Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  “Nothing can be so wretchedly uncertain and uncomfortable as my situation,” she wrote to Priscilla Burghersh. “I am grown thin, sleep ill and eat but little. Bailly [Dr. Matthew Baillie] says my complaints are all nervous, and that bathing and sailing will brace me; but I say Oh no! no good can be done whilst the mind and the soul are on the rack constantly, and the spirits forced and screwed up to a certain pitch.”

  Harmony was eventually restored, and Princess Charlotte was allowed to marry the man of her choice, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, in 1816. It was an ideal match; one of the rare royal marriages that actually worked. “We lead a very quiet and retired life here,” Charlotte wrote from her country estate in Surrey, “but a very, very happy one.” Alas, the sweet idyll would not last. The year after her wedding, Princess Charlotte died suddenly after giving birth to a stillborn baby son. She was only twenty-one, and the outpouring of grief that followed rivaled that for another Princess of Wales almost two centuries later.

  As her daughter died, Princess Caroline was off gallivanting across Europe and making quite a spectacle of herself—as a stripper, essentially. At a ball in Naples, for example, she appeared “in the most indecent manner, her breast and her arms being entirely naked,” and in Athens she had “dressed almost naked and danced with her servants.” After seeing her at another ball, Lady Bessborough painted a particularly garish portrait of the princess in a letter to Granville Leveson-Gower: “I cannot tell you how sorry and ashamed I felt as an Englishwoman. In the room, [dancing], was a short, very fat elderly woman, with an extremely red face (owing I suppose to the heat) in a girl’s white frock-looking dress, but with shoulder, back and neck quite low (disgustingly so) down to the middle of her stomach; very black hair [she was wearing a black wig] and eyebrows, which gave her a fierce look, and a wreath of light pink roses on her head.”

  Inappropriate dress aside, though, the most scandalous aspect of Princess Caroline’s behavior was the flagrant affair she conducted with her strapping chamberlain, Bartolomeo Pergami, reports of which filtered back to Britain from all over Europe. There was the letter from Florence about her continuing “exceedingly prodigal behavior” and her “intimacy” with Pergami, which was “the subject of conversation everywhere.” And from Hanover came news of Caroline’s “very incongruous conduct,” which “created general astonishment and justly merited indignation.”

  The couple simply seemed incapable of discretion, as a long list of servants and others attested. Caroline’s coachman, Giuseppe Sacchi, for one, saw on several occasions Pergami slip into the princess’s room, where he found them in the morning, “both asleep and having their respective hands upon one another. Her Royal Highness had her hand upon a particular part of Mr. Pergami, and Mr. Pergami had his own upon that of her Royal Highness.… Once … Pergami had his breeches loosened … and the Princess’s hand was … upon that part.”

  Caroline had decided that she would never return to England, but that all changed early in 1820 when King George III died and her estranged husband became King George IV. The wayward princess now determined that she would take her place as queen. And there was nothing the government could do to stop her, despite the new king’s most intensive efforts.

  “It is impossible for me to paint the insolence, the violence and the precipitation of this woman’s conduct,” reported Lord Hutchinson, part of a deputation sent to France to urge Caroline’s quiet retirement. “I never saw anything so outrageous, so undignified as a queen, or so unamiable as a woman.… She has really assumed a tone and hauteur which is quite insufferable, and which nothing but the most pure and unimpeached innocence could justify.… We have at length come to a final and ultimate issue with this outrageous woman. She has set the King’s authority at defiance, and it is now time for her to feel his vengeance and his power. Patience, forbearance and moderation have had no effect on her. I must now implore His Majesty to exert all his firmness and resolution: retreat is impossible. The Queen has thrown down the gauntlet of defiance. The King must take it up.”

  Yet for all his huffing and puffing, King George IV was powerless against Caroline’s onslaught. He was almost universally loathed, and she—personifying all opposition to the king and his government—was warmly embraced by the masses. “No Queen, no King!” the people shouted.

