Empress Caroline

Empress Caroline (Caroline Elizabeth Louise, born 14 June 1966) is a princess of the House of Hanover, the only sibling of Ernest V, and the widow of Heinrich I, German Emperor and King of Prussia. She was German Empress and Queen of Prussia from 2005 until her husband’s death on 12 February 2028, and is the mother of Alexander I, who succeeded him at fourteen, and of Princess Charlotte, who has exercised his powers as Princess Regent since 11 October 2028.

She has several correct styles, and the Register uses all of them. Formally she is the Empress Dowager in the German Empire and the Queen Dowager in Prussia. In ordinary speech, in Prussia and in the Register’s other articles, she is the Queen Mother. During the marriage she was Empress Caroline in imperial work and Queen Caroline in Prussian work, and by her birth house she is Queen Caroline of Hanover. To the King of fourteen realms she is Aunt Caroline, and to her children Mama.

Since 31 October 2028 she has been heir presumptive to her nephew, George V, in all fourteen Crown capacities of the personal union. The King is fifteen and an only child, and when his father abdicated the line behind him passed from Ernest V’s descendants to his sister’s. She holds no heir’s dignity, because none passes to an heir presumptive, and she has said nothing in public about her position.

She was born and brought up in London and lived there until she married, at thirty-six. She was trained in the history of art and in archive conservation, spent twelve years working on the Hanoverian royal collections, and met Heinrich in 1996 over the Welf family papers that had been divided between Hanover and Berlin since 1866. Her marriage, like her brother’s, was governed by a written rule that kept the two governments apart: family talk with her brother, and nothing carried between Crowns. She kept it for twenty-six years and keeps it in widowhood.

She is the Welf in Potsdam. She is a daughter of the house whose kingdom Prussia declined to annex in 1866, living in the Hohenzollern seat, the mother of a German Emperor born at Hanover, and next in line to fourteen Crowns, two of which are states of her son’s Empire. The fact is constitutional as much as personal, and it is the thread of this article.

From February to October she sat on the nine-member Regency Council that exercised her son’s powers, spoke rarely in it, and was one of the three members who voted against the dismissal of the Prussian Minister-President, Johanna Falk, in April. Since the Council was abolished she has held only one public office of any kind, the formal governorship of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union during her son’s minority, which she exercises as a communicant of the Church of England.

Her public words since her husband’s death are two short statements, one of thanks in March and one on her brother’s abdication at the end of October. She returned to public work in September, at the children’s wards her foundation funds.

Family and early life

London

She was born in London on 14 June 1966, the second child and only daughter of Ernest IV and Queen Elizabeth. Her father was sixty-six and had reigned for thirty years. Her mother, born Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Churchill, a daughter of the Duke of Marlborough, was forty. Her brother, the heir, was nineteen.

She was christened Caroline Elizabeth Louise. Caroline is a Hanoverian name with a long and mixed history in the house. Elizabeth was her mother’s. Louise was given, her mother said later, because it was the only name of the three that nobody could make into anything shorter, and the family has never tried.

She was the late child of an old King, and the household treated her as a private matter for as long as it could. She did not appear on the palace balcony until she was four. Her first public engagement, the presentation of prizes at a London children’s hospital, was at fourteen. The British press, which watched the heir closely through the 1960s, left the princess in the nursery largely alone, and she has said that she owes her childhood to the fact that her brother was more interesting.

1972

Her father died in 1972, when she was not yet seven, and her brother became King at twenty-five. She remembers the funeral and very little of her father before it. What she remembers of him is a voice on the wireless, which she was allowed to listen to in the nursery on Christmas Day, and a man who let her sit under his desk while he read.

After 1972 she was raised half by her mother and half by her brother. Queen Elizabeth moved to Clarence House, where Caroline lived with her through the school week. Most weekends she spent at the palace with the new King, who was a young man of twenty-five with fourteen Crowns and a sister of six, and who, by every account including his own, made her his favourite at once and never stopped.

What she says he taught her is three things. He taught her to read every document all the way through, including the parts that nobody would ask her about, on the ground that the part nobody asks about is where the trouble is. He taught her to sail, on the water at Windsor and later at Cowes. And he taught her to keep her own counsel, which he did by example rather than instruction: she has never in her life heard him say in private anything that he would not have been willing to have repeated, and she has never heard him say very much.

The arrangement was unusual and it was not concealed. The King was not his sister’s guardian, her mother was, and the household was careful to say so. But it was widely understood in London that the King’s private calendar had his sister’s school holidays marked on it, that he kept her letters, and that the one engagement he refused to move in the 1970s was a parents’ evening.

