Willy Austin had been born on July 11, 1802, to the wife of a cashiered Deptford shipwright. Babe in arms, Sophia Austin had sought Caroline’s assistance in reinstating her husband’s employment. The princess offered to care for the little boy herself, and ten days later, Sophia returned with little Willikins, as Caroline would call him. Assured that her son would be given the best of everything, Sophia released him to Caroline.
No sooner had Caroline set up Willy’s nursery than a new man, the handsome naval captain Thomas Manby, arrived in Greenwich and entered her life.
Lady Douglas, swiftly revealing herself to be no true friend to Caroline, told the prince about a Montague House dinner party at which the princess played footsie with Manby under the table, while above board she flirted quite outrageously and evenhandedly with both Manby and Sidney Smith. When the meal ended, Caroline rose from the table and headed for the door, turning back to glance significantly at Manby. When Smith spied Caroline and Manby kissing behind the door, he left the table, never to return to Montague House.
At another dinner party, Caroline disappeared with Manby for nearly an hour, leaving her embarrassed guests to fend for themselves.
Caroline’s behavior was becoming increasingly shocking. According to Lady Hester Stanhope, “How the sea-captains used to color up when she danced about, exposing herself like an opera girl . . . she was so low, so vulgar! . . . I plainly told her it was a hanging matter that she should mind what she was about.”
Unwisely, Caroline never seriously credited anyone’s warnings that her sexual escapades were treasonous offenses.
Caroline had either discovered the products of Yardley and Floris or else her lovers were not as hygienically fastidious as her estranged husband. Then again, she was the Princess of Wales. She was rich enough, she was a terrific hostess, and she clearly loved to have a good time. Not only that, she was the mother of the young heir presumptive. With the king ailing and mentally deranged, and the Prince of Wales unhealthily obese, Caroline might at any moment become the most powerful woman in England.
And if that’s not enough inducement for a man to catch her when she threw herself at him, Caroline no doubt became better and better looking with each glass of claret.
Toward the end of 1804, the air was thick with rumors about Caroline’s indiscreet conduct. Captain Manby received two anonymous letters bribing him to reveal the extent of his “intimacy” with the Princess of Wales. Although the prince assured everyone that he was looking forward to letting justice take its course, behind the scenes, he had been assiduously endeavoring to dig up as much dirt as possible.
On May 29, 1806, after the PM, Lord Grenville, had presented the evidence of Caroline’s indiscretions, King George appointed a secret commission of cabinet ministers to examine the witnesses who had provided it. At issue was whether Caroline and Charlotte’s visits should still be subject to “restriction and regulation,” pursuant to a thorough investigation of her conduct. In the meantime, Caroline was “deprived by a positive order” from seeing her daughter at all. Until she married in 1816, the hoydenish Charlotte remained an unfortunate pawn in the ugly squabbles between the battling Hanovers; neither of her parents wanted anything to do with her unless it would cause pain to the other one.
The proceeding, called “the Delicate Investigation,” commenced on June 1, 1806, with Lady Douglas’s sworn statement, written in December 1805, that the child brought to Caroline’s house in the summer of 1802 was the princess’s biological son. Lady Douglas was certain that Sir Sidney Smith was Willy Austin’s father, knowing of Caroline’s partiality for the naval man. She told the commission that “Sir Sidney Smith had lain with her [Caroline]; that she believed all men liked a bedfellow, but Sir Sidney better than any body else.”
But Sophia Austin swore under oath that the child was indeed hers and that she visited him regularly at Montague House.
Lord Moira testified that a box belonging to Captain Manby (who Princess Charlotte believed to be Willy’s father) had been opened by a friend, who found inside it a portrait of Caroline “with many souvenirs hanging to it,” including a leather bag containing “hair of a particular description and such as his friend said he had been married too long not to know that it came from no woman’s head.”
Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, jocularly suggested that the hair found in the bag would have to be compared with its supposed source in order for it to become admissible evidence.