  “This brave woman,” as The Times called Caroline, was raucously received from the moment she arrived at Dover on June 5, 1820. The diarist Charles Greville rode out to watch the queen enter London and reported, “The road was thronged with an immense multitude the whole way from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. Carriages, carts, and horsemen followed, preceded, and surrounded her coach the whole way. She was everywhere received with the greatest enthusiasm. Women waved pocket handkerchiefs, and men shouted wherever she passed.”

  George IV, faced with the nightmarish possibility of a revolution in support of his monstrous wife, had one weapon left to destroy her (or so he thought): Bartolomeo Pergami. A Bill of Pains and Penalties was introduced into the House of Lords accusing Caroline of having conducted herself toward Pergami with “indecent and offensive familiarity and freedom,” and of having carried on “a licentious, disgraceful, and adulterous intercourse” with him. And for such behavior, the bill sought to “deprive her Majesty Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of the title, prerogatives, rights, privileges, and pretensions of Queen Consort of this realm, and to dissolve the marriage between his Majesty and the said Queen.”

  The inquiry that followed produced compelling evidence against Caroline, but the majority of people seemed not to care. “All the world is with her,” declared Sir James Mackintosh. Roving mobs attacked anyone they believed was not on the queen’s side, while cartoonists gleefully attacked the king. The nation was riveted by the case.

  “No other subject is ever talked of,” Charles Greville wrote. “If you meet a man in the street, he impatiently asks you, ‘Have you heard anything new about the Queen?’ All people express themselves bored with the subject, yet none talk or think of any other.… Since I have been in the world I never remember any question which so exclusively occupied everybody’s attention, and so completely absorbed men’s thoughts.”

  After a sensational trial in which all manner of lurid testimony was heard regarding Caroline’s romps with Pergami, the Bill of Pains and Penalties narrowly passed in the House of Lords. But given the slim margin, as well as the widespread agitation in favor of the queen, the bill was withdrawn before it was sent for debate in the House of Commons. A massive three-day celebration erupted across the kingdom as a result. “There had never been such rejoicing since Waterloo,” wrote historian Christopher Hibbert.

  Though Caroline had won, she was still not going to be crowned. When she arrived at Westminster Abbey for George IV’s coronation, the doors were slammed right in her face. Several weeks later she was dead, perhaps of stomach cancer, though some have suggested poison. The inscription on her coffin, which she wrote herself, read: DEPOSITED, CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, THE INJURED QUEEN OF ENGLAND.

  George IV lived another nine years, reviled as ever.

  * It remains unclear just how far the sexual relationship between Princess Charlotte and Captain Hesse went, but according to Charlotte’s own account to her horrified father, Caroline left them alone in her room, locked the doors, and announced with a wink, “A present je vous laisee, amusez vous!” (“Now I leave you, have fun!”)

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  William IV (1830–1837):

  A Misbegotten Brood

  Jordan’s high and mighty squire

  —JOHN WOLCOT, AKA PETER PINDAR

  When George IV died in 1830, he was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence, who became King William IV—the second (and last) of the sons of George III to reign in Britain.

  The sons of George III were nothing if not prolific. Between the lot of them, they produced fifty-seven children before 1819—fifty-six of whom were illegitimate.* Most of these misbegotten offspring were secreted aw
ay and kept quiet by the princes who sired them. But the Duke of Clarence, who became King William IV, defied convention and lived openly—and quite happily—with his ten out-of-wedlock children and their mother, an actress named Dorothy Jordan. He even named his kids—the Fitzclarences, as they were called—after his own brothers and sisters.

  Mrs. Jordan entered William’s life at a fortuitous time in 1790. His naval career was in its decline and, thanks to his disapproving father, he had few prospects for gainful employment. What he needed was a good companion. Having grown tired of the empty sexual encounters of his youth—“with a lady of the town against a wall or in the middle of a parade,” as he wrote—the duke was seeking a woman to settle down with, or at least one who “would not clap or pox me every time I fucked.”