School

She was taught by a governess until she was eleven and then went to a London day school. The governess, engaged in 1972, taught her at Clarence House with two other girls from families of the household, and the arrangement was the last of its kind in the house. At eleven she went to a girls’ day school in west London, travelled there by car with a protection officer who waited in the street, and was, according to the school’s own history, an ordinary pupil with an unusual talent for drawing and no talent at all for German.

The German matters to what follows. She learned French at school and spoke it well. She did not learn German, because the school did not teach it to her year, and she read it, later, only as an archivist reads a language, for the documents. She spoke it properly only after her marriage, at thirty-six, and she speaks it now with a precision that Prussians describe as Hanoverian and Hanoverians as English.

Her mother

Queen Elizabeth was Queen Mother from 1972 until her death in 2011, and her daughter lived near her for thirty years. They were close in the way of two people who had shared a house after a death. When Caroline married and moved to Potsdam in 2002 she telephoned her mother every evening, a habit she kept until the end, and in Queen Elizabeth’s last illness she spent most of a winter in London.

Queen Elizabeth is buried at Windsor, beside Ernest IV. Her daughter attended the funeral as German Empress and walked behind the coffin with her brother. It was, the British press noted, the only occasion on which the two had appeared in public together as reigning sovereign and reigning consort of two different Crowns, and neither of them acknowledged that it was an occasion of that kind.

The collections

The Courtauld

She read the history of art at the Courtauld Institute in London from 1985 to 1988. She lived at Clarence House throughout and went to lectures by bus, which the protection service disliked and her brother permitted. Her undergraduate work was on court portraiture of the eighteenth century, which she has described as the study of how people with power wished to be seen by people who painted them, and she has said that it was the most useful thing she ever learned for a life she did not then expect.

Göttingen

In 1989 she spent a year at Göttingen, on a course in archive and conservation practice. Göttingen was the Hanoverian university, founded by George II, and the choice was a family one. She lived in a flat in the town, took the course in German that she could read and barely speak, and came home to London at the end of it. She has said that she spent the year learning to repair paper and to apologise in German, and that she became good at the first.

Her home remained London. The year at Göttingen was a course and not a removal, and she has never described it as having lived in Germany before her marriage. She lived in London until she married at thirty-six, and that is how she describes it herself.

The Hanover collections

From 1990 to 2002 she worked on the Hanoverian royal collections, commuting from London. The work was at the Leine Palace and in the collections associated with the Herrenhausen palaces, on paper, drawings and the family’s private archive. She went out to Hanover on Monday mornings and came home on Thursday nights for twelve years. She held no Hanoverian office, was paid by the collections’ trust like any other conservator, and was known in the conservation rooms as Frau Hanover, a joke she did not discourage.

The work shaped her later institutions directly. She learned there that an archive is a public trust as much as a family’s property, that the condition of a document decides what can be known from it, and that small collections die first. All three lessons became foundations.

The Welf papers

The papers that brought her to Heinrich had been divided since 1866. In the summer of 1866, during the short Prussian occupation of Hanover after the war, part of the Welf family’s private correspondence was removed to Berlin for safe keeping. The settlement that left Hanover unannexed returned the kingdom’s state archives intact. It did not return the family’s letters, which remained in the Prussian archives for a hundred and thirty years as private papers that nobody had a duty to send back.

In 1996 the two houses agreed to reunite them, and each sent somebody. Hanover sent Caroline, who had worked on its half for six years. Prussia sent the heir, Heinrich, then twenty-seven, who was working through the Prussian collections as part of his constitutional preparation and had asked for the project because, he said afterwards, it was the only file in the Prussian archives that nobody else wanted. The two of them catalogued both halves together over five years, in Hanover and in Berlin.

The project ended with Berlin returning its half to Hanover. The papers are now held together in the Royal Archives at Hanover. The return was carried out through the ordinary archival process and was reported, at the time, as a small piece of professional housekeeping. It has since been described as the most consequential archive transfer in modern German history, a description that both of the people concerned found absurd.

Marriage

Heinrich

Their relationship began professionally and stayed that way for some years. Heinrich, according to his own account, admired her first as a conservator, because she could read a nineteenth-century hand faster than anybody in either archive. She admired him, she has said, because he was the only Prussian she had met who apologised for 1866 without being asked.

