power had been vested in the people, there is little doubt that James would have come into his own. ”

“ The Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick William, had spent a good deal of time at the Hanoverian Court when a boy. His grandmother, the Electress Sophia, had wished to educate him at Hanover with her other grandson, George Augustus, but Frederick William was of a quarrelsome disposition, and pummelled George Augustus so unmercifully that they had to be separated. Their hatred for one another lasted through life. Frederick William was a headstrong and violent youth, with ungovernable passions; even when a boy it was dangerous to thwart him in any way. The boy was father to the man. ”

“ These letters of Leibniz and Clarke were read out at Caroline’s reunions, and the Princess, who took the liveliest interest in the controversy, conducted a discussion upon these abstruse questions in which her learned guests took261 part. Her intellectual life was lived wholly apart from her husband. The Prince, too, had his social suppers in private, but no learned men were bidden, nor were there any metaphysics or theology. In fact, on the evenings when the Prince and Princess did not receive in the magnificent Queen’s Gallery, there were little parties going on all over the palace. ”

“ Howard and others, which, though they bear witness to the correctness of her principles, almost make one doubt the sparkling wit with which her contemporaries have credited her. Perhaps marriage had exercised a sobering influence, though she showed not the slightest affection for her husband. Poor Sophia Howe was dying in obscurity of a broken heart. The maids of honour who had taken the place of these had not the esprit and beauty of their predecessors. But the popularity of the Princess of Wales continued unabated, and Leicester House was always crowded at her birthday receptions. ”

“ George the First had told him to keep his eye on the Prince, “to keep all things in order, and to give an account of everything that was doing”. Politics, too, intruded to break the harmony. The Prince and Princess seemed determined to be of no party—or rather to create one of their own. They received malcontent Whigs, Tories, and even suspected Jacobites at Hampton Court; and Argyll, though dismissed from his offices by the King’s command, still stood high in their favour. ”

“ One night at supper she had the impudence to declare before several of the ladies-in-waiting that, “Englishwomen do not look like women of quality, they make themselves look as pitiful and sneaking as they can; they hold their heads down and look always in a fright, whereas foreigners hold up their heads and hold out their breasts, and make themselves look as great and stately as they can, and more noble and more like quality than you English”. ”

“ And then he went on to say: “The standard of his Majesty’s taste, as exemplified in his mistress, makes all ladies who aspire to his favour, and who are near the suitable age, strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and the dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others—burst.” Whereat the Princess and her ladies laughed heartily. But Chesterfield’s wit was a two-edged sword, which he sometimes directed against the Princess herself, mimicking her gestures and her foreign accent the moment her back was turned. ”

“ If we had the power now to realise the marvellous beauty and harmony of things, we should reduce happiness to a science, and live in a state of perpetual blessedness. But since this beauty is hidden from our eyes, and we see around us a thousand sights that shock us, and cause temptation to the weak and ignorant, our love of God and our trust in His goodness are founded on faith, not yet lost in sight or verified by the senses. ”

“ Consequently I wish the same good things to his Highness, your consort, since you can only occupy the throne of that great Queen with him. Whenever the gazettes publish favourable rumours concerning you and affairs in England, I devoutly pray that they may become true; sometimes it is rumoured here that a fleet is about to escort you both to England, and a powerful alliance is being formed to support your claims. ”

“ The Electress Sophia was a worthy ancestress of our good Queen Victoria, whom in some respects, notably her devotion to duty, and her large and liberal way of looking at things, she closely resembled. No English historian has yet done justice to the eventful life of Sophia of Hanover, who missed, by a bare two months, becoming Queen of England. It was largely in consequence of her able policy, maintained throughout a critical period, no less than her Stuart descent, that her descendants came to occupy the English throne. ”

“ He wrote a long poem to the Princess of Wales, in which he mingled her praises with his necessities. The only practical result of this effusion was that Caroline went to Drury Lane to honour the first performance of Gay’s next effort, which he described as a tragi-comi-pastoral-farce, “What d’ye call it?” a burlesque on the plays of the time; it was a failure, notwithstanding this distinguished patronage. Gay at this time was a far greater social success than a literary one, and the maids of honour especially delighted in his sunny, cheery presence. ”

“ This, of course, was an allusion to the hurried meeting which had been held in Lady Masham’s apartments when the Queen lay dying,191 and Atterbury’s offer to go forth and proclaim James. But all the Ministers were not so zealous as Walpole, and more moderate counsels prevailed; they were afraid of arousing the old cry of “The Church in danger,” and Atterbury was left alone. But Bolingbroke in the House of Lords sat and heard that he and some of his late colleagues were to be impeached of high treason. ”

“ The Court of Berlin, where Caroline was to spend the most impressionable years of her life, was queened over at this time by one of the most intellectual and gifted princesses in Europe. Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg, who in 1701, on her husband’s assumption of the regal dignity, became first Queen of Prussia, was the daughter of that remarkable woman, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, and granddaughter of the gifted and beautiful Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James the First of England. ”

“ Meanwhile the old Electress, despite her assurances to the Queen, was listening to the suggestions put forward by the English Whigs, through their emissaries in Hanover. Her favourite plan was, that though she herself, as heiress to the throne, could not visit England without an express invitation from the Queen, yet the Electoral Prince and Caroline might do so. She seems thus to have prompted her grandson to court popularity with the English at the expense of his father. The Elector placed little faith in Queen Anne, who he considered was merely playing him off against her brother, James. ”

“ The Court of Hanover at the time of Caroline’s marriage was one of the principal courts of North Germany, not equal in importance to that of Berlin, or in splendour to that of Dresden, but second to no others. During the reign of the first Elector, Ernest Augustus, and his consort, the Electress Sophia, Hanover had gained materially in power and importance. The town became the resort of wealthy nobles, who had before divided their attentions between Hamburg and Brunswick. ”

“ Like her illustrious descendant, Queen Victoria, she never passed a day without spending many hours in the open air; she sometimes drove, but more often walked for two or three hours in the gardens of Herrenhausen, pacing up and down the interminable paths, and talking the whole time in French or English to her companions. In this way she gave audience to many Englishmen of note, from the great Marlborough downwards, and it is on record that she tired out many of them. ”

“ It is exceedingly unlikely that a morganatic marriage took place, for the King, shortly after the death of his ill-treated consort, took to himself another mistress, who in time might have proved a formidable rival to the old-established favourites. On this occasion he selected an Englishwoman, Anne Brett, a bold and handsome brunette, who was the daughter of the divorced Countess of Macclesfield by her second husband, Colonel Brett. Anne demanded a coronet as the price of her complaisance and the old King was so enamoured that he promised her everything she wished. ”

“ The Electoral Prince is now in despair about going to take his seat in the English Parliament, as he had hoped. I do not know how the world will judge of the policy which keeps us still at Hanover. I do not so much regret the loss we personally may suffer, as that we may116 seem to have abandoned for the moment the cause of our religion, the liberty of Europe and so many of our brave and honest friends in England. I have only the consolation of knowing that everything possible has been done by the Prince to obtain the Queen’s permission. ”