However, despite the statement made in the witness box by her former footman Samuel Roberts that “the Princess is very fond of fucking,” the investigators were unable to obtain any incontrovertible proof of Caroline’s infidelity.
Accusations, denials, hearsay, rumor, and innuendo characterized “the Delicate Investigation.” Tales of soiled sheets and skulking about in the night titillated the commissioners. Some testimony was contradictory, other statements seemed coerced, and some allegations were clearly manufactured by those who nurtured grudges against the Princess of Wales, or those who feared losing their situation and therefore sought to protect her.
Finally, some genius thought to check for any documentation on Willy Austin’s birth, leading to the Brownlow Street Hospital records, where, plain as day, Sophia Austin’s testimony was revealed to be absolutely factual.
On July 4, 1806, the Lord Commissioners rendered their verdict: “There is no foundation for believing that the child now with the Princess is the child of her Royal Highness, or that she was delivered of any child in the year 1802; nor has anything appeared to us which would warrant the belief that she was pregnant in that year, or at any other period within the compass of our inquisition.”
Although Caroline had been found innocent of giving birth to a bastard, the commission found enough merit in the allegations of sexual misconduct, particularly with regard to Captain Manby, for her behavior to warrant further scrutiny.
The king was fond of his niece, and he adored his granddaughter Charlotte, now ten years old. But after the spotlight of inquiry had revealed Caroline’s moral character (or lack thereof) to be unwholesome, if not illegal, he had no alternative but to terminate all social intercourse between Caroline and the royal family, including—or perhaps especially—the impressionable Charlotte, who would one day become queen.
On February 5, 1811, the Prince of Wales was sworn in as Regent. Now that he, and Caroline, were one step closer to the throne, it was vital to George to prevent her from ever sitting on it beside him.
But in endeavoring to exclude Caroline from society, they compelled her to choose her lovers from outside it, creating a bigger nest of hornets that would end up stinging everyone.
Craving a less repressive atmosphere, during the first week in August 1814, at the age of forty-six, she embarked for the Continent, attended by an assortment of English companions. As her ship put out to sea, she was observed to be weeping.
In Italy, she met thirty-two-year-old Bartolomeo Pergami, a stud of a man over six feet tall, with curly black hair and thick dark mustachios. He had come to her lodgings for a job interview, and finding no one to meet him, wandered through the rooms, eventually discovering a short, stout lady endeavoring to dislodge her skirts from a piece of furniture. Pergami gallantly assisted her in releasing her gown, and Caroline hired him immediately, assigning him to ride ahead to her next destination and secure lodgings and fresh horses for her entourage.
Pergami came from a well-heeled Crema family and had been a quartermaster in the Austrian Viceregal army, serving in the Russian campaign of 1812 as a courier for General Pino. He was now unemployed, allegedly for killing a higher-ranking officer in a duel, and was also conveniently separated from his wife. Caroline acquired Pergami’s relatives along with the dashing Bartolomeo, loading them with favors and financial gifts.
She decided to “go native,” but her unfortunate attempt to look Italian was comical. Caroline covered her fine blond hair with a curly black wig and darkened her eyebrows with kohl
until she looked like an ancestor of Groucho Marx. In an effort to darken her pale Germanic complexion, she reddened her cheeks until she resembled a circus clown. Overindulging in the local cuisine, she packed on more weight. At balls, she danced with abandon until her high-waisted gowns slipped off her shoulders and her considerable bosom bounced out of the few inches of fabric that strained to contain it.
With a mandate to provide irrefutable proof of Caroline’s adultery, the Regent’s spies filed regular reports to the crown on Caroline’s outrageous conduct. What must George have thought when he read about the time his estranged wife plopped a pumpkin shell on her head, explaining that the unusual chapeau kept her cool? Or the news that she had appeared more than once at a formal ball attired (to her mind) like a Roman goddess, which meant remaining entirely nude from the waist up? Or that she had traveled through the streets of Genoa in a coach shaped like a conch shell with a pageboy dressed as Cupid in flesh-colored tights leading her matched pair of tiny ponies? Presumably costumed as Venus, Caroline had been clad in her black fright wig and a diaphanous tunic that barely grazed her knees. Beside her sat her thirteen-year-old adopted protégé, Willy Austin, whom she referred to as “the little Prince,” although it had already been satisfactorily proven that he was not her biological son.
