In the language of the time, this sort of lively admiration amounted to a decided expression of interest, albeit not a formal proposal. By a circuitous route, Charles set off from Weissenfels to claim his crown in Spain. His aide-de-camp informed Caroline of his progress and the golden opinions he won along the way, including at Queen Anne’s court at Windsor and in Lisbon, where, in honour of a new alliance, the Portuguese king, Pedro II, outdid himself in the splendour of his ceremonial welcome; Anne commissioned his portrait from Godfrey Kneller.91 For six months, these long-distance tweets proved Caroline’s only update on the ‘extremely important matters concerning [her] greatest happiness’. The question was out of Charles’s hands. In Vienna, the thoughts of the imperial court centred less on Charles’s admiration and Caroline’s charms of mind and body than on the issue of the princess’s religion.
Once, it was rumoured, Eleonore had considered conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Maximilian II of Bavaria. Now, for an infinitely greater marriage prize, Caroline’s change of faith would become the sine qua non. Insistence on such a condition cannot have come as a surprise to any of the key players in this unromantic drama. Nor did any doubt Caroline’s acceptance of this inevitable and overriding preliminary.
She had inherited from Eleonore, Stepney’s ‘princess of great virtue and piety’, a sturdy Lutheranism remote from Habsburg Catholicism. By 1703, time had tempered her unhappy mother’s influence. In exchanging the dower house at Pretzsch for the palaces of Berlin and Lützenburg, Caroline found herself in an environment in which religious faith, alongside philosophy and metaphysics, formed one strand of a continuous dialogue about the nature and governance of the universe. Sophia of Hanover, one clergyman claimed, ‘multiplied’ questions, one leading to another: no single answer satisfied her, and she failed to convince herself of any conclusion.92 This habit of intellectual restlessness her daughter Figuelotte shared. While religion for Eleonore had been a narrow matter of faith, Sophia’s approach was discursive and, above all, pragmatic. She had delayed Figuelotte’s confirmation until after her sixteenth birthday, in order to widen her marriage prospects to embrace Catholic as well as Protestant suitors. As an adult, Figuelotte disclaimed any attachment to dogma. Debate at Lützenburg centred on what she described as her ‘curiosity about the origin of things’, her desire ‘to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness’:93 a continuous creedless disquisition about ethics, free choice, love and the soul, through which Figuelotte set out to emphasise reason over superstition and relished verbal or epistolary skirmishes for their own sake. But no one forgot that the setting for these skirmishes was the palace bestowed on Figuelotte by an indulgent husband. Hers were the freedoms of a married woman.
From Weissenfels, Caroline had returned to Berlin. She could not avoid informing Frederick as well as Figuelotte of what had taken place. From now on Vienna would communicate with Frederick directly, albeit intermittently. Ever alert to worldly advantage, Frederick described the meeting between Caroline and the archduke as ‘God’s providence’.94 Nevertheless, the wheels of Habsburg statecraft revolved slowly. To her brother, the Elector Palatine, the emperor’s wife entrusted supervision of the process by which Caroline’s eligibility for marriage could be accomplished. Without Caroline’s conversion there could be no formal proposal. Six months after her single meeting with Archduke Charles, the Elector Palatine requested that Caroline return to Weissenfels. His purpose was to apprise for himself this future imperial bride and compile a report for the empress.
To Caroline, a portionless princess, the imperial court offered no incentive bar the incontrovertible lure of a Habsburg prince. Distant were the glory days of the Empire, when Austria had defended Christian Europe against the Turkish infidel; but still an aureole of greatness clung to the imperial family. Austria’s sons represented the greatest prize in the marriage market of the German-speaking world. After she had endured a six-month virtual silence, Caroline’s reaction was moderate to the point of obstinacy. She resented the requirement to return to Weissenfels, and retraced her steps with an ill grace. Having done so, she lingered at her aunt’s court for almost two months, awaiting the absent elector, before ignoring Frederick’s protests and journeying back to Lützenburg late in August. Tardily the Elector Palatine recognised the mettle of the young woman with whom he was dealing. His departure from Vienna was days too late. Instead he sent after Caroline his Jesuit confessor, Father Ferdinand Orban, with the request that she ‘[be] completely persuaded that what he will lay before your noble incomparable self … is the pure, undefiled, genuine, holy truth’.95
Until now Caroline’s exposure to Catholicism had been scant. In 1685 the Great Elector had passed the Edict of Potsdam, offering protection in Brandenburg to French Protestants in the aftermath of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Since 1701, and the religious conversion of her improvident third son Maximilian, Sophia of Hanover had nurtured a vitriolic hatred of Jesuits, which she certainly communicated to Figuelotte. The Lutheran orphan Caroline found herself living with Calvinist guardians in a state that was tangibly and proudly Protestant. ‘I feel assured that your Highness … will … accord [Father Orban] a patient hearing and then your fullest approval,’ the Elector Palatine wrote to her.96 It was an optimistic statement and one that, despite its measure of coercion, acknowledged likely obstacles.97
As summer turned to autumn, Frederick found himself on the horns of a dilemma. From an alliance with the imperial family he anticipated considerable boon; as his protests in the early 1690s against the proposed creation of a Catholic tenth electorate for ‘a prince of the house of Austria’ indicate, his was a Protestant outlook.98 That he anticipated the probability of Caroline’s resistance to apostasy, even in the face of arguments of powerful material persuasion, points both to aspects of Caroline’s character and the strength of her religious convictions. Frederick did not resort to sophism. There is a cynical truthfulness in his appeal to her that includes, as she understood, a reminder of what she owed to him and his guardianship. ‘For your part you may be able to exercise a moderating influence,’ he told her, ‘not to mention the advantages therefrom that might accrue to our royal and princely house. I do not very well see how your Highness can decline such an offer, since it is to be hoped that you will be so firmly established in your religion that no one need feel anxious about your soul.’99
For an instant, Caroline was persuaded. She yielded. To the Elector Palatine, who had sent her Father Orban, she wrote that she had perceived the errors of her Lutheranism.100 To the authorities in Vienna, the Austrian resident in Berlin reported that she ‘had already changed and was resolved to marry the King of Spain’.101 And Caroline agreed to a second proposed meeting with the Elector Palatine, this time in Düsseldorf.
The optimism of princess and imperial diplomat was ill-founded. Caroline’s meeting with the Elector Palatine never happened. Her confession of the errors of her faith masked considerable unease. Her discussions with Father Orban, attended by Leibniz, consisted of arguments ‘at length’ over an open Bible. Point-scoring oscillated between priest and princess, but the contest was unequal and the strain unsettled Caroline. ‘Of course, the Jesuit, who has studied more, argues her down, and then the Princess weeps,’ the electress Sophia explained to a niece.102 Afterwards Caroline told Leibniz, ‘I really think his persuasions contributed materially to the uncertainty I felt.’