The Prince of Wales called his first wife his “dearest and only belov’d Maria.” The words he chose for his second were slightly less effusive. She was, he said, “the vilest wretch this world ever was cursed with, who I cannot feel more disgust for her personal nastiness than I do from her entire want of all principle. She is a very monster of iniquity.”
The calamitous union of the future king George IV with his cousin Caroline of Brunswick was doomed before it ever began. The prince was a selfish, overindulged libertine, thoroughly loathed by the British people, who only agreed to marry as a means of abating his colossal debts. And Princess Caroline came with her own set of deficits, not the least of which was her reputation for being, as Lord Holland reported, “exceedingly loose.” She also smelled, bathing infrequently and rarely changing her underwear. And she lacked all tact.
Sir James Harris, Earl of Malmesbury, was given the task of asking for Caroline’s hand and escorting her to England. He thought her not unattractive, even if she was short and stocky, with “a head always too large for her body, and her neck too short.” And though at first he found the princess’s exuberance appealing, he soon discovered “that her heart is very, very light, unsusceptible of strong or lasting feelings.” The more Caroline spoke, the more Malmesbury urged her to keep quiet when she met her betrothed; otherwise he was sure the Prince of Wales would be repelled by this gauche creature. She had “no judgment,” he observed; “caught by the first impression, led by the first impulse … loving to talk, and prone to confide and make missish friendships that last twenty-four hours. Some natural, but no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity.”
Few saw any chance of a happy marriage, particularly Queen Charlotte, who had heard horrifying tales about Princess Caroline’s out-of-control behavior and reported them to her brother: “They say that her passions are so strong that the Duke [of Brunswick, Caroline’s father] himself said that she was not to be allowed even to go from one room to another without her Governess, and that when she dances, this lady is obliged to follow her for the whole of the dance to prevent her from making an exhibition of herself by indecent conversations with men.”
King George was one of the few who were enthusiastic about the bride he had selected, his niece, “whose amiable qualities will, I flatter myself, so fully engage your attention that they will divert it from objects not so pleasing to the nation.” Lady Jersey, the prince’s mistress, also approved. Lord Holland reported that, according to the Duke of Wellington, her support of her lover’s marriage to a woman of supposedly “indelicate manners, indifferent character, and not very inviting appearance” arose “from the hope that disgust for the wife would secure constancy to the mistress.”
It was Lady Jersey, not the prince, who was there to greet Caroline upon her arrival in England, and she immediately set to work trying to make the already dumpy princess look worse. She insisted on a less flattering gown for Caroline and over-applied rouge to her cheeks. The mistress needn’t have worried, however, as the prince was instantly repelled when he met his bride-to-be on April 5, 1795. Lord Malmesbury recorded the scene at St. James’s Palace: “He raised her (gracefully enough), and embraced her, said barely one word, turned around, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and calling me to him, said, ‘Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.’ ”
George then stormed out of the room, leaving the bewildered princess alone with Malmesbury. “My God,” she cried, “is the Prince always like that?” Then, seemingly aware of what sent the prince scurrying away, she remarked, almost in retaliation, “I find him very fat, and nothing like as handsome as his portrait.”
Princess Caroline may have been flighty and impulsive, but she wasn’t stupid. She not only recognized that she was not pleasing to the prince, but she understood Lady Jersey’s agenda—and she resented it, especially since the mistress was to be a member of her household. That night at dinner she tried to make light of what was turning out to be an untenable situation. Her attempt failed—utterly. She was, according to Malmesbury, “flippant, rattling, affecting raillery and wit, and throwing out coarse vulgar hints about Lady Jersey, who was present.” The Prince of Wales was, he added, “evidently disgusted.”
Three days after their first, disastrous meeting, the prince and the cousin he was coming to despise were married in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. George was so bombed on brandy that the Duke of Bedford had to keep him propped up, while Lord Melbourne noted that he “was like a man doing a thing in desperation; it was like Macheath going to his execution.”
After the wedding ceremony, the Prince of Wales conducted his new bride to a reception in the queen’s apartments. They barely spoke a word. Lady Maria Stuart said he looked “like Death and full of confusion, as if he wished to hide himself from the looks of the whole world.… I think he is much to be pitied. The bride, on the contrary, appeared in the highest spirits, when she passed by us first, smiling and nodding to every one.… What an odd Wedding!”
That evening the prince passed out in the fireplace, where he stayed all night. The next morning he consummated the union. “It required no small [effort] to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person,” he wrote. Sex hardly improved George’s disposition toward his wife, but at least she got pregnant and bore the next heir to the throne, Princess Charlotte. With that accomplished, the prince left her bed for good. He wanted nothing more to do with his wife. “I had rather see toads and vipers crawling over my victuals than sit at the same table with her,” he declared.
Caroline was all but abandoned by George, who preferred dallying with his mistress, Lady Jersey, and racking up more debts. While he was away, he made sure his wife’s movements were severely restricted. “She drives always alone,” the lawyer Charles Abbot noted in his journal, “sees no company but old people put on her list.… She goes nowhere but airings in Hyde Park. The Prince uses her unpardonably.”
