Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  The regent became king at the age of fifty-seven upon the death of his father on January 29, 1820. Now George IV, he and Maria rarely crossed paths, but evidently she was never terribly far from his thoughts.

  In June 1830, when the king was dying, he refused to have her visit his bedside, because he was ashamed of his appearance. But he eagerly seized her “get well soon” letter, and after reading it placed it under his pillow. On June 26 at three fifteen a.m., Maria Fitzherbert was made a widow for the third time.

  The new king, George IV’s younger brother, William IV, the former Duke of Clarence, returned eight of the nine portraits of her that had been in George IV’s possession, but Mrs. Fitzherbert wondered what had happened to the missing image—a miniature painted by Maria Cosway that had been set with brilliants in a locket.

  Minney had remained George’s pride and joy, even after Maria had broken with him for good. She knew that the king had wished to be buried with Maria’s portrait about his neck, and for some time she felt too shy to admit its whereabouts to her adoptive mother. When Minney finally told her the king had gone to his grave with it, she said that “Mrs. Fitzherbert made no observation but soon large tears fell from her eyes.”

  William IV unhesitatingly continued to dispense Maria’s annual pension (now £10,000 [over $1.4 million today], although George had changed his 1796 will that had initially left her everything). She signed a release against any claim to George IV’s property. When the new king called on her in Brighton, Maria showed him her marriage certificate to his elder brother, and William’s eyes filled with tears.

  Maria now spoke openly of her marriage to George, and William’s court happily accepted her as a respected in-law.

  The remainder of Maria’s life was gracious and genteel. She was a devoted mother and grandmother to Minney and Maryanne and their children, hostessing parties, traveling throughout England and abroad, and when in Brighton, attending the Church of St. John the Baptist every week for confession. Only a young charwoman was permitted to remain in the building on these occasions, and she was told by the priest to curtsy deeply to the mysteriously veiled old lady, “for maybe it was the queen of England and maybe not.”

  One day in March 1837, Maria collapsed. She died at her Brighton home on Easter Monday, March 27, at the age of eighty, and was buried on April 6 in St. John the Baptist Church. The ring finger of her stone effigy is carved with three wedding bands.

  CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, PRINCESS OF WALES

  1768–1821 QUEEN OF ENGLAND (UNCROWNED) 1820-1821

  The “Delicate Investigation” and

  The Bill of Pains and Penalties

  I never did commit adultery but once, and I have repented of it ever since. It was with the husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert.

  —CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK

  ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A PRINCESS OF WALES WHO was wed to the prince in an arranged marriage. She knew she was on uneven footing from the start because the prince only had eyes for his nearly-middle-aged mistress—the very woman who thought the match would be a good idea in the first place, knowing that the new princess would prove no rival. Although the prince repeatedly assured his bride that the mistress was “just a good friend,” the new princess didn’t for a moment believe it.

  To get back at her husband for his flagrant infidelities, the lonely and sexually rapacious Princess of Wales unwisely resorted to numerous affairs—some were mere flirtations, perhaps, and others were full-blown flings—until the house of cards came down around her head and she was accused of immoral conduct and adultery. Although her husband was as guilty of the same offense, she was better at manipulating public opinion. Getting her story into the press before he did resulted in her martyrdom as the victim of a hypocritical, tin-eared monarchy.

  Most of this sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it? But two hundred or so years before Princess Diana, there was Caroline of Brunswick.

  First cousin to the Prince of Wales, Caroline was the second daughter of the unhappy marriage between Karl II, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and George III’s favorite sister, Augusta.

  The prince had not planned to take a wife—beyond Maria Fitzherbert. It was only the sheer magnitude of his debts, and his father’s promise to pay them on his wedding day, that spurred his decision to find a suitable bride. The pickings were slim; only Protestants were legally eligible because of the 1701 Act of Settlement, and most of those princesses were to be found in the postage-stamp-sized Prussian duchies.

