Everyone expected Charlotte’s arrival to reunite the Waleses in a lovefest of domestic harmony and marital bliss, but it didn’t happen. On the contrary, George took great pains to avoid seeing his wife. Caroline was instructed to remain more or less secluded in London with a short list of socially appropriate visitors, which included one of her mandated attendants—Lady Jersey. Known as the Carlton House System, it was George’s way of keeping his wife “in order lest she should keep me so.” Restricting Caroline’s movements checked her ability to demand limits on his own freedom.
Left alone with her ladies-in-waiting at Carlton House, the Princess of Wales wrote to a German acquaintance, “I do not know how I shall be able to bear the loneliness. The Queen seldom visits me and my sisters-in-law show me the same sympathy. But I admire the character of the English and nothing can be more flattering than the reception that is given me when I appear in public. . . .”
Her attendants and visitors noticed her unhappiness. Lady Sheffield, who dined with the princess in Brighton in late July, noted that “her lively spirits which she brought over with her are all gone, and they say the melancholy and anxiety in her countenance is quite affecting.”
George suggested the idea of a marital separation to Lord Malmesbury, assuring the earl that Caroline had lied about his ill treatment of her, though he did admit that he loathed the very sight of his wife. “I had rather see toads and vipers crawling over my victuals than sit at the same table with her,” he declared. Part of his revulsion was Caroline’s continued inattention to personal hygiene.
But Caroline had indiscreetly shared her opinions of her husband’s failings in the boudoir, 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 mid-April 1796, Caroline, lonely and humiliated, had had enough of Lady Jersey, and complained to her husband that she would no longer spend her days being shut in with no other companion but his mistress. Meanwhile, in case she ever needed to defend herself against her in-laws, she was quietly compiling a list of transgressions committed against her by her husband and other members of the royal family, including the separation from her only child—who was being raised in such seclusion that she was ill prepared to become queen, having so little knowledge of the world.
The Waleses mutually agreed to separate in the spring of 1796, never again to sleep together, and to remain man and wife in name only, even if they resided under the same roof. George sent Caroline a letter stating: Our inclinations are not in our power, nor should either of us be held answerable to the other because nature has not made us suitable to each other. Tranquil and comfortable society is, however, in our power; let our intercourse be restricted to that. . . . I shall now close this disagreeable correspondence, trusting that as we have completely explained ourselves to each other, the rest of our lives will be passed in an uninterrupted tranquility.
In an effort to sift through the wreckage of his royal marriage, George demanded an interview with Caroline. Anticipating a scene, the prince took a “second”—on this occasion it was Lord Chomondeley—to witness the maelstrom.
No sooner had they entered Carlton House than Caroline assailed her husband in French. “I have been two and a half years 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.” She spat out that last word in English.
Reminding their son that his entire life was a very public matter and that separation would reflect badly on his popularity, the monarchs tried to reconcile the Waleses, but the marriage was irreparable. By December 1796, the formal separation agreement was finalized, and a few months later Caroline moved to a house in Charlton, near Blackheath, although her husband told her she was welcome to avail herself of Carlton House at any time. Anxious that the settlement arrangements not appear petty or ungenerous, George also made it clear that he had no objections to her attending public entertainments, particularly as he knew she was fond of the opera.
Caroline took full advantage of her freedom. By 1799, she was indulging her flirtatious personality at Montague House, regularly entertaining several of the most prominent Cabinet ministers—including the PM himself, William Pitt. She was rumored to be enjoying a series of lovers from her guest list. “I have a bedfellow as often as I like,” she once boasted, “nothing is more wholesome.” Her behavior became increasingly shocking. Unwisely, Caroline never seriously credited anyone’s warnings that her sexual escapades were treasonous offenses. “Nobody can improve me in morality,” she declared. “I have a system quite of my own.”
Princess Charlotte would later observe, “My mother was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she was if my father had not been infinitely worse.”
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 care for them. She placed the children with nearby foster mothers, but they were always welcome to come and play at Montague House.
One of those children was Willy Austin. He had been born on July 11, 1802, to the wife of a cashiered Deptford dockyard worker. 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 after this first interview, 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.