They argued from the beginning. She was more direct than he was, and less inclined to believe that careful procedure answered the question of who held power. They argued about the return of cultural property, about gendered succession, about the reach of expert administration and about what a dynasty owed for what it had inherited. The arguments did not end with the marriage and were, by the account of both, part of why it worked.

He proposed by letter, dated 4 May 2001, and the engagement was announced in September. The letter is private. The announcement was made from London and from Potsdam on the same morning, in identical terms, and was received in both countries with a degree of surprise that the two families had not quite anticipated: the British had assumed the princess would not marry, and the Prussians had assumed the heir would marry a German.

The wedding

They were married on Saturday 22 June 2002, at the Marktkirche in Hanover, eight days after her thirty-sixth birthday. The marriage was solemnised in civil and Lutheran ceremonies approved under the laws of both houses, followed by an Anglican blessing, because the bride remained a communicant of the Church of England and intended to remain one. Hanover was chosen as the bride’s city and as the place where the two houses’ papers were now kept together. The British press noted that she married in the town where she had spent twelve years commuting to work, and the Hanoverian press noted that she had at last moved.

On her marriage her brother made her a Royal Lady of the Order of the Garter, and the King of Prussia conferred the Order of Louise. She had held the Royal Guelphic Order, the Hanoverian order, from her brother since her twenties.

The marriage rule

The rule that governed the marriage was written down in a memorandum of two pages, agreed by both ministries before the wedding. It recognised that the bride was the sister of a sovereign of fourteen Crowns, two of them German states, and that the groom was heir to the German and Prussian Crowns, and it provided that the marriage would create no channel between them. She could exchange family conversation with her brother, and where a conversation touched public business the responsible ministries would be told that it had taken place. She could not carry a document, an instruction, a request, a piece of intelligence or formal advice between her husband and her brother in either direction.

She kept the rule for twenty-six years. No breach of it has ever been alleged, and the two private secretaries who administered it have said that she was more scrupulous about it than either sovereign. Where arrangements between the two families have been attributed to her in gossip, the attribution has always turned out to be a guess, and the rule has always turned out to have held.

She keeps it in widowhood. Her son is a reigning sovereign, her brother was one until 31 October, and her nephew is one now, and the memorandum’s principle has been applied by her own choice to all three: family talk, and nothing carried.

German

She spoke German properly only after 2002. She had read it for twenty years, for the archives, and spoke it, by her own account, like a document. In Potsdam she took lessons for two years from a retired schoolmistress who refused to be paid and who corrected her, she has said, without mercy and without ever once mentioning that she was correcting the Crown Princess. Her German now is exact, a little formal, and recognisably that of a woman who learned it from paper first.

Empress and Queen

2005

In 2005 Friedrich V abdicated and Heinrich succeeded him, and she became German Empress and Queen of Prussia. The marital titles gave her no office. In imperial work she was Empress Caroline and in Prussian work Queen Caroline, because the two Crowns are legally distinct in every act though held by the same person, and the household was precise about which she was at any engagement. Their daughter Charlotte was born at Potsdam on 11 March that year.

She became her husband’s principal private counsellor and held no office in either Crown. Heinrich could give her recorded, revocable access to selected papers that were not operational, within the capacity concerned, and the private secretary of that capacity logged what she saw and why. She had no entitlement to files, intelligence or state advice in her own right. Ministers did not receive her views as instructions, and she did not carry them to parties or agencies. Where Heinrich adopted an argument that she had first made at home, it reached the government through him and through responsible ministers, and nowhere else.

Respected more than loved

As Empress she was respected more than she was loved, and she has said that she would not have wanted it the other way round. Germans found her capable, direct, well briefed and faintly foreign, and the faint foreignness never wore off. She did not give interviews, with one exception. She did her work through institutions that had their own boards and their own managers, and she was seen at their doors and not on the front pages.

The joke about her never stopped. Prussia declined to annex Hanover, so Hanover annexed Prussia was first made in a Berlin cabaret in the year of her marriage and has been made in every year since, in the press, in the Reichstag and on one occasion in the Abgeordnetenhaus by a minister who apologised for it. She is said to have heard it more often than anybody in Germany and to have laughed at it every time, which the Berlin press has taken as proof that she did not understand it and the Hanoverian press as proof that she did.

Faith

She is an Anglican and worships in both churches. She was baptised and confirmed in the Church of England and has remained a communicant of it, and in Potsdam she has also worshipped in the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union since 2002, at the Friedenskirche and in Berlin Cathedral, as her husband’s household did. The Lutheran practice that her husband’s article describes is real. So is the Anglican one. She has never been asked to choose and has said that she would not know how.