  The persnickety George spent less time choosing a bride than he did a pair of boots, dismissively quipping, “One damned German frau is as good as another.” He told his father “very abruptly” in August 1794 that he was ready to begin “a more creditable line of life” by marrying. His choice of words is telling.

  According to the Duke of Wellington, “Lady Jersey made the marriage simply because she wished to put Mrs. Fitzherbert on the same footing with herself, and deprive her of the claim to the title of lawful wife.” Lady Jersey chose a wife for her royal lover with “indelicate manners, indifferent character, and not very inviting appearance, from the hope that disgust for the wife would secure constancy for the mistress.”

  In the autumn of 1794, James Harris, Earl of Malmesbury, was dispatched to Brunswick, charged with bringing the princess back to England for a royal marriage. After meeting an embarrassed Caroline on November 28, his diary entry describes her “pretty face—not expressive of softness—her figure not graceful—fine eyes—tolerable teeth, but going—fair hair and light eyebrows, good bust—short, with what the French call ‘épaules impertinentes’ [broad shoulders]. Vastly happy with her future expectations . . .”

  She also had an overly large head that looked far too big for her squat, no-necked body. Although her pale, clear complexion was much praised, she was also too fond of her rouge pot.

  The twenty-six-year-old Caroline was not in any way presentable. Malmesbury remained in Brunswick for several weeks, endeavoring to instill even the most rudimentary elements of decorum, discretion, and personal hygiene. Malmesbury also discovered that Caroline’s undergarments—her “coarse petticoats and shifts and thread stockings”—were filthy and smelled rank, “never well washed or changed often enough.” She evinced no hurry to remedy the situation until Malmesbury insisted on it, making a point of telling her that the prince was “very delicate” and expected “a long and very careful toilette de propreté.”

  The Duke of Brunswick candidly told Malmesbury on December 5 that his daughter was “no fool, but she lacks judgment. She was strictly brought up, and necessarily so.” Caroline’s high spirits required a firm hand, which the duke hoped the Prince of Wales would exert. Little did Karl know that, temperamentally, George was all too similar to Caroline.

  Malmesbury began to lay the groundwork for the necessary taming of the shrew. He instructed Caroline “never to talk politics or allow them to be talked to her.” He cautioned her never to “be familiar or too easy” with her ladies, reminding her that she could “be affable without forgetting she was Princess of Wales.”

  When Caroline asked the earl, point-blank, about Lady Jersey, whom she reckoned was “an intriguante,” Malmesbury advised her never to display any jealousy of her husband. If she suspected him of an infidelity, she was to feign ignorance, pretending not to notice it.

  With every admonishment, Caroline promised Lord Malmesbury that she was very anxious to please her prince. “She entreats me also to guide and direct her,” Malmesbury wrote. “I recommend perfect silence on all subjects for six months after her arrival.” By December 16, Malmesbury had formed the impression that Caroline “had no fond [depth], no fixed character, a light and flighty mind, but means well and well disposed; and my eternal theme to her is to think before she speaks, to recollect herself.”

  Caroline’s departure from Brunswick was scheduled for December 21. On the day before, her mother, Augusta, received an anonymous letter, warning her that Lady Jersey was not to b
e trusted, that she would be a bad influence on Caroline and put into her head the notion to take lovers. The duchess unwisely showed Caroline the letter.

  But Augusta’s bad judgment gave Malmesbury the cue he needed to instruct Caroline on the issue of adultery and how it applied to the future Queen of England. The earl warned Caroline that “anybody who presumed to love her was guilty of high treason and punished with death, if she was weak enough to listen to him; so also was she. This startled her.”

  But the loose-moraled Caroline’s astonishment was born of incredulity. She laughed uproariously, dismissing Malmesbury’s dire warning as though she had no intention of taking him seriously.

  On Easter Sunday—April 5, 1795—at St. James’s Palace, the prince and princess met for the first time. Observing the protocol she had struggled to absorb, Caroline curtsied deeply to George. According to Malmesbury, “He raised her (gracefully enough) and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round [and] returned to a distant part of the apartment.”

  “Harris, I am not well, get me a glass of brandy,” the prince said curtly to Malmesbury.

  The earl, embarrassed for both Caroline and the prince, diplomatically endeavored to smooth things over. “Sir, had you not better have a glass of water?”

  “No,” the prince replied, adding an oath presumably too crude for Malmesbury to record in his diary. “I will go directly to the queen.” George then turned on his heels and strode out of the room without another word.

  An astonished Caroline inquired of Malmesbury (in French), “My God! Is the prince always like that? I find him very fat and nothing as handsome as his picture.”

  The match, made first in haste and then in Hanover, might just as well have begun in hell.

  Was it Caroline’s looks or her body odor that had repulsed the Prince of Wales? More than once, Malmesbury had cautioned the princess to wash herself thoroughly all over.

  That night, Caroline’s first in London, was an unmitigated disaster. Insulted that Lady Jersey was present at their dinner table—seated right between her and George—the princess could not keep silent after all, implying that she knew perfectly well that her ladyship was the prince’s mistress.

  Years later, Caroline told Lady Charlotte Campbell, “The first moment I saw my futur and Lady Jersey together, I knew how it all was, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, very well!’ I could be the slave of a man I love; but one whom I love not, and who did not love me, impossible—c’est autre chose.”

  Over the next few days, as the wedding approached, the monarchs subtly offered their heir an “out.” Her Majesty drew the prince aside and told him, “You know, George, it is for you to say whether you can marry the Princess or not.” The king grew uneasy as well, admitting to his wife, in what may have been his most lucid moment of the decade, that he would accept the responsibility for breaking off what might be a disastrous match.

  At the London gentlemen’s clubs, the betting books were full of wagers as to whether the royal wedding would actually take place.

  But His Royal Highness was dreaming of a clean credit report; as distasteful as things were, he was not about to back out. Caroline didn’t care for the prince any more than he did for her, but she was ever the pugnacious Brunswicker, duty-and honor-bound to hold her head high and see it through. She knew the prize was not George—it was to be Queen of England.

  Caroline and George were married in the Chapel Royal on the evening of April 8, 1795. Clad in silver tissue lace festooned with ribbons and bows, the bride glittered with diamonds and grinned from ear to ear, almost bursting with happiness. In contrast, the piss-drunk groom, who had made it down the aisle literally supported by two unmarried dukes, wept through the ceremony when he wasn’t ogling Lady Jersey. At one point, the prince rose to his feet in the middle of the service, looking as though he was about to bolt. He received dirty looks from his father and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the king admonished his heir to assume the position again.

  But the most potentially embarrassing hitch came when the archbishop set down the book after asking whether “any person” knew “of a lawful impediment.” The air was thick with tension. Would someone mention Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Catholic woman George had secretly married a decade earlier? It was certainly the cue to do so. The archbishop looked long and hard from the prince to the king and back again. The chapel remained silent and the ceremony continued.

  Guests didn’t know what to make of it all. “What an odd wedding,” observed Lady Maria Stuart.

  On his wedding night, through a haze of brandy, the prince must have gritted his teeth and thought of £600,000, fantasizing about paying off his debts and beginning to spend afresh, starting with all the improvements he wished to make to Carlton House.

  Caroline was mortified, humiliated, and disgusted by his behavior. She confided to Lady Charlotte Campbell, “Judge what it was to have a drunken husband on one’s wedding day, and one who passed the greatest part of his bridal night under the grate, where he fell, and where I left him.”

  But it got worse. George told Lord Minto, “Finding that I had suspicions of her not being new, she the next night mixed up some tooth powder and water, colored her shift with it and . . . in showing these she showed at the same time such marks of filth both in the fore and hind part of her . . . that she turned my stomach and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again. I had known her three times—twice the first and once the second night—it required no small [effort] to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person.”