For some years the air was thick with rumors about Caroline’s indiscreet conduct, and behind the scenes, the prince had been endeavoring to dig up as much evidence of it as possible. The search culminated in a proceeding called the Delicate Investigation, which commenced on June 1, 1806. At issue was Caroline’s alleged adulterous behavior and whether little William Austin was actually her illegitimate son. But the investigators were unable to obtain any incontrovertible proof of Caroline’s infidelity, a remarkable failure given her former footman Samuel Roberts’s testimony that “The princess is very fond of fucking”; and the statement made by Lady Lisle, one of the Women of the Bedchamber, that the princess was “a terrible flirt.”
After the Brownlow Street Hospital records proved that Sophia Austin’s testimony regarding little William’s birth was entirely truthful, 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.” The bottom line was that the prince had no grounds for a divorce because his wife had been cleared of committing any specific crime.
“Are you not glad to see me with my head upon my rump?” a relieved Caroline asked a visitor. However, while the princess had been found innocent of giving birth to a bastard, the commission found enough merit in the allegations of sexual misconduct for her behavior to warran
t further scrutiny.
Although he was fond of his niece, the king determined that it was for the best to terminate all social intercourse between Caroline and the royal family, including—or perhaps especially—ten-year-old Charlotte. Enraged at becoming persona non grata, Caroline threatened to publish her lengthy list of grievances against the prince, as well as all the documents pertaining to the investigation, which cast her husband in an equally unflattering light. The real danger lay not with the enumeration of George’s numerous extramarital affairs and any resultant royal bastards, but with the public exposure of his relationship with Maria Fitzherbert and their two alleged children. As anticipated, George panicked and Caroline was swiftly, if awkwardly, restored to the royal fold.
A month or so later, husband and wife met face-to-face for the last time. According to Lady Bessborough, the sister of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, “They did not speak, but coming close together both looked contrary ways, like the print of the spread eagle.”
Another eyewitness claimed that the pair did speak, but briefly. “They met in the very centre of the apartment—they bowed, stood face to face for a moment, exchanged a few words which nobody heard, and then passed on; he frigid as an iceberg, she with a smile, half-mirthful, half-melancholy, as though she were rejoicing that she were there in spite of him.”
Caroline was in marital purgatory, in her words “a princess and no princess, a married woman and no husband—never was dere [sic] a poor devil in such a plight as I.” Her words echo nearly verbatim the satirical “epitaph” of Maria Fitzherbert that was published in the World in September of 1788.
In 1813, financial woes obliged Caroline to quit Montague House for a more modest residence in Bayswater. She endeavored to maintain at least a toehold in society, but it wasn’t always easy. In the spring of 1814, when Tsar Alexander of Russia visited England, Caroline was omitted from the guest list for his reception at Carlton House. Princess Charlotte added her mother’s name, but her father scratched it out again. Then he thrice prevented the tsar from paying a social call on Caroline by sending messengers to intercept him.
One night at the opera house Caroline arrived to hear the orchestra playing “God Save the King.” The people remained on their feet and greeted her with resounding cheers. On her way home, her carriage was mobbed with sympathetic well-wishers. Poking his head into her coach, one man assured the princess, “We will make the prince love you before we are done with him.”
George’s pettiness even went so far as to prohibit Caroline from worshipping at St. Paul’s; he reserved every seat in the cathedral for a service to commemorate the peace and she was turned away. Balls in her honor were cancelled when the prince forbade his friends from accepting invitations to attend them.
After enduring nearly twenty years as a royal pariah, the Princess of Wales made the decision to quit England. At the age of forty-six, she embarked for the Continent on August 9, 1814, attended by an assortment of English retainers and companions. As her ship put out to sea, she was observed to be weeping.
Soon after her arrival in Italy, she was rumored to have commenced a torrid affair with a native member of her entourage. The thirty-two-year-old Bartolomeo Pergami was a stud of a man over six feet tall, with curly black hair and thick dark mustachios. He 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, although he’d lost his position, allegedly for killing a higher-ranking officer in a duel.
Caroline, traveling abroad, was not present at the May 2, 1816, wedding of Princess Charlotte to 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. Caroline was also absent from her daughter’s bedside when, after fifty hours of agonizing labor, on November 5, 1817, the princess was delivered of a stillborn boy.
