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The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline - Softcover

Fraser, Flora

 
9780307456366: The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307456366 ISBN 13: 9780307456366
Verlag: Anchor, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

When the Prince Regent (who would later become King George IV) separated privately from Princess Caroline in 1796, they had been together for less than a year. Their disastrous marriage, ridiculed by the satirists of the day, led to profound political consequences and the eventual trial of Queen Caroline for adultery. After her exile, Caroline traveled through Europe with her own court, with catastrophic results, eventually returning to England but still lacking the dignity of her station. With careful research and an eye to the parallels in the modern era, acclaimed biographer Flora Fraser crafts in The Unruly Queen a riveting portrait of a woman who, despite her persecution, refused to be victimized.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Flora Fraser, daughter of bestselling biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, is the author of Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton and the forthcoming Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire. She lives in London with her husband and three children.

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CHAPTER ONE


PRINCESS CAROLINE


1768--1794


'She will he unhappy for all her life'


PRINCESS CAROLINE Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbittel was born on 17 May 1768 in the small duchy of Brunswick, a vassal state of Prussia in northern Germany. The birth of this little princess, granddaughter to the reigning Duke, was unimportant in itself. Her grandmother Duchess Charlotte had remarked after the birth of Caroline's elder sister Augusta in 1765, 'It's only a girl.... it was hardly worth waiting so long, as there are quite enough princesses in the world, and we are often most useless beings.'1 But then the Duchess was a sister to Frederick the Great of Prussia and had high standards. The birth of a Brunswicker prince, which happened to take place in England the following year, placated Charlotte, although on first seeing him she declared that he was quite a little English savage.

However, Princess Caroline's father, Charles William Ferdinand, was a man of consequence in European affairs. As Hereditary Prince--this was the German style for an heir apparent--he would inherit his father's duchy. A flurry of imposing addresses from emperors, kings and other sovereign princes of Europe duly greeted Princess Caroline's birth.2 But Charles was eminent for more than his ducal pedigree. Indeed, he came from a long line of warriors. 'Nature destined him for a hero,' wrote his maternal uncle, Frederick the Great.3 At Hastenbeck in 1757, during the Seven Years' War, Charles showed Brunswicker courage in recapturing, sword in hand, a central battery. In the course of this war, which devastated Europe from 1756 to 1763, the Hereditary Prince was attached to the staff of his paternal uncle, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Oels, who was given the British command abroad. After the war's close in 1763 he rejoined the Prussian service and modelled himself on his distinguished uncle, like him clothing his slim and elegant figure on all possible occasions in the Prussian uniform and boots.

Duke Ferdinand was also something of a military hero, as the victor of Minden in 1759. William Pitt the Elder had Ferdinand in mind when he wrote in 1760 of 'the most sincere, but unimportant homage, which my heart pays to the virtues and genius of the Hereditary Prince. Admiration, and devoted attachment, to the two great Princes, uncle and nephew, are terms synonymous with zeal for the common cause of Europe, of which they are the glorious instrument.

Charles's mother, Duchess Charlotte, was a tiny woman whose ethereal looks belied a steely ambition on behalf of her children. She encouraged her eldest son in his reverence for her brother Frederick. Like him a dedicated child of the Enlightenment, she had arranged for Charles a prodigious course of instruction in the humanities under tutors who included the Abbe Jerusalem, before sending him on a Grand Tour of Europe with the archaeologist Winckelmann as bearleader. The Hereditary Prince more than met her expectations. He was equally happy at his uncle's palace at Potsdam, near Berlin, drilling with Frederick at the camp, listening to him play the flute or discourse on European literature. At home in Brunswick life was more fractious. His father the Duke had nearly bankrupted the country through incompetence and prodigality. In the year of Princess Caroline's birth, the Hereditary Prince was forced to negotiate on behalf of his unpopular father with the Provincial Diet, or parliament.

Caroline's mother Augusta, Hereditary Princess of Brunswick, was the elder sister of George III, King of England and Elector of Hanover. Despite being wholly German by blood, she was a foolish English patriot in her hostility to all things east of the Rhine. On her marriage in 1764 she wrote to her brother the King, giving her first impressions of Germany and recounting 'the odd figures and manners of these people, as for instance the brother in law of Barg [Berg?] holds his glass between his legs, and a lady today put her fan while she dines in the same place.'5 Time did not alter her opinions, and twenty-four years later the statesman Mirabeau described her as still 'wholly English, in her tastes, her principles and her manners, to the point that her almost cynical independence makes, with the etiquette of the German courts, the most singular contrast that I know'.6 Her more formal mother-in-law could at least reflect that the English Princess had brought a dot, or dowry, of £8o,ooo.

The Duke and Duchess, the Duke's brother Ferdinand, the Hereditary Prince and Princess and their different households all lodged at the Grauer Hof, a sprawling stone palace with wooden wings added piecemeal around a central courtyard. Tree-lined allees at the back led past pavilions and flower gardens down to the River Oker, which ringed the city of Brunswick. Across the Bohlweg, the main street at the front, lay the houses of the wool and silk merchants and the cathedral of St Blasius, which Caroline's Guelph ancestor, Henry the Lion, had founded to mark his 1172 pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Here also stood a military academy, the Collegium Carolinum, which attracted students from all parts of Germany, and from England too. The Hotel d'Angleterre hosted a weekly club where professors, nobility and burghers met under the presidency of Duke Ferdinand to discuss matters philosophical, literary, intellectual--and Masonic. Brunswick was the centre of German Freemasonry, and Ferdinand a grand master of the Order.

West and south of this prosperous quarter, confined within the loop of the river, lay a hinterland of medieval timbered houses and dark narrow streets, inhabited by more than 20,000 shopkeepers and others. The townspeople and Court mingled at the Fair, a traditionally merry event which twice a year drew merchants from all over northern Germany to buy and sell wares and where the Court stocked up on provisions, coffee and chocolate. 'The coffee is better here than with us,' the Hereditary Princess informed her brother, 'and the chocolate, but the tea is abominable so that I don't hurt my nerves with drinking it.'8 The Court also attended occasional performances at the opera house and a few prescribed public balls and masquerades. But the Court's straitened finances, as well as distinction of birth, prevented further intercourse with the general public.

At the Grauer Hof, the ducal households dined in each other's apartments by rote, with an array of foreign visitors, ladies and gentlemen and officials of the Court. In Duchess Charlotte's apartments the greatest state was kept, and the better food and wine. Formal conversation in a circle was the rule before and after dinner, which was held around four in the afternoon. At her own table, her daughter-in-law observed the German habit, ladies ranged on one side facing the gentlemen on the other. However, Augusta chose to ignore the finer points of etiquette and would advance patriotically on any English visitor, before he had finished his bow, with hands outstretched. After dinner, she sometimes gave what she dubbed a concert, at which music was performed while the company played cards for hours at a time, or a casino (an undress ball followed by a supper).

The Hereditary Princess was a true Hanoverian, with protuberant eyes, loose mouth and long face. In the early years of her marriage she considered herself blessed in her handsome husband. 'There is both confidence and amity between the Prince and me,' she wrote, shortly after her daughter Augusta's birth. 'No two people live better together than we do, and I would go through fire and water for him.'

She continued in this happy frame of mind, despite the Prince's public flirtation with her friends in London while she was pregnant with their son Charles. 'Even when he is grave, it's never with me, she wrote.10 She endured the winter months in the Grauer Hof with him...

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Verlag
Anchor
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307456366
ISBN 13 
9780307456366
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
560
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar