THE FIRST IRON LADY
A LIFE OF CAROLINE OF ANSBACH
William Collins, 352pp, £25, Oldie price £18.08 inc p&p Arguably the cleverest queen consort we’ve ever had, Caroline of Ansbach, the wife of George II, deserves to be better known than she is, hence the applause for what Paula Byrne in the
Times called Matthew Dennison’s ‘scintillating, thoroughly researched biography’, the first of Caroline for seventy years. Orphaned early, she was lucky enough to be mentored by the German savant Leibniz. Consequently – and unlike her doltish husband – she was receptive to the Enlightenment, ‘a delightful philosopher on the throne’ according to Voltaire. Her intimates marvelled at the breadth of her interests, which included music, literature, theatre, opera and garden design. She also bathed at least once a day, an unusual refinement then, even at Court.
Dennison’s title invokes Margaret Thatcher, and to many of her contemporaries Caroline was the power behind the throne. ‘She directed everything, at home and abroad,’ said Lord Hervey, who called Prime Minister Walpole ‘the Queen’s Minister’. But in Hanoverian England the first duty of a royal bride was to produce heirs, and it was Caroline’s ample bosom, not her lively mind, that caught the eye. ‘Small wonder,’ as David Crane noted in the Spectator, ‘that poets, panegyrists and portrait painters all dedicated so much time and space to celebrating the “legendary embonpoint”, as Dennison terms it, “of the nation’s mother”.’ How ‘bitterly ironic’ then, said Crane, ‘that it was the complication of a late pregnancy which, ignored and hidden, would eventually, and horribly kill this gifted and courageous woman’.