Book Review: Queen Caroline

Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century CourtBy Joanna MarschnerYale University Press, 2014 The role of Caroline, the queen consort of King George II, as a significant patroness of the arts is the subject of Historic Royal Palaces Senior Curator Joanna Marschner’s new book, opulently produced by Yale University Press, but that’s only the narrowest construing of the understated marvel Marschner pulls off in this volume.Although it centers on Caroline’s busy activities at the heart of the English Enlightenment – with lovingly-detailed chapters like “Caroline and the Architects,” “Caroline and the Natural Philosophers,” and my personal favorite (and I’d bet a brass farthing it’s our author’s favorite too), “Caroline and Her Books” – Queen Caroline also manages to spend a good deal of time on the intricacies of the English political system, and it finds Caroline much at the heart of that world as well. In short, despite its appearance (an oversized, heavily-illustrated ‘coffee table’ affair), this book is very close to being a full-dress biography of this remarkable woman, something she hasn’t had in English in well over a century (as usual, this didn’t stop the effervescent Jean Plaidy, whose 1968 novel Caroline, The Queen is quite good).Casual readers of English history might be tempted to say a century is too soon. The excessive, adorable hysteria of exaltation with which the Victorians, weary of a succession of “wicked uncles,” greeted their demure, diminutive young Queen Victoria when she came to the throne was, unfortunately, accompanied by a strong desire to vilify the previous Hanoverian dynasty as a pack of bulbous-nosed beer-guzzling Hohenzollern by-blows. Even writing as late as 1956, the otherwise-perceptive historian J. H. Plumb could feel comfortable reducing things to bedroom-farce baseness when it came to assessing George II and his queen:

Odd, certainly, both of them were, rather nerveless in their tastes, not particularly happy with each other’s temperament, yet bound together in passion, knitted together by the lusts of their flesh. The disparity of their characters led all but the most perceptive into thinking that the King might be most easily approached through his mistresses, until Sir Robert Walpole demonstrated to the Court that Caroline was mistress as well as Queen, or, as he bluntly put it in the coarse, rustic way which he affected, “He took the right sow by the ear.”

It’s almost as an afterthought that Plumb refers to Caroline as “a woman of singular accomplishment,” so Marschner knows better than anybody the uphill work she has before her – even starting with simple matters of identity:

Caroline has largely escaped the attention of historians. Visitors to Hampton Court Place today may admire her state bed which still dominates the Queen’s Bedchamber, and some may recall that she played an important part in the laying out of Kensington Gardens and what would later become the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Most of us, however, would have difficulty untangling her history from that of Caroline of Brunswick, the spouse of King George IV.

And although the hard truth of the matter is that ‘most of us’ wouldn’t know either Caroline from the Sultan of Morocco (the optimism of the specialist, like the innocence of little children, must be cherished), the comparison does indeed work entirely in our Caroline’s favor.Caroline of Ansbach married Prince George Augustus while he was still Prince of Wales. She was born in 1683, daughter of the Margrave of Brandburg-Ansbach, who was a member of the cadet branch of the Hohenzollern dynasty from which the mighty electors of Brandeburg drew their numbers. She joined her husband in London in October of 1714 as Princess of Wales now that George Louis of Hanover was King George I.Her husband the prince was an earnest, limited man (he was fond of telling people “I care nothing for Bainting or Boetry”), but Caroline, both as Princess of Wales and then as queen, was lionized by the likes of Robert Walpole, Alexander Pope, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, Voltaire (who remarked that “she was born to encourage the whole circle of the arts”), Jonathan Swift, and the great architect William Kent, who created many of her most astonishing and pleasing conceptions, including “Merlin’s Cave” at Richmond. She was also close friends with the irrepressible, unclassifiable Lord Hervey, who as usual gets all the best lines in any book foolish enough to include him, as when he berates the organizer of the queen’s new library at St. James’s Palace in 1737 – Marschner tells the story well:

In October 1737 Lord Hervey wrote angrily to Henry Fox ‘Neglecter of His Majesty’s Works,’ to complain: ‘which of all the devils in Hell prompted you to tell the Queen that everything in the library was ready for the putting up of her books? Thou abominable new broom that so far from sweeping clean, has not removed one grain of Dirt and Rubbish. Bad night.’

In fact, our author tells her entire story well – this book may look like one of the many engorged scholarly monographs that trundle off the university presses of the West with such encouraging regularity (I am their foremost fan, but I’m ready to admit their general appeal must be fairly limited), but it deserves a wider readership than such books usually get. A sparkling, intelligent, interested woman emerges from these pages with a clarity and sympathy she hasn’t received in print since her own day, when she was very much more esteemed and loved than her husband – and worshipped by him. Take my strong recommendation: part with your $75 and order this book. You’ll want to make Her Majesty’s aquaintance.