Except for the king, who always took her part, Caroline had no support within the royal family. “I don’t know how I shall be able to bear the loneliness,” she wrote to a friend in Germany. “The Queen seldom visits me, and my sisters-in-law show me the same sympathy.… The Countess [of Jersey] is still here. I hate her and I know she feels the same towards me. My husband is wholly given up to her, so you can easily imagine the rest.”
Although Lady Jersey’s influence over the prince was beginning to wane, she was still a formidable adversary, a monster, really, who, having “no happiness without a rival to trouble and torment,” as one contemporary said of her, relished humiliating the Princess of Wales at every opportunity. “It cannot have been difficult,” wrote author Thea Holme. “Caroline was gauche, unversed in etiquette, stumbling in her English and apt when nervous to blurt out tactless comments and opinions, or to make coarse jokes, all of which were noted by Lady Jersey and relayed to the Prince.” No wonder Caroline loathed her, or bristled over the fact that her husband’s mistress had been foisted upon her as a member of her household.
When Caroline wrote to George requesting Lady Jersey’s removal, she received a curt response, and a dismissal of sorts. “Nature has not made us suitable to each other,” the prince wrote. “Tranquil and comfortable society is, however, in our power; let our intercourse therefore be restricted to that.”
By this time, George’s hatred of his wife had grown virulent. The marriage had not served its one purpose: to resolve his money problems. In fact, they had become even worse. Infinitely more galling, though, was Caroline’s popularity with the people—especially as he was so reviled. “Poor woman,” the novelist Jane Austen later wrote. “I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman and because I hate her Husband.” True Briton lavished praise upon “the amiable and accomplished personage [Caroline], who had been the object of so much unmerited ill treatment.”
Caroline’s mass appeal as the wronged wife was vividly demonstrated one evening when she a
ttended the opera. “The house,” The Times reported, “seemed as if electrified by her presence, and before she could take her seat, every hand was lifted to greet her with the loudest of plaudits. The gentlemen jumped on the benches and waved their hats, crying out ‘Huzza!’…. If the Princess will only afford the public a few more opportunities of testifying their respect for suffering virtue, we think it will bring more than one person to a proper reflection.” Her sense of humor intact, the princess told the Duke of Leeds that “she supposed she could be guillotined … for what had passed this evening.”
George was desperate to be rid of the “infamous wench,” but his father, George III, absolutely forbade a formal separation. “You seem to look on your disunion with the princess as merely of a private nature,” the king wrote to his son, “and totally put out of sight that as Heir Apparent of the Crown your marriage is a public act, wherein the Kingdom is concerned; that therefore a separation cannot be brought forward by the mere interference of relations.”
Caroline did eventually establish her own residence near Blackheath. Before leaving her husband’s home, she blasted him for his abominable behavior toward her: “Since I have been in this house you have treated me neither as your wife, nor as the mother of your child, nor as the Princess of Wales: and I tell you that from this moment I shall have nothing more to say and that I regard myself as being no longer subject to your orders—or to your rules.”
Free from the tyranny of the prince, who had reunited with Mrs. Fitzherbert, Caroline really let loose—on an epic scale. “The poor Princess is going headlong to her ruin,” wrote Lady Charlotte Campbell. “Every day she becomes more imprudent in her conduct, more heedless of society.… The society she is now surrounded by is disgraceful.” Lady Hester Stanhope called Caroline “an impudent woman … a downright whore … she danced about, exposing herself like an opera girl … she was so low, so vulgar.” Most scandalous of all, Lady Douglas alleged the princess had gotten pregnant and that the little boy whom she more or less adopted—William Austin, or Willikin, as Caroline called him—was actually her child.
An inquiry into this allegation, known as the Delicate Investigation, produced some extremely lurid testimony—like the statement from Roberts, the princess’s footman, who said she was “very fond of fucking.” Ultimately, though, there was no proof that Caroline had committed adultery, which would have been a treasonable offense and, George had hoped, grounds for the dissolution of their miserable marriage. (The princess later remarked that she had only committed adultery once, “with the husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert!”)
Although Princess Caroline was exonerated after the Delicate Investigation, her reputation was in ruins. Even the king, her most stalwart supporter, was forced to concede that she was guilty of great “levity and profligacy” and declared that “no nearer intercourse” with the royal family could be “admitted in future than outward marks of civility.”
The unrelenting hostility between the Prince and Princess of Wales, as well as their own selfish pursuits, left little room for parenting. Their daughter, Princess Charlotte, was sometimes used as a public relations prop in their escalating marital war, “dandled by each parent in turn for extra dramatic effect,” as Thea Holme wrote. Mostly, though, she was ignored. George appeared particularly indifferent to his daughter, even if he did occasionally dote on the little girl. Charlotte felt his absence keenly.
“Oh how I wish I could see more of you!” the princess wrote to her father. “But I hope I shall in time. I am sensible how irksome it must be to you to see me, feeling I can be no companion to you to amuse you when in health; and am too young to soothe you when in affliction. Believe me that I am always truly happy when I do see you.”
