Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 09.djvu/147

 Caroline three more children, who survived to maturity, the eldest of these, afterwards known as the Duke of Cumberland, being the favourite of his parents. The Duke of Gloucester, whose birth in 1717 'transported' his father with joy (Suffolk Letters, i. 17), and gave rise to the family quarrel noticed below, died in infancy; another boy, born in the previous year, did not survive his birth.

Between the electoral princess and her grandmother, the old Electress Sophia, to whom she must largely have supplied the place of Sophia Charlotte, a warm esteem and affection continued to prevail, and her intimacy with Leibniz continued, though he was at this time much away from Hanover. Even in times of political anxiety she took comfort in the preface to his 'Deodyces' (sic,, 504; for other examples of her spelling, phenomenal even in that age, see her letters in the same collection, passim). But she was not absorbed in moral philosophy or in other literature. The electoral prince was far more eager for the British succession than his father, or probably even than his grandmother; and Caroline had already learned how to flatter her husband's foibles. She was, moreover, herself of an ambitious nature, and may be supposed to have been conscious of her capacity for the royal station to which, in common with the prince, she aspired. Towards this end her conduct seems to have been consistently shaped. Her progress in the English tongue was slow; for though as early as 1706 she had expressed a wish to study it (Correspondance, iii. 220-1), and in 1713 actually engaged an Englishwoman born in Hanover to read English to her (ib. iii. 411), she never seems to have learned to speak it with any degree of correctness. But to the political situation and its needs she was wide awake. In September 1712 she is found assuring Queen Anne of her gratitude ( Original Letters, 2nd ser. iv. 267-8); but in December 1713 she writes to Leibniz very gloomily concerning the prospects of the succession. She may he concluded to have agreed with the step taken on her husband's behalf in England in May 1714, when his writ of summons to the House of Lords was demanded and granted. At all events, she shared in the excitement created at Hanover by the queen's irate letters to the Electress Sophia and the electoral prince, and declared that she had never experienced so intolerable an annoyance (see her letter in, 503-4, and in Correspondance, iii. 452-3). On 8 June, in consequence, as was widely believed, of her agitation from the same cause, the Electress Sophia died at Herrenhausen, in Caroline's arms (see the narrative in Correspondance, iii. 457-62). The request of Leibniz, that she would accept him as a poor legacy from his old mistress (ib. 462-5), was not overlooked; she is found corresponding with him from England in 1715, when she attempted to obtain for him from George I the payment of arrears of salary due to him (, 528 seq.) But her most confidential correspondent after the death of the old electress seems to have been the favourite niece of the latter, the vivacious and warm-hearted Elisabeth Charlotte, duchess of Orleans, who declared Caroline to be possessed of a heart, 'a rare thing as times go' (, 251).

Alter the death of the Electress Sophia, Caroline's active interest in the British succession did not abate (Memoirs of Ker of Kersland, 3rd ed. 1727, i. 88 seq.); and her hopes had not long to wait for fulfilment. Before the close of 1714 the Princess of Wales had followed her husband and George I to England; already in November Addison rapturously commends his 'Cato' to her notice (see the lines in Miscellaneous Works, 1736, ii. 124-6; and about the same time her first household appointments are sharply censured by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Letters and Works, 2nd ed. 1837, i. 225). And likewise at a very early date in her English life her name was mixed up in a factious dispute concerning the religious beliefs of the new royal family, in the course of which she was branded as a Calvinist and a presbyterian, and declared to have refused to receive the sacrament according to the rites of the church of England. These reports, though contradicted, may have contributed to the animosity with which she afterwards came to be regarded by the high church party (see, Aufsätze zur englischen Geschichte, neue (third) Folge (1833), 383-91). The first occasion, however, on which, after the accession of the house of Hanover in England, the Princess of Wales was called upon to take a side, was that of the open rupture between her husband and the king, his father, towards the close of 1717. George I did not love his daughter-in-law, whom to confidential ears he termed 'cette diablesse madame la princesse' (Reminiscences, 283), and she had shown herself as irreconcilable as had her husband, and carried her display of animosity against the king's party even into the neutral ground of a masquerade (, i. 381). When the prince was banished from St. James's Palace, the princess, though in consideration of her condition leave was granted her to remain, preferred to accompany her husband; and the night from 2-3 Dec. was