  A popular comedic actress, Mrs. Jordan had a gregarious good nature that blended well with the duke’s own kindly—if sometimes crude—disposition. “Her face, her tones, her manner, were irresistible,” wrote William Hazlitt in his Dramatic Essays. “Her smile had the effect of sunshine, and her laugh did one good to hear it.” No wonder William was smitten. She was, he said, “one of the most perfect women in the world.” And Dorothy’s income as an actress had its own compensations as well, especially for a man with debts as heavy as the duke’s. William’s reliance on Mrs. Jordan’s money prompted a few snickers, and John Wolcot’s (aka Peter Pindar) sassy epigram:

  As Jordan’s high and mighty squire

  Her playhouse profits deigns to skim;

  Some folks audaciously enquire

  If he keeps her or she keeps him.

  Despite such occasional barbs, the couple’s essential decency tended to mute most criticism of their unconventional domestic arrangement. “The truth of the matter was that it was extraordinarily difficult to denigrate any relationship so happy, domestic and virtuous,” wrote biographer Philip Ziegler. “They were two likeable people, anxious to do no harm to anybody and devoted to each other. It would have been surprising if the public had not learned to look on them, at first with tolerance, in the end with affectionate approval.”

  Even the uptight king and queen grudgingly accepted Mrs. Jordan, though not—heaven forbid—at court. They even deigned to attend one of her performances. “The Duke of Clarence has managed so well that the King jokes with him about Mrs. Jordan,” Lord Liverpool reported in 1797.

  For twenty years the prince and his paramour lived in harmony with the children they both doted upon. She continued to act, even during her numerous pregnancies, while he devoted himself to farming. William thrived in the domestic idyll they had created. “We shall have a full and merry house at Christmas,” Mrs. Jordan wrote to a friend. “ ’Tis what the duke delights in.” Alas, the arrangement was not destined to last.

  Money was the main problem; William never had enough. He knew, like his brother George before him, that a respectable marriage would increase his income. So in 1811, after two decades of domestic bliss, the duke abandoned his mistress and began the search for a wealthy wife. Poor Mrs. Jordan was crushed.

  “Could you believe or the world believe that we never had for twenty years the semblance of a quarrel,” she wrote to a friend. “But this is so well known in our domestic circle that the astonishment is greater. Money, money, my good friend, or the want of it, has, I am convinced made HIM at the moment the most wretched of men, but having done wrong he does not like to retract.” Still, the scorned woman was surprisingly sympathetic: “But with all his excellent qualities, his domestic virtues, his love for his lovely children, what must he not at this moment suffer?”

  The duke’s suffering was not alleviated by his hunt for a rich woman to support him. Sadly, none of the ladies he pursued was willing to have him. “It was flattering to be courted by a prince of the blood,” wrote Philip Ziegler, “but when the prince was forty-six and looked every year of it; portly, balding and uncouth with no small talk, a mountain of debts and ten illegitimate children; a romantic girl might be forgiven for finding that blood alone had only limited charm.”

  The need for a wife became more urgent in 1817 when Princess Charlotte, George III’s only legitimate grandchild, died after childbirth. Now, after the king, only William’s two older brothers stood between him and the throne. Charlotte’s father, the Prince of Wales, was not likely to live long given his unhealthy lifestyle, and the wife of Frederick, Duke of York, was not expected to reproduce after twenty years of marriage. So, the race was on between the rest of the royal dukes to secure the succession. William saw an opportunity not only to do his duty by marrying, but to get paid for it as well.

  “If the Cabinet consider the measure of my marrying one of consequence,” he wrote to his mother, Queen Charlotte, “they ought to state to me what they can and will propose for my establishment: for without previously being acquainted with their intentions as to money matters I cannot and will not make any positive offer to any Princess. I have ten children totally and entirely dependent on myself: I owe forty thousand pounds of funded debt for which of course I pay interest, and I have a floating debt of sixteen thousand pounds.”

  A German bride, Princess Amelia Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen, was selected for the duke, and on July 13, 1818, they were married—just over a week after first meeting. It was a double ceremony with William’s brother Edward, Duke of Kent (who ultimately won the reproductive race by fathering the future Queen Victoria the following year).† “She is doomed, poor dear innocent young creature, to be my wife,” William wrote of Princess Adelaide before their wedding. “I cannot, will not, I must not ill use her.”