At Catania, Pergami received the Order of Malta when Caroline explained to the Grand Master that the other men in her entourage could not be knighted because they were Protestant. Discovering that she could not appoint Pergami to the rank of chamberlain because English court protocol stipulated that only a nobleman could hold that position, she bought her lover an estate and a barony, creating him Barone Pergami della Francina, Order of Malta.
Caroline and her entourage cruised the Mediterranean on a polacca. She rode into Jerusalem on an ass, a deliberate allusion to Jesus. There, she founded the Order of St. Caroline, naming Pergami as its Grand Master, adopting the motto of England’s Order of the Garter, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Evil be to him who evil thinks).
News that the Princess of Wales was consorting with a mob of undistinguished foreigners shocked the English aristocracy. When the Duke of Devonshire heard that Caroline had “a Mameluke outside her carriage,” he replied that “it was not so bad as having a courier inside.”
On May 2, 1816, Princess Charlotte married Prince Leopold, the third son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Not only had Charlotte finally escaped her repressive, infantilizing upbringing, it was a love match. Her mother, traveling abroad, was not present at the wedding. Nor was Caroline at her daughter’s bedside when, after fifty hours of agonizing labor, on November 5, 1817, the princess was delivered of a stillborn boy.
Five hours later, in the early morning hours of November 6, the twenty-one-year-old princess was dead, most probably from a postpartum hemorrhage or an infection that was misdiagnosed and then mistreated. Her grieving husband, Leopold, robbed of his chance to become England’s king consort, returned to the Continent and remarried. He eventually became King of the Belgians, and was the uncle of Queen Victoria.
Caroline was living in Pesaro, on the east coast of Italy, when she received the sorrowful report, quite by accident, that Charlotte and her infant had died. The princess’s household, always on the lookout for news of Charlotte’s accouchement, intercepted the English monarch’s courier, who was en route to Rome. Evidently, the crown had thought it was more important to inform the Pope of the princess’s death than to tell her mother about it.
When she heard the dreadful news, the Princess of Wales fainted. Contrary to the propaganda disseminated by her husband, Caroline was very affected by Charlotte’s death (as well as her chance to be a grandmother and eventually queen mum). She began to suffer severe headaches and bouts of extreme melancholy.
With their daughter dead, George no longer felt any need to be remotely kind to Caroline. In 1818, casting himself as the most abused and tormented man ever to walk the face of the earth, the Regent wrote to his Lord Chancellor illuminating the need for “unshackling myself from a woman who has for the last three and twenty years . . . been the bane and curse of my existence,” and who “now stands prominent in the eyes of the world characterized by a flagrancy of abandonment unparalleled in the history of women, and stamped with disgrace and dishonor.”
That summer, although the cabinet had been reluctant to sanction a second proceeding at taxpayer expense that would only result in another royal scandal, the Regent dispatched a three-man commission to Milan “for the purposes of making enquiries into the conduct of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales since she quitted England in the month of August 1814.”
The Milan Commission interviewed more than eighty-five witnesses, most of whom were Italian servants who gave their statements through interpreters—and afterward laughingly shared all the sordid details with their friends at the local tavern, mocking the somber-suited Englishmen who were paying them so much for their stories that they didn’t need to work again.
The prince’s British investigators amassed “a great body of evidence,” but upon their return to England with their brimming portfolios the Regent was advised that he could not obtain a divorce “except upon proof of adultery, to be substantiated by evidence before some tribunal in this country.”
