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Copyright © Matthew Dennison 2017
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Source ISBN: 9780008121990
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008122010
Version: 2018-08-20
For Gráinne, with love
‘Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair … Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.’
Song of Solomon
Contents
I Princess of Ansbach: ‘Bred up in the softness of a Court’
II Electoral Princess: ‘The affections of the heart’
I Princess of Wales: ‘Majesty with Affability’
II Leicester House: ‘Not a Day without Suffering’
III Queen: ‘Constancy and Greatness’
‘The darling pleasure of her soul was power.’
Lord Hervey, Memoirs
‘She loved the real possession of power rather than the show of it, and whatever she did herself that was either wise or popular, she always desired that the King should have the full credit as well as the advantage of the measure, conscious that, by adding to his respectability, she was most likely to maintain her own.’
Walter Scott on Caroline of Ansbach, The Heart of Midlothian, 1818
History has forgotten Caroline of Ansbach. The astuteness of her political manoeuvrings; her patronage of poets, philosophers and clerics; her careful management of her peppery husband George II; the toxic breakdown of her relationship with her eldest son, Frederick; her reputation as Protestant heroine; even the legendary renown of her magnificent bosom – ‘her breasts they make such a wonder at’ – have all escaped posterity’s radar.1
Her contemporaries understood her as the power behind George II’s throne. One lampoon taunted, ‘You may strutt, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain;/We know ’tis Caroline, not you, that reign.’2 She was the first Hanoverian queen consort. On her arrival in London from Germany in October 1714, following the