  The marriage was by all accounts a happy one. Adelaide was kind to William’s ten children—some of whom lived at Windsor Castle—even as her own children were stillborn or died soon after delivery, and she seemed to tame the more uncouth side of the duke’s disposition. “You would be surprised at the Duke of Clarence if you were to see him,” Lord Colchester wrote; “for his wife, it is said, has entirely reformed him; and instead of that polisson [naughty] manner for which he used to be celebrated, he is now quiet and well-behaved.”

  Meanwhile, William’s ill-used mistress, Mrs. Jordan, had fled to France in 1815 to escape her creditors. Largely ignored by her children, in increasingly bad health, and nearly destitute, she died alone in the summer of 1816. Although clearly not the most attentive of former lovers, William always revered the memory of Mrs. Jordan. He would snap up portraits of her whenever they came on the market and, after he became king in 1830, commissioned a bust of her that he tried to give to St. Paul’s. The offer was politely refused, and thus Mrs. Jordan’s sculpture stayed by the king’s side—a persistent reminder of the past, indulged by the remarkably tolerant Queen Adelaide.

  * Princess Charlotte was George III’s only legitimate grandchild before 1819, when, as shall be seen later in this chapter, several more of the king’s sons produced legitimate heirs after Charlotte’s death in 1817.

  † A younger brother, Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, also fathered a legitimate son earlier in 1819, but he was farther down in the line of succession. Thus, Victoria became queen.

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  Victoria (1837–1901):

  A Trip Down the Aisle

  And you saw the want of rehearsal.

  —BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  William IV died in 1837 without a child of his own to succeed him, so the crown passed to his niece Victoria, daughter of George III’s fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent.

  The accession of eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria in 1837 marked the beginning of a remarkable era—a second English Renaissance, as it has been called. But the coronation of the young monarch did not bode such a brilliant future—quite the opposite, in fact. The ceremony was an awkward affair—five hours filled with every manner of mishap, featuring participants who, Charles Greville noted, “were very imperfect in their parts.”

  The patina of magnificence was certainly present at the service, infused as it was with ancient tradition and the
aura of royalty. Westminster Abbey was packed with richly adorned peers and peeresses, triumphant music filled the air, and the diminutive sovereign—standing at just five feet tall—dazzled in her rich regalia. Victoria was indeed the very image of majesty, and managed to maintain it, despite the blundering of almost everyone around her.

  “The Queen looked very well, and performed her part with great grace and completeness, which cannot in general be said of the other performers,” Benjamin Disraeli observed. “They were always in doubt as to what came next, and you saw the want of rehearsal.”

  The clergymen leading the ceremony seemed to be the most egregiously unprepared. Lord John Thynne, who officiated in place of the elderly and infirm dean of Westminster, admitted to Charles Greville “that nobody knew what was to be done … and consequently there was continual difficulty and embarrassment, and the Queen never knew what she was to do next.”

  Among the fumbling clergy was the “remarkably maladroit” bishop of Durham, who, Victoria wrote, “never could tell me what was to take place.” The archbishop of Canterbury was also present, but he, too, was of little help. The queen recounted that at one point in the service he “came in and ought to have delivered the Orb to me, but I had already got it, and he (as usual) was so confused and puzzled and knew nothing, and went away.” It was the archbishop who insisted upon cramming the coronation ring onto the queen’s finger, even though it didn’t fit, “and the consequence was that I had the greatest difficulty to take it off again, which I at last did with great pain.”

  Other participants rivaled the clergy in their clumsiness, including Prime Minister William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne. Loaded on laudanum and brandy, he “looked very awkward and uncouth,” Disraeli wrote, “with his coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great Sword of State like a butcher.” Then there was the Duchess of Sutherland, “full of her situation,” Disraeli noted, who “walked, or rather stalked up the Abbey like Juno.”