  Miraculously, during one of George’s three drunken and disappointing performances in the bedroom, he had gotten Caroline pregnant. On January 7, 1796, she gave birth to “an immense girl,” Princess Charlotte. Times had changed; the monarchy was constitutional, and the Renaissance-era reasons for preferring a male heir were moot. Upon Charlotte’s birth, because a daughter could also inherit the throne (as long as she was, according to the 1701 Act of Settlement, a legitimate descendent of Sophia, Electress of Hanover—the mother of George I), the succession was now secured.

  The kingdom rejoiced. So did the Prince of Wales. His duty done, he assured Malmesbury that “the child just born . . . certainly will be the last as I declare I can never approach her again, for she never washes or wipes any part of her body.”

  By mid-April, Caroline, lonely and humiliated, complained to her husband that she would no longer spend her days being shut in with no other company but his spiteful mistress, who had been assigned to act more or less as Caroline’s full-time companion and minder. George immediately became shocked, appalled, insulted! He castigated Caroline for assuming such an indelicate thing about Lady Jersey and wounding her noble character. They were just good friends, George insisted.

  In the spring of 1796, the Waleses decided to live apart, and by December the formal separation agreement was finalized. But the double standard by which Caroline was expected to abide is anathema to modern women. The prince felt perfectly at liberty to cat around as much as he liked, while he expected Caroline to socialize only with the people named on a list he’d drawn up, and to remain chaste, or at least discreet.

  After the split, Caroline indiscreetly shared her opinions of her estranged husband’s failings in certain areas, causing the Earl of Minto to remark, “I fancy the mutual disgust broke out at that time, and if I can spell her hums and haws, I take it that the ground of his antipathy was his own incapacity, and the distaste which a man feels for a woman who knows his defects and humiliations.”

  There may be some truth to Minto’s observation. One reason the prince had so avidly desired to rid himself of Caroline was because she was not as advertised. George told Malmesbury, “Not only on the first night there was no appearance of blood, but her manners were not those of a novice. In taking the liberties natural on these occasions, she said, ‘Ah mon dieu, qu’il est gros!’ (Oh, my god, it’s big!), and how should she know this without a previous means of comparison.”

 
; By 1799, she was in her new residence, Montague House. There she entertained several of the most prominent cabinet ministers—including the PM himself, William Pitt. Caroline was giving full rein to her flirtatious personality.

  One of Caroline’s favorites was George Canning, the twenty-nine -year-old member of the Control Board (and a future PM). Evidently, Caroline threw herself at Canning during the summer of 1799 and he didn’t turn down what was offered, despite having just lost his heart to Miss Joan Scott, the woman he would eventually marry.

  Another rumored lover was the artist Thomas Lawrence, who briefly resided at Montague House over the winter of 1800 while he was working on a portrait of Caroline and Charlotte. And from 1801 to 1802, the princess appeared to be more than just good friends with the naval hero and diplomat Sir Sidney Smith, who was observed coming and going at all hours. “I have a bedfellow as often as I like,” she boasted. “Nothing is more wholesome.”

  Around 1801, Caroline struck up a friendship with her neighbors, Sir John and Lady Douglas. She insinuated herself into their lives, and the ambitious and scheming Lady Douglas was treated to the full measure of the princess’s madcap (or just plain mad) behavior. When Lady Douglas was pregnant, Caroline confided that she, too, was enceinte, leading her ladyship to eventually conclude that Willy Austin, an indigent infant adopted by the princess in 1802, was in fact Caroline’s own son.

  Caroline loved children, but after Charlotte had been taken from her and given a separate establishment, the prince sought to exclude her from seeing their daughter with any degree of regularity, and from having any input in the girl’s education. To fill the void, Caroline “adopted” a number of children—orphans or the offspring of destitute parents who could not afford to feed so many mouths. She placed the children with nearby foster mothers, and they were always welcome to come and play at Montague House.