Part of the prince’s lack of regard for his daughter sprang from the unsettling characteristics she shared with her mother, his detested wife. Charlotte was a vibrant, engaging, and essentially good-hearted girl, but at times a bit wild.
“One of her fancies was to ape the manner of a man,” recalled Charlotte’s childhood friend George Keppel. “On these occasions she would double her fists, and assume an attitude of defence that would have done credit to a professed pugilist. What I disliked in her, when in this mood, was her fondness for exercising her hands upon me in their clenched form.”
There was indeed something of the rough-and-tumble tomboy in the princess, a high-spiritedness some of her contemporaries deemed distinctly unladylike. She “goes swaggering about,” reported Lady Albina Cumberland, “and twangs hands with all the men, is in awe of no one and glories in her independent way of thinking.” Lord Glenbervie recorded in his diary that the princess’s conversation was “forward and dogmatical on all subjects, buckish about horses, and full of expressions very like swearing.” Few of these characteristics were likely to endear the boisterous princess to her dad.
When King George III finally succumbed to permanent madness late in 1810, the Prince of Wales became regent. He planned an extravagant party to celebrate. “I have not been invited, nor do I know if I shall or not,” fifteen-year-old Charlotte wrote to her governess. “If I should not, it will make a great noise in the world, as the friends I have seen have repeated over and over again it is my duty to go there; it is proper that I should. Really I do think it will be very hard if I am not asked.” She wasn’t.
If Charlotte craved affection from her father, she was more ambivalent about her mother. Caroline’s maternal instincts—like so much else about her—were a little off-kilter. Certainly she never bothered to modify her outlandish behavior around her teenaged daughter, and thus Charlotte was exposed to a long line of Caroline’s consorts. The young princess was understandably disturbed by her mother’s antics and once said that “she could not think she was her daughter, as she showed such a want of character.” Nevertheless, Charlotte did recognize how terribly mistreated her mother was. “I believe her to be both a very unhappy & a very unfortunate woman,” she wrote, “who has had great errors, great faults, but is really oppressed and cruelly used.”
The prince regent, as George was now known, ordered strict limitations on Caroline’s visits with Charlotte, particularly after he learned that his estranged wife had been arranging liaisons in her home between their daughter and a womanizing officer by the name of Captain Charles Hesse.* Caroline’s reaction to the restrictions was not really that of a broken-hearted mother deprived of her daughter; she didn’t care all that much. Rather it was one of a vengeful wife who saw the opportunity to make trouble with George and his family—“teazing and worrying them,” as she wrote.
When Queen Charlotte refused to intercede on Caroline’s appeal for more time with Charlotte, the prince regent wrote to his mother to express himself gratified for the “very kind and considerate and well judged and most prudent method” she had adopted to “baffle this not only extraordinary … but most impudent fresh attempt on the part of this most mischievous and intriguing infernale” to affect a fondness for her daughter “which she never did feel and [was] totally incapable of feeling to create a discord or confusion in the family under the pretence of seeing her.”
The prince regent’s assessment of his wife’s motives was fairly accurate, even if it was made in the midst of his blind hatred toward her. Caroline’s concern for Princess Charlotte extended only so far as it suited her, as evidenced by her rash decision to leave England for good in 1814. She had been warned that such a drastic step could jeopardize her daughter’s position as heir apparent because George could divorce her while she was away, remarry, and sire a son. Plus, as shall be seen, Charlotte needed her at the time. Caroline didn’t care.
“She decidedly deserts me,” Princess Charlotte wrote in despair. “After all if a mother has not feeling for her child or children are they to teach it to her or can they expect to be listened to with any hopes of success?”
Caroline’s desertion of her daughter occurred in the midst of a terrible situation Charlotte was enduring with her father. The prince regent
was determined to exercise absolute control over his heir. In one instance he even told her governess that “Charlotte must lay aside the idle nonsense of thinking that she has a will of her own; while I live she must be subject to me as she is at present.”
As part of the domination he maintained over his daughter, George herded her into an engagement with Prince William of Orange, even after assuring her that she would have a say in whom she wed. Such a marriage would entail living in Holland, at least for some part of the year, and sleeping with Prince William—neither of which appealed to the princess.
“As to going abroad,” Charlotte wrote to her friend Priscilla Burghersh,
I believe and hope it to be quite out of the question, as I find by high and low that, naturally, it is a very unpopular measure in England, and as such of course (as my inclinations do not lead me either) I could not go against it, and besides which, I have now no manner of doubt that it is decidedly an object and wish of more than one to get rid of me if possible in that way.… You are far too sensible not to know that this [marriage] is only de convenance, and it is as much brought about by force as anything, and by deceit and hurry; though I grant you that, were such a thing absolutely necessary, no one could be found so unexceptionable as he is. I am much more triste [sad] at it than I have ever chosen to write; can you be surprised?
Rather than proceed in an arrangement she found so odious, Charlotte took the bold step of breaking off the engagement. Her father was furious, and in his wrath he dismissed her servants and decreed that she would live, essentially, under house arrest. Desperate to escape such a fate, Charlotte ran away to her mother, only to find Caroline inflexible in her determination to leave England. The princess had no choice but to return and live in the isolated circumstances her father had ordered.
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