LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
| Caroline, Princess of Wales. From the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller | |
| [Frontispiece] | |
| to face page | |
| The Castle of Ansbach | [8] |
| Lützenburg (Charlottenburg) | [20] |
| Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia. From the original portrait by Wiedman | [34] |
| Queen Caroline’s Room in the Castle of Ansbach | [54] |
| George II. and Queen Caroline at the Time of their Marriage | [70] |
| The Electress Sophia of Hanover | [88] |
| Leibniz | [102] |
| Herrenhausen | [124] |
| The Ceremony of the Champion of England Giving the Challenge at the Coronation | [152] |
| King George I. From the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery | [174] |
| Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (in Eastern dress) | [200] |
| Prince James Francis Edward Stuart (The Chevalier de St. George). From the picture in the National Portrait Gallery | [218] |
| Lord Nithisdale’s Escape from the Tower. From an old print | [242] |
| Pavilions Belonging to the Bowling Green, Hampton Court, temp. George I. | [258] |
| Leibnizhaus, Hanover (where Leibniz died) | [270] |
| Caroline, Princess of Wales, and Her Infant Son, Prince George William. From an old print | [284] |
| Leicester House, Leicester Square, temp. George I. | [302] |
| Mary, Countess Cowper. From the original portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller | [324] |
| The South Sea Bubble. From an old cartoon | [346] |
| Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke | [358] |
BOOK I.
ELECTORAL PRINCESS OF HANOVER.
CHAPTER I.
ANSBACH AND ITS MARGRAVES. 1683–1696.
Wilhelmina Caroline, Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach, known to history as “Caroline of Ansbach,” Queen-Consort of King George the Second of Great Britain and Ireland, and sometime Queen-Regent, was born in the palace of Ansbach, a little town in South Germany, on March 1st, 1683. It was a year memorable in the annals of English history as the one in which Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney were brought to the block, who by their blood strengthened the long struggle against the Stuarts which culminated in the accession of the House of Hanover. The same year, seven months later, on October 30th, the ill-fated Sophie Dorothea of Celle, consort of George the First, gave birth to a son at Hanover, George Augustus, who twenty-two years later was destined to take Caroline of Ansbach to wife, and in fulness of time to ascend the throne of England.
The Margraves of Brandenburg-Ansbach were far from wealthy, but the palace wherein the little princess first opened her eyes to the light was one of the finest in Germany, quite out of proportion to the fortunes of the petty principality. It was a vast building, four storeys high, built in the form of a square, with a cloistered court-yard, and an ornate façade to the west. Yet large as it was, it did not suit the splendour-loving Margraves of later generations, and the palace as it stands to-day, with its twenty-two state apartments, each more magnificent than the other, is a veritable treasure-house of baroque and rococo art. Some of the interior decoration is very florid and in doubtful taste; the ceiling of the great hall, for instance, depicts the apotheosis of the Margrave Karl the Wild; the four corners respectively represent the feast of the Bacchante, music, painting and architecture, and in the centre is a colossal figure of the Margrave, in classical attire, clasping Venus in his arms. The dining-hall is also gorgeous, with imitation marbles, crystal chandeliers, and a gilded gallery, wherefrom the minstrels were wont to discourse sweet music to the diners. The porcelain saloon, the walls lined with exquisite porcelain, is a gem of its kind, and the picture gallery contains many portraits of the Hohenzollerns. But the most interesting room is that known as “Queen Caroline’s apartment,” in which the future Queen of England was born; it was occupied by her during her visits to Ansbach until her marriage. This room is left much as it was in Caroline’s day, and a canopy of faded green silk still marks the place where the bed stood in which she was born.
The town of Ansbach has changed but little since the seventeenth century, far less than the palace, which successive Margraves have improved almost out of recognition. Unlike Würzburg and Nuremberg, cities comparatively near, Ansbach has not progressed; it has rather gone backward, for since the last Margrave, Alexander, sold his heritage in 1791, there has not been a court at Ansbach.[2] A sign of its vanished glories may be seen in the principal hotel of the place, formerly the residence of the Court Chamberlain, a fine house with frescoed ceilings, wide oak staircase, and spacious court-yard. The Hofgarten remains the same, a large park, with a double avenue of limes and oaks, beneath which Caroline must often have played when a girl. The high-pitched roofs and narrow irregular streets of the town still breathe the spirit of mediævalism, but the old-time glory has departed from Ansbach, and the wave of modern progress has scarcely touched it. The little town, surrounded with low-lying meadows, wears an aspect inexpressibly dreary and forsaken.