Hours later, the twenty-one-year-old Charlotte was dead, most probably from either a postpartum hemorrhage or an infection that was not caught in time and was then mistreated. Her grieving husband, 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 news. 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 had fainted when she was told of Charlotte’s tragic demise, and from then on suffered severe headaches and bouts of extreme melancholy.
With their daughter dead, George no longer felt it necessary to tolerate his sham of a marriage. In 1818, 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, George 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.” In their efforts to collect information for a potential divorce claim, the investigators interviewed more than eighty-five witnesses, most of whom were Italian servants who gave their statements through interpreters. Frightened by the Milan Commission’s existence, Caroline correctly surmised that several witnesses were being bribed to give statements, and feared for her safety. “A great body of evidence” was amassed, but 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.”
He was also warned that Caroline could raise the issue of his numerous extramarital liaisons, including his marriage to (the Catholic) Maria Fitzherbert—which would terminate his right of succession, as well as expose him to a potential charge of bigamy.
On July 13, 1819, the Milan Commission presented its report, and after reviewing it, the Cabinet decided on July 24 that it could not concur with its conclusions that the Princess of Wales and Bartolomeo Pergami were engaged in an adulterous affair. It was the Cabinet’s view that the report did not contain enough evidence to assure that Caroline would be found guilty of adultery in an English court of law. She had dodged another bullet.
Caroline was at Leghorn (Livorno) in 1820 when she received a letter from her lawyer, Henry Brougham, advising her of the death of George III on January 29 and urging her to return to England immediately, as she was now Queen of Great Britain. But a subsequent letter informed her that the new king, her estranged husband, would take no action against her unless she set foot again on English soil. If she remained on the Continent, she would still be considered Queen of England, but would have to accept the fact that according to George’s wishes she would never be crowned.
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 was not exhorted to pray for her by name every Sunday. Caroline found this decree to be so intolerable that she decided to come home. Adding insult to injury, she then discovered that she would not be called the queen after all, but simply Caroline of Brunswick.
Leaving her foreign entourage behind, on June 5 she landed at Dover and received an enthusiastic reception from her subjects. The fifty-two-year-old 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 symbol of an abusive, repressive, and hypocritical monarchy. The press called her “the injured queen.”
Because Caroline’s alleged lover was a foreigner, and their purported affair took place outside of England, George urged the government to consider a Bill of Pains and Penalties that would punish Caroline for her alleged adul
tery with Bartolomeo Pergami. However, Pergami, being an Italian, could not possibly have committed treason against a king and crown that were not his own; therefore, if he was not treasonous, then technically, neither was Caroline.
Nevertheless, 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.”
But from the start, there were problems. The Whig lords were solidly against the Bill of Pains and Penalties. Several Tories, including some of the king’s closest friends, didn’t think it prudent to proceed, fearing that His Majesty’s numerous skeletons would be dragged from his closet by the defense. And many of the clerical lords would only vote for the bill if the divorce clause was removed. Nevertheless, the hearings proceeded, and at the end of the sixteenth day of testimony, much of it graphically prurient, the prosecution rested its case.
But now it was the defense’s turn. Caroline’s ambitious lawyer, Henry Brougham, demolished the witnesses’ testimony, characterizing the prosecution’s case as the “tittle-tattle of coffee-houses and alehouses, the gossip of bargemen on canals and . . . cast-off servants,” and denouncing the Milan Commission as “that great receipt of perjury—that storehouse of false swearing and all iniquity.” He declared that Caroline’s so-called affair with Pergami had been nothing but a dumpy middle-aged woman’s one-sided attempt to appear beloved.
People and the press talked of little but the queen’s trial. Caroline, who had learned how to manipulate public opinion, copied the newspaper editors on a letter she sent to her husband. Probably ghostwritten by Brougham, because Caroline’s use of English never became sophisticated, the queen maintained, “From the very threshold of your Majesty’s mansion the mother of your child was pursued by spies, conspirators, and traitors. . . . You have pursued me with hatred and scorn, and with all the means of destruction. You wrested me from my child . . . you sent me sorrowing through the world, and even in my sorrows pursued me with unrelenting persecution.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 34