The children

Charlotte was born at Potsdam in 2005 and Alexander at Hanover on 18 January 2014, by her choice. She wished one of her children to be born in her own city, and the household agreed. The date was the anniversary of the Prussian coronation of 1701 and the proclamation of the Empire in 1871, and no claim has ever been made that it was chosen; Alexander was born when he was born.

Under the law then in force the son displaced the daughter. Male-preference primogeniture put Alexander ahead of a sister nine years older, and the parents both recognised the unfairness and gave the two children the same constitutional education. They did not tell either child that equality of preparation was equality of position, because it was not.

2015

When the Empire and Prussia moved to absolute primogeniture in 2015, she argued that equality pointed to Charlotte, and she lost. The reform was drafted to run only forwards, so that it equalised descendants born after it and left the order fixed at Alexander’s birth undisturbed. Heinrich held that the prospective form was the one that could be enacted and the one that was institutionally safe, and he would not displace a son he had raised as heir. She disagreed with him, in private, consistently, and accepted the law when it passed without pretending that it made her children’s positions equal.

In 2016 she said so once in public, to the BBC. It is the only interview she has given in her life. Asked about the reform, she said: “Equality pointed to my daughter. The law points to my son. I argued, and I lost.” She said nothing further on the subject, then or since, and declined the follow-up question.

The interview was received in Germany as a breach of reticence and in Britain as a statement of the obvious. Neither government commented. Her husband did not, in public or, as far as anybody knows, in private. Her daughter has never asked her about it, and her son has never needed to.

Her institutions

She has four institutions, and each has its own board. They are governed independently, publish their accounts, appoint their own managers and decline her suggestions when they think fit, and the managers of two of them have said that they have done so. She can advocate, visit, listen and convene. She cannot direct a ministry, distribute public money, select the outcome of a restitution case or prefer a friend, and the institutions’ rules were written so that she could not.

The Kaiserin-Caroline-Stiftung

The Kaiserin-Caroline-Stiftung, founded in 2006, funds children’s wards in German hospitals, the Charité’s above all. It pays for equipment, for parents’ rooms, for play specialists and, increasingly, for nurses’ training, and it has paid for the refitting of children’s wards in forty hospitals. Its largest single commitment is at the Charité in Berlin, where it funded the children’s ward that she opened in its first year and has funded most of its successors.

It is named after her against her wish. She proposed a name taken from the first ward, and the founding board, which included two paediatricians and a banker, voted her down on the ground that donors would give to an Empress and not to a ward. She has said that they were right and that she has never forgiven them.

She went back to its wards in September 2028, seven months after her husband’s death, for her first engagements for any of her institutions since February. She visited three wards in Berlin and Brandenburg over a fortnight, without speeches, and the foundation published the visits afterwards and not before.

The Institut für Provenienzforschung

The Institut für Provenienzforschung was founded in Berlin in 2008 to research the provenance of objects in German collections, independently of the state museums that hold them. Its independence is the reason for it. The museums had their own provenance departments, and claimants had said for years that a museum investigating its own collection was investigating its own title. The institute investigates on request from claimants, governments and the museums themselves, publishes its findings, and has no power to decide anything. Decisions on return belong to the owners, which are mostly the states.

Its best-known case is the beaded throne of the Bamum kings, returned to Fumban in 2019. The throne had been sent to Berlin in 1908 by the Bamum sultan Ibrahim Njoya as a gift to the Emperor, and had been held in the Berlin collections for a hundred and eleven years. The institute’s research, requested through the government of Kamerun on behalf of the Bamum palace, established the circumstances of the gift, which were those of a ruler in alliance with a protectorate whose favour he needed, and the museum’s trustees decided to return it.

She did not go to Fumban. The museum’s director went, and handed the throne over at the palace, and she has said that it was his museum and his decision and that the photograph should be of him. She had been in Kamerun three years earlier with her husband, when he attended the rehabilitation of Rudolf Duala Manga Bell at Duala as Kaiser von Kamerun, and she has not been since.

The institute’s largest open case concerns the Herero and Nama. The objects, human remains and records taken from German South West Africa during and after the genocide of 1904 to 1908 are held across dozens of German institutions, and the work of tracing them has been under way for more than a decade. It is not concluded and is entangled with the reparation negotiations described in the German Empire article, which are not concluded either. She has never said anything about it in public. The institute’s director has said that this is correct, and that the case belongs to the people it concerns.

The archives trust

Her civic archives trust works for small-town archives, the municipal and parish collections that hold most of the written memory of German local life and have the least money to keep it. It pays for digitising, for conservation of the most endangered records, and above all for training: it has trained several hundred archivists, most of them people already working in small archives without any formal qualification, on courses modelled on the one she took at Göttingen in 1989. It is the least known of her institutions and the one she visits most.

Lessons in hospital

Her schools programme provides lessons for long-stay children in hospital. Teachers employed by the programme work on children’s wards, coordinated with the children’s own schools, so that a child who spends months in hospital does not lose a school year with the treatment. The programme works alongside the Stiftung’s wards and is funded separately.

During the respiratory pandemic the lessons went on when the schools closed. For many months the programme’s teachers were the only teachers some children in Germany saw in person, on wards that were themselves closed to most visitors. It is the work of hers that the German public knows best, though few could say whose it is.

In public

Her public life as Empress is remembered for four moments, and she would have chosen none of them as the four.

The first is the opening of the Stiftung’s first children’s ward at the Charité, which she opened in its first year without a speech, by walking round it and talking to the parents, and which established the manner of everything afterwards. The photograph from that day, of the Empress sitting on the floor of a playroom with a child’s drawing on her knee, is the one German newspapers still use.

The second is Kamerun in 2016, when she accompanied Heinrich to Duala for the rehabilitation of Duala Manga Bell. She stood behind him at the site of the execution and said nothing in public, and the Kamerunian press noted, with approval, that the Empress had come to listen.

The third is the hospital lessons during the respiratory pandemic, which made her institution a household name and her own name no better known than it had been.

The fourth is the BBC interview of 2016, her one interview, and its three sentences about her daughter, which are quoted in every German article about the succession and which she has never repeated.

Widowhood

February

Heinrich I died suddenly at Potsdam on 12 February 2028, of an aortic aneurysm, at fifty-eight. She and the children were told directly and privately before the public announcement, and given time together before anything that could lawfully wait was put before them. Alexander succeeded at once in all his father’s capacities, at fourteen, and the Regency Council was constituted the same day with her as one of its two dynastic members.

The funeral

At the funeral she appeared in the capacity appropriate to each part of it. In the imperial service at Berlin Cathedral she was Empress Caroline. At the Prussian committal at the mausoleum of the Friedenskirche in Potsdam, where Heinrich lies, she was Queen Caroline. The distinction was the household’s and she kept it, and nobody watching could have said that she noticed.

Queen Christina of Sweden sat beside her through the service in the cathedral. Ernest V came too, on a separate aircraft under his household’s rule, and sat with the other sovereigns. Christina was not in the front row by protocol. She was there because Caroline had asked her to be, and the cathedral’s protocol office, which had a seating plan, moved it.

March

In March she issued a statement of thanks, which is her only public statement about her husband’s death. It said that she and her children thanked everyone who had written to them, that they had read the letters, that they could not answer them all, and that they were grateful for every one. It was four sentences long. She has said nothing about her bereavement in public since.

Her private life since February is little known, and the Register prints two things about it, both of them visible. She walks every morning along the shore of the Heiliger See from the house in the Neuer Garten to the Marble Palace and back, alone or with one companion, at the same pace whatever the weather. And she does it in a long grey coat, which Potsdam has come to know, and which the Potsdam papers, after one attempt to make a story of it, have agreed among themselves not to photograph.

The Regency Council

Her seat

She sat on the Council as one of its two dynastic members from February until it was abolished on 10 October 2028. The other was her daughter, who chaired it as the senior dynastic member by blood. The other seven were the two presiding officers of the Reichstag, the two of the Bundesrat, the President of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus and two retired judges, one from each of the German and Prussian constitutional courts.

She spoke rarely. Members have said that she read every paper put before the Council all the way through, asked perhaps one question a sitting, and otherwise said nothing until a vote. She approached the Council through its protective purpose: she accepted that a regency must sometimes use powers that a minor cannot safely exercise himself, and she held that it should not use disputed personal powers against a government that commanded its parliament.

Falk

In April the Council dismissed the Prussian Minister-President, Johanna Falk, by six votes to three, and she was one of the three. A personal Prussian royal power requires two thirds of the nine, which is six, and the dismissal passed by exactly that. She, Charlotte and the President of the Abgeordnetenhaus voted against. She asked that her vote be minuted, which the Council’s forms already required, and made the request anyway; members have said that it was the only time she raised her voice in eight months, and that she did not raise it very far.

Her reasons were her own and she has never published them. It is generally understood, from what the Council’s record discloses, that she did not deny the power existed. She questioned whether guardians acting for a boy could use it against a ministry with a clear majority, and whether a dismissal made in her son’s name, which her son had opposed in the room, would ever afterwards be regarded as his. The Prussian constitutional crisis of 2028 article describes what followed: the Constitutional Court’s judgment of 9 October that the dismissal was void, and the amendments of 10 October that abolished the Council and made Charlotte sole Regent.

She was described, with her daughter, as a bloc, and both of them disliked the description. They voted together on every division of consequence, and for different reasons. Her daughter has said that she was protecting the office and that the boy was protected as a consequence. Caroline was protecting her son and has never pretended otherwise.

Since 11 October

Since her daughter became sole Regent she has held only the Church governorship. The King of Prussia is the formal governor of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union, and during Alexander’s minority she exercises the function. It is narrow: it carries no teaching, sacramental or disciplinary authority, and consists of confirming the election of the Church’s presiding bishop, summoning its general synod and signing a small number of instruments that the Church’s own bodies have already decided.

Her governorship as an Anglican has never been questioned. It was raised as a curiosity in the first week of the regency and has not been raised since, by the Church, the Landtag or anybody else. The Church’s presiding bishop has said that the governor’s function is to sign what the synod has decided, that the Queen Mother signs it, and that what church she attends on Sunday is between her and God.

With her daughter

She and Charlotte are close, and since 11 October she has been careful never to look like a second Regent. She does not attend her daughter’s audiences, does not see the Regent’s papers, and does not appear beside her at any engagement at which the Regent acts for the King. They see each other privately, as a mother and daughter, mostly at the Potsdam house on Sundays, and the Regent’s household has said that the arrangement was the Queen Mother’s suggestion and that it was made the day the Council was abolished.

With her son

Her relationship with Alexander is loving and protective, and since February it has become more protective than he would like. She has wished to keep from him as much of disputed state business as can lawfully be kept from a minor sovereign. He has wished to know what is being decided in his name. The disagreement is real, is contained inside the family, and has not been resolved. His article describes it from his side; from hers, it is what any mother would do whose son was made Emperor at fourteen by his father’s death, and she does not regard it as a disagreement about the constitution at all.

Her styles

She has more correct styles than almost anybody in Europe, and the Register uses each where it belongs.

During the marriage she was formally Her Imperial and Royal Majesty Caroline, German Empress and Queen of Prussia; ordinarily Empress Caroline in imperial work and Queen Caroline in Prussian work. Since February she is formally the Empress Dowager in the German Empire, the style used in the court circular, and the Queen Dowager in Prussia, to match it. In ordinary speech, in Prussia, in the press and in the Register’s other articles, she is the Queen Mother, which is what Germans have called her since February and what she answers to. By her birth house she is Queen Caroline of Hanover, the epithet used in the Atlantic realms and in Hanover itself. She was born Princess Caroline Elizabeth Louise of Hanover, and the British press, which knew her by that name for thirty-six years, has never quite learned to call her anything else.

In the family she is Aunt Caroline to the King of fourteen realms, Mama to the German Emperor and the Princess Regent, and Caroline to her brother and to her sister-in-law.

Her brother

The rule in practice

She and her brother have spoken by telephone most weeks of her adult life and have never discussed the business of either government. The marriage rule required that a conversation touching public business be disclosed to the responsible ministries, and in twenty-six years the ministries were told of perhaps a dozen, most of them about funerals. Her brother’s household has said that the rule was easy to administer because she treated it as his and he treated it as hers.

Kittyhawk

When her brother’s aircraft was lost east of Newfoundland on 25 September 2028 she was in Potsdam, and she stayed there. She made no statement during the search. She did not travel to New Westminster when he was found alive on 29 September, or when he woke on 20 October. Her household has said only that she was kept informed by her brother’s household throughout, under the same rule as always, and that she spoke to her sister-in-law most days.

New Westminster General telephones her about her brother every Thursday, and has done since he was brought there. The calls are from his physicians, at her request, and are private.

The abdication

When her brother abdicated, with effect on 31 October 2028, she made a short public statement. It said: “My brother has served his realms for fifty-six years, and he has decided. I honour his decision with all my heart. My nephew has my love, and he has my prayers.” It did not mention the succession. With the statement of thanks in March, it is the whole of what she has said in public since February.

Her brother has been the Duke of Cumberland since that evening. She has not commented on the peerage, his seat in the House of Lords or his announcement of 7 November that he will take it when he can walk to it.

Frederick

She is the King’s godmother. She stood sponsor at his christening in the Royal Chapel at Stockholm Palace in 2013, with Olav, Grand Duke of Minnesota, and has taken the office seriously in a family where godparents are not always expected to.

She gave him a fountain pen at his confirmation, a dark green one with a gold band, which he still uses for his own letters. It is the only gift of hers to him that is publicly known.

She visits him once a year, alone and unannounced. She has been in the Realm about once a year since he went to live in New Westminster, always privately, always without notice, and never as anybody but his aunt. She has never made an official visit to the Realm, and none of her visits has been recorded by the Household as an engagement.

She was asked about the name George before his accession. Her reply, which became known in the family and later outside it, was that it was about time the family did something sensible with a name.

Since 31 October the King’s Private Secretary in the Realm has briefed her once a quarter, by letter. The letters tell the heir presumptive what the heir presumptive should know, and nothing more, and they are the only official communication she receives from any of the fourteen Crowns.

Christina

Her friendship with Queen Christina of Sweden dates from Christina’s wedding to her brother in 2009 and has become, for both of them, the closest friendship either has in the other’s family. They speak on Sunday evenings. They have little in common on paper, a Swedish naval officer and a London conservator, two Queens of very different kinds of Crown, and a great deal in common in fact: each married a sovereign of another country and kept her own work, and each has watched a son take on more than a child should.

Christina sat beside her at Heinrich’s funeral in February. In October, when Charlotte became sole Regent, Christina wrote to Charlotte, and told her, among other things, that Caroline would answer any telephone call at any hour.

Heir presumptive

Next in fourteen capacities

Since 31 October 2028 she has been next in line to the fourteen Crown capacities of the personal union. The King is an only child and has no heir of his own, and under the realms’ rules the succession behind him passes to his father’s only sibling and then to her children, her son before her daughter, because the realms’ move to absolute primogeniture was drafted, like Prussia’s, to run only forwards. She stands first, Alexander second and Charlotte third.

She holds no heir’s dignity. The six that Frederick held as heir apparent merged in the Crown at his accession and wait for an heir apparent; none passes to an heir presumptive. She is next in fourteen capacities and holds no title in any of them.

She has said nothing about it in public. The King’s Household plans for her as next, as it must, and has plans on file in every realm for the case in which she would succeed. She has not been asked to approve them and has not asked to see them.

If she inherited

If she succeeded her nephew she would hold fourteen Crowns as a widow living in Potsdam, and her heir would be a reigning German Emperor. Nothing in the Interrealm Succession Compact bars a sovereign who already reigns elsewhere from succeeding, and nothing provides for it. Two of the fourteen capacities, Hanover and Brunswick, are constituent states of the German Empire, whose Emperor would then be heir to their Crowns as well as sovereign of the federation they belong to.

The question is open, and the Register states the arithmetic and leaves it there. The King is fifteen. She is sixty-two. Every one of the fourteen Crowns would have to decide, by its own law, what to do about a German Emperor in its line, and none has been asked to, and the George V article records that no instrument of any realm says what would follow if the line reached a sovereign who already reigns elsewhere.

In the Realm

In the United Kingdom of America the public reaction is curiosity. The Realm’s next in line is a German Empress whom it has never seen, who has made no official visit and given no interview to an American, and whose one public quotation in the Realm’s press is about somebody else’s succession. The American newspapers have printed her portrait of 2005 and her BBC sentences a great many times since 31 October, and very little else, because there is very little else.

In Britain

In Britain she is well liked. She was a London child and a London student, is remembered at the Courtauld, kept her flat in Kensington through twenty-six years of marriage, and has the British advantage of having never once been in the news for anything she did not intend. The British regard her position as heir presumptive with something between pride and alarm.

The Welf in Potsdam

Her life is joined at five points to the history of the two houses, and the article sets them out without drawing a conclusion from them.

The first is 1866. Hanover fought on Austria’s side in the war of that year and was defeated, and the victorious Prussian settlement did not annex it. The kingdom entered the Empire in 1871 with its Crown and government intact, and its dynasty went on reigning, which is what made the Welf personal union and the Hanoverian Crown Exception possible. She is a daughter of that dynasty who became Queen of the kingdom that declined to take her family’s.

The second is the papers. The only part of Hanover that Prussia kept after 1866 was a box of family letters, and she spent five years with the heir of Prussia putting it back.

The third is Alexander’s birth at Hanover. The German Emperor was born in a Welf city by his mother’s choice, and his grandmother lives there now.