The honest burghers of Ansbach, who took a personal interest in the domestic affairs of their Margraves, feeling that as they prospered they would prosper with them, could not, in their most ambitious moments, have imagined the exalted destiny which awaited the little princess who was born in the palace on that March morning. The princesses of Ansbach had not in the past made brilliant alliances, and there is no record of any one of them having married into a royal house. They were content to wed the margraves, the burgraves, the landgraves, and the princelets who offered themselves, to bear them children, and to die, without contributing any particular brilliancy to the history of their house.
The margravate of Ansbach was one of the petty German princedoms which had succeeded in weathering the storm and stress of the Middle Ages. At the time of Caroline’s birth, any importance Ansbach might have possessed to the outer world arose from its connection with the Brandenburgs and Hohenzollerns, of which connection the later Margraves of Ansbach were alternately proud and jealous. Ansbach can, with reason, claim to be the cradle of the Hohenzollern kingdom. For nearly five hundred years (from 1331 to 1806) the princedom of Ansbach belonged to the Hohenzollerns, and a succession of the greatest events of Prussian history arose from the union of Prussia and Brandenburg and the margravate of Ansbach. It is not certain how, or when, the link began. But out of the mist of ages emerges the fact, that when the Burgrave Frederick V. divided his possessions into the Oberland and Unterland, or Highlands and Lowlands, Ansbach was raised to the dignity of capital of the Lowland princedom, and a castle was built. The Margrave Albert the Great, a son of the Elector Frederick the First of Brandenburg, set up his court at Ansbach, decreeing that it should remain the seat of government for all time. Albert the Great’s court was more splendid and princely than any in Germany; he enlarged the already beautiful castle, he kept much company and held brilliant tournaments, and he founded the famous order of the Knights of the Swan. The high altar, elaborately carved and painted, of the old Gothic church of St. Gumbertus in Ansbach remains to this day a monument of his munificence, and on the walls of the chancel are the escutcheons of the Knights of the Swan, and from the roof hang down the tattered banners of the Margraves.
The succeeding Margraves do not call for any special notice; after the fashion of German princes of that time, they spent most of their days in hunting, and their nights in carousing. They were distinguished from their neighbours only by their more peaceful proclivities. Two names come to us out of oblivion, George the Pious, who introduced the Reformation into Franconia, and George Frederick, who was guardian to the mad Duke Albert Frederick of Prussia, and who consequently managed Prussian affairs from Ansbach. With his death in 1602 the elder branch of the Margraves expired.
Caroline’s father, the Margrave John Frederick, was of the younger branch, and succeeded to the margravate in 1667. John Frederick was a worthy man, who confined his ambitions solely to promoting the prosperity of his princedom, and concerned himself with little outside it. When his first wife died, he married secondly, and rather late in life, Eleanor Erdmuthe Louisa, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach, a princess many years his junior, by whom he had two children, a son, William Frederick, and a daughter, Caroline, the subject of this book. There is a picture of Caroline’s parents in one of the state rooms of the castle, which depicts her father as a full-faced, portly man, with a brown wig, clasping the hand of a plump, highly-coloured young woman, with auburn hair, and large blue eyes. It is easy to see that Caroline derived her good looks from her mother. Her father died in 1686, and was succeeded by his son, George Frederick, who was the offspring of the first marriage.
THE CASTLE OF ANSBACH.
As the Margrave George Frederick was a lad of fourteen years of age at the time of his father’s death, the Elector Frederick the Third of Brandenburg acted as his guardian, and for the next seven years Ansbach was under the rule of a minor. As the minor was her stepson, who had never shown any affection for his stepmother or her children, the position of the widowed Margravine Eleanor was not a pleasant one. She was friendly with the Elector and Electress of Brandenburg, and looked to them for support, and on the eve of her stepson’s majority she went to Berlin on a long visit, taking with her the little Princess Caroline, and leaving behind at Ansbach her son, William Frederick, who was heir-presumptive to the margravate. The visit was eventful, for during it Eleanor became betrothed to the Elector of Saxony, John George the Fourth.