Not only that, Caroline could always raise the issue of her husband’s numerous extramarital liaisons, including his marriage to Maria Fitzherbert and a potential charge of bigamy. Although some historians have maintained that Caroline was even more upset by the existence of Mrs. Fitzherbert than she was by Lady Jersey, the princess was quite sympathetic toward Maria, avowing, “That is the prince’s true wife; she is an excellent woman; it is a great pity for him that he ever broke with her.”
On July 13, 1819, the Milan Commission presented its report to the cabinet. After reviewing it, they decided on July 24 that the report did not contain enough evidence to assure that the Princess of Wales would be found guilty of adultery with Bartolomeo Pergami in an English court of law.
Caroline was in Italy at Leghorn (Livorno) in 1820 when she received a letter from Henry Brougham advising her of the death of George III on January 29 and urging her to return to England immediately; she was now Queen of Great Britain. But another letter informed her that the new king would take no action against her unless she set foot again on English soil. She would remain queen, but uncrowned.
One of George IV’s first acts as king was to insist that Caroline’s name be struck from the church liturgy, so that the country would not be exhorted to pray for her by name every Sunday. When Caroline heard about her husband’s intention, she grew livid. Adding insult to injury, she then learned that she was not to be called the queen after all, but simply Caroline of Brunswick. This was intolerable; she was going home.
Her lawyer, the Whig MP Henry Brougham, now secretly working on the king’s behalf, tried to talk her out of returning, advising her to remain abroad in exchange for a £50,000 annuity (over $6.2 million today), retention of her title, and all rights as Queen of England. But Caroline wasn’t going to be bribed. Having left her foreign entourage behind, on June 5, she landed at Dover, prepared to greet her subjects.
It was noted by the Times that after a five-and-a-half-year absence, “Her blue eyes [were] shining with peculiar luster, but her cheeks had the appearance of a long intimacy with care and anxiety.” She was now fifty-two years old.
Now that she was queen, she dressed herself with all the decorum of a criminal defendant on arraignment day. Her bodices fully covered her ample poitrine right up to her nonexistent neck. Her gowns were somber-hued, her bonnets modest and fashionable.
At Dover, the people unhorsed her carriage and pulled it themselves through the streets. It was just the sort of enthusiastic welcome the king and his government had dreaded. Caroline was cheered all the way to London with shouts of “God Save the Queen” and “No Queen, No King.” She had become the people’s symbolic victim of an abusive, repressive, and hypocritical
monarchy. The press called her “the injured queen.”
After receiving such a warm welcome from her subjects, Caroline was prepared to live abroad forever in exchange for the allowance, but now the king felt it was not punishment enough. He stubbornly clung to the liturgy issue. Not only that, he wanted a legal divorce.
Luckily for the queen, her purported affair took place outside of England and her presumable lover was a foreigner. Pergami could not have committed treason against a king and crown not his own; therefore, if he was not treasonous, neither was Caroline. Consequently, when George brought the Milan Commission documents to both houses of Parliament, he urged the government to consider a Bill of Pains and Penalties, the only remedy available to him that would punish Caroline for her alleged adultery with Bartolomeo Pergami.
The Secret Committee comprised of fifteen lords convened on June 20, to review the contents of the notorious “green bags” that contained the intelligence amassed over the years by the Milan Commission.
On July 5, the Bill of Pains and Penalties was introduced into the House of Lords. The bill sought “to deprive Her Majesty Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of the title, prerogatives, rights, privileges, and exemptions of Queen Consort of this Realm, and to dissolve the marriage between His Majesty and the said [Queen] Caroline.”
Caroline was accused of committing her first adulterous act with Pergami on November 14, 1814, in Naples. A witness had seen imprints of two bodies on her bed in the morning.
But from the start, there were problems. For one thing, the Bill of Pains and Penalties permitted the king to achieve what none of his equally adulterous subjects could obtain: a divorce “without clean hands.” The Whig lords were solidly against the bill. Several Tories, including some of the king’s closest friends, didn’t think it prudent to proceed, fearing that the defense would drag His Majesty’s numerous skeletons from his closet. And many of the clerical lords would only vote for the bill if the divorce clause was removed.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 29