The fourth is the marriage rule. Two houses joined by a marriage agreed in writing that the marriage would join nothing else, and the rule was kept.

The fifth is the line. Since 31 October the heir to fourteen Crowns, among them the Crowns of two German states, lives in the Hohenzollern seat, and after her the heir is the Hohenzollern Emperor.

Homes

She lives at the house in the Neuer Garten in Potsdam, the family house on the shore of the Heiliger See where she and Heinrich lived from 2002, which is not named and has not, in the household’s phrase, had a fire in it for two hundred years. She has kept it unchanged since February. It is where her children were raised and where her husband died, and she has said that she will live there for as long as her son is a minor and has not said what she will do after.

She has rooms at the Imperial Palace in Berlin, a drawing room and a bedroom on the floor below her son’s, which she uses on school nights, when Alexander is in Berlin for his school. She does not use them as an office and receives nobody there.

She has a flat in Kensington, the one she had before her marriage, which she never gave up. She uses it when she is in London, perhaps four times a year, and it is the only home she owns outright.

She is in Hanover once a month, to see her husband’s mother and to visit the archives. Princess Elisabeth of Baden, Heinrich’s mother, moved to Hanover after the death of Friedrich V in 2024, in order, she said, to be neither in Potsdam nor in Baden. The two widows have lunch on the same day each month, and Alexander, when he goes, goes to his grandmother in Hanover.

Household

Her household is a private secretary, two ladies-in-waiting and her share of the family establishment. The establishment that served Heinrich and her together, a single professional household under ordinary employment law, now serves her, the Regent and the King, with separate secretariats for the imperial and Prussian capacities that she does not use. Her own private secretary has served her since 2005. Her ladies-in-waiting are a former conservator from Hanover and the widow of a Prussian diplomat, and both are paid.

She has no relationship with ministers beyond courtesy. She extended the marriage rule into widowhood by applying it to her son’s government: she sees ministers at the occasions where the protocol puts them, is courteous to them, and discusses nothing with them, and the State Ministry and the imperial Chancellery have said that she has never once asked either for anything.

Honours

She holds three orders, each from a different Crown.

• The Order of Louise, the Prussian order for women, conferred on her marriage in 2002.
• The Royal Guelphic Order, the Hanoverian order, conferred by her brother.
• The Order of the Garter, as a Royal Lady of the Order, conferred by her brother on her marriage in 2002.

She wears them separately, the Prussian at Prussian occasions and the British and Hanoverian at theirs, and has never worn all three at once. The household has said that this is a matter of taste. The Hanoverian Crown Office has said that it is a matter of law.

Assessment

She is a woman who has spent her life inside other people’s institutions and has built four of her own that do not need her. She was trained to preserve paper and to read it, married into a monarchy that kept papers more carefully than any in Europe, and spent twenty-six years at the side of a sovereign without once being accused of using a paper she should not have seen. Her achievements are all in the form of things that run without her: a foundation, an institute, a trust, a programme of lessons.

Her one public argument was lost. She argued in private that equality pointed to her daughter, said so once in public, and accepted the law that made her son Emperor. It is the clearest view anybody has of what she thinks, and she has given no other.

Her position since February is one of three silences. She has been silent about her husband’s death, apart from four sentences of thanks; about her brother, apart from three; and about the fact that she is next in line to fourteen Crowns. Each silence is, on the evidence, a matter of principle rather than of reticence, and the principle is the same in all three: that what belongs to other people, a grief, a decision, a succession, is theirs to speak about.

The Register records that she is the heir presumptive to the personal union, that the King she would succeed is fifteen, and that the question of what would follow her has no answer in any instrument of any realm.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Ernest V, her brother, nineteen years older, who raised her half and is since 31 October 2028 the Duke of Cumberland
• Heinrich I, her husband, German Emperor and King of Prussia, who died in February 2028
• Alexander I, her son, German Emperor and King of Prussia since 12 February 2028
• Princess Charlotte, her daughter, Princess Regent since 11 October 2028
• George V, her nephew and godson, to whom she is heir presumptive
• Christina II of Sweden, her sister-in-law and closest friend in the house of Hanover
• Ernest IV, her father
• Kingdom of Hanover, the kingdom Prussia declined to annex in 1866
• Kingdom of Prussia, whose Regency Council she sat on and whose Church she governs during the minority
• Kamerun, to whose Bamum palace the throne her institute researched was returned in 2019
• Prussian constitutional crisis of 2028, in which she voted against the dismissal of Johanna Falk

Categories

People · World People · The Crown · Hanover · Prussia · The German Empire