The betrothal arose directly out of the newly formed alliance between the Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony. At the time of his meeting with the young Margravine Eleanor the Elector of Saxony was only twenty-five years of age. Nature had endowed him with considerable talents and great bodily strength, though a blow on the head had weakened his mental powers, and his manhood did not fulfil the promise of his youth. Before he succeeded to the electorate of Saxony he had conceived a violent passion for Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz, the daughter of a colonel of the Saxon guard, a brunette of surpassing beauty, but so ignorant that her mother had to write her love letters for her. Magdalen gained complete sway over the young Elector, and she, in her turn, was the tool of her ambitious and intriguing mother. The Elector endowed his favourite with great wealth, gave her a palace and lands, surrounded her with a little court, and honoured her as though she were his consort. The high Saxon officials refused to bow down to the mistress, more especially as she was said to be in the pay of the Emperor of Austria, whereas the popular policy in Saxony at that time was to lean towards Brandenburg.
The Elector of Brandenburg and his consort the Electress Sophie Charlotte came to Torgau in 1692 to strengthen the alliance between the electorates. The two Electors formed a new order to commemorate the entente, which was called the “Order of the Golden Bracelet”. The Saxon Ministers hoped by this friendship to draw their Elector from the toils of his mistress and of Austria, and they persuaded him to pay a return visit to the Court of Berlin. While there the Elector of Saxony met the young widow the Margravine Eleanor, and became betrothed to her, to the great joy of the Elector and Electress of Brandenburg. The wedding was arranged to take place a little later at Leipzig, and for a time everything went smoothly; it seemed that the power of the mistress was broken, and she would have to retire. But when the Elector of Brandenburg and the Electress Sophie Charlotte accompanied the Margravine Eleanor to Leipzig for the wedding, they found the Elector of Saxony in quite another frame of mind, and he insulted his future wife by receiving her in company with his mistress. The negotiations had to begin all over again, but after a great deal of unpleasantness and many delays, the Elector of Saxony married, very ungraciously and manifestly under protest, the unfortunate Eleanor.
The Elector of Saxony’s dislike to his wife, and his reluctance to live with her, had been so marked even before marriage, that many wondered why the Margravine was so foolish as to enter upon a union which held out so slender a promise of happiness. But in truth she had not much choice; she had very little dower, she was anxious to find a home for herself and her daughter Caroline, and she was largely dependent on the Elector of Brandenburg’s goodwill; she was, in short, the puppet of a political intrigue. She returned with the Elector of Saxony to Dresden, where her troubles immediately began. The mistress had now been promoted to the rank of a countess. The Electress’s interests were with Brandenburg, and the Countess’s with Vienna, and, apart from their domestic rivalries, their political differences soon led to friction. The Elector openly slighted and neglected his wife, and things went from bad to worse at the Saxon Court; so much so, that the state of morals and manners threatened to culminate in open bigamy. The Countess von Röohlitz, prompted by her mother, declared her intention of becoming the wife of the Elector though he was married already, and though she could not take the title of Electress, and the Elector supported her in this extraordinary demand. He gave her a written promise of marriage, and caused pamphlets to be circulated in defence of polygamy. It was vain for the Electress to protest; her life was in danger, attempts were made to poison her, and at last she was compelled to withdraw from the Court of Dresden to the dower-house of Pretsch, taking her daughter Caroline with her. The mistress had won all along the line, but in the supreme hour of her triumph she was struck down by small-pox and died after a brief illness. The Elector, who was half-crazed with grief, would not leave her bedside during the whole of her illness. He, too, caught the disease, and died eleven days later. He was succeeded by his brother, Augustus Frederick, better known as “Augustus the Strong,” and Eleanor became the Electress-dowager of Saxony.
In the autumn of the same year (1694) the Elector and Electress of Brandenburg paid a visit to the Electress Eleanor, whose health had broken down, and assured her of their support and affection, as indeed they ought to have done, considering that they were largely the cause of her troubles. At the same time the Elector and Electress promised to look after the interests of the little Princess Caroline, and to treat her as though she were their own daughter.
The next two years were spent by the young princess with her mother at Pretsch. It was a beautiful spot, surrounded by woods and looking down the fertile valley of the Elbe, and hard by was the little town of Wittenberg, one of the cradles of the Reformation. Luther and Melancthon lived at Wittenberg; their houses are still shown, and it was here that Luther publicly burned the Papal bull; an oak tree marks the spot. Caroline must often have visited Wittenberg; she was about twelve years of age at this time, and advanced beyond her years, and it may be that much of the sturdy Protestantism of her later life was due to her early associations with the home of Luther and Melanchthon.
In 1696 Caroline was left an orphan by the death of her mother, and was placed under the care of her guardians, the Elector and Electress of Brandenburg, at Berlin.