Fascinating portrait of the birth of the modern princess
Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World
The word “princesses” feels a bit of misnomer. This exhibition’s title, with its note of youthful breathlessness, evokes an image of these hitherto little-regarded German royals as a trio of bright-eyed, elaborately coiffed young things as they might have been portrayed by one of the great painters of their time, such as Gainsborough or Reynolds.
In fact, these women, who married into the British monarchy and exerted – the show argues – a powerful influence on the Georgian period, belonged to different generations and enjoyed their greatest prestige in middle age: Caroline, as the queen of George II; Augusta, who married his son, Frederick, remaining influential, despite his early death; while Charlotte, consort of the famously mad George III, effectively ruled the country for a substantial time.
The period of these women’s eminence coincided not only with the Enlightenment, the rationalist revolution that swept Europe in the 18th century, but the period of Britain’s greatest political and industrial expansion. The exhibition brings together a fascinating array of artefacts – paintings, ceramics, clothes, personal effects – to examine the way their interests not only coincided with the tenor of this dynamic period, but – the exhibition maintains – actively influenced it, thereby creating the prototype for the “modern royal woman”, from Queen Victoria to Diana, Princess of Wales, and even the Duchess of Cornwall.
Yet the exhibition asks us to take a lot on trust. We’re told that Caroline set out to modernise the fusty Hanoverian court by including Enlightenment figures, such as Isaac Newton and the writers Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope – all seen here in portraits – in her soirées. But the hows and whys are left slightly too vague. Handel was her children’s music tutor, and the seven-year-old Mozart wrote violin sonatas for her during a visit to Kensington Palace – which sounds like the kind of thing that tends to happen to major royals, rather than suggesting a particular interest in music.
Caroline gave support to the Foundling Hospital, set up to care for abandoned children – evidence of her social concern, certainly, though it would be hard to argue she was closely involved in the organisation. Charlotte’s interest in smallpox inoculation, meanwhile, was no doubt genuine: she had all of her 15 children inoculated, two dying in the process. So she would naturally have been interested in the country doctor Edward Jenner’s much safer vaccination, here represented through documents and satirical engravings, though her participation didn’t, as far as we can gather, go beyond acting as patron and writing a letter of support.
The exhibition wants, rightly, to enhance our sense of women’s contribution to history, in contrast to the traditional focus on “great men” – such as, indeed, these women’s husbands. But in taking a sort of “laundry bill” view of history, in which every last aspect of these women’s lives is deemed historically significant – from child-rearing to art collecting, neither of which are, in their case, made to seem particularly interesting – we lose sight of the things they were passionately interested in.
One area where these women definitely made a mark was in gardening, notably in the grounds of Kew, then a royal palace, which became a showcase for their very different interests. Passionately preoccupied with history, Caroline created a kind of proto-feminist theme park, with waxwork effigies of historical figures and an emphasis on women, including Elizabeth I and a helmeted virago representing martial power. While this early visitor attraction – represented in engravings – was lambasted in the press, a pavilion devoted to scientists and philosophers, from which we see a bust of chemist Robert Boyle, was well received. Augusta looked to the limits of the expanding empire with a collection of exotic buildings, of which only the magnificent pagoda survives, while Charlotte began the creation of the greenhouses and the botanical collections that made Kew the great scientific institution it is today.
Yet the artefacts that most convince us of the influence of these princesses are the satirical cartoons: Caroline and Robert Walpole, then prime minster, administer an enema on a statue of George II, in an anonymous engraving, showing she controlled even his bowel movements. The father of the political cartoon, James Gillray, shows Charlotte and George III as the two faces of the moon, highlighting her alleged passion for power.
If the princesses hardly come to life as individuals, you get a sense in this part of the show of how they recast the royal woman as a public figure who was not only culturally engaged, but capable of withstanding everything the then burgeoning mass media could throw at them – setting a powerful precedent for ages to come.