Lord Ellenborough spoke for his fellow peers when he conceded that “the queen was the last woman any one would wish his own wife to resemble,” yet he voted against the bill, having acknowledged that Caroline’s husband was just as ill behaved and licentious as she was, if not significantly worse. The opinion of many of the lords reflected that of John Bull. In the words of Henry Brougham, “all men, both in and out of Parliament . . . admit everything to be true which is alleged against the Queen, yet, after the treatment she had received since she first came to England, her husband had no right to the relief prayed by him or the punishment sought against her.”
The government withdrew the Bill of Pains and Penalties four days later after the third reading of the bill when, at 108 to 99, only nine votes separated the ayes from the nays. The crown conceded that if the outcome was this close in the Lords, the bill would never pass in the Commons, where the king’s numerous extramarital infidelities, as well as the Mrs. Fitzherbert issue, would surely sink his case. Fear of mob violence was another reason the government withdrew the bill.
The Lords had decided to punish the king for his hypocrisy rather than condemn the queen for her adultery.
George was so shocked by the withdrawal of the bill that he considered abdicating and leaving for Hanover, where he was Elector, there to remain forever.
Caroline was too exhausted to rejoice. Lady Charlotte Campbell observed that the queen “appeared worn-out in mind and body. The desolateness of her private existence seemed to make her very sorrowful: she appeared to feel the loss of her daughter more than at any previous moment, and she wept incessantly.”
So the case was closed. And a popular satirical verse made the rounds of coffeehouses: Most gracious Queen we thee implore
To go away and sin no more,
Or, if that effort be too great,
To go away at any rate.
Now that her name and character had been formally cleared, the queen was also eager to be crowned alongside her husband. However, the Privy Council informed Caroline that it rested within the king’s purview to crown his consort and therefore was not a decision she could appeal either to the council or to Parliament, nor could she take her case to the people or the press. Nonetheless, the queen insisted on attending the king’s coronation and being rightfully crowned alongside him.
George took every precaution to prevent this event. He hired beefy prizefighters, captained by the champion pugilist Gentleman Jackson, to guard the doors to Westminster Abbey, the palace, and the hall on Coronation Day, July 19, 1821. As the participants and invited guests assembled at six a.m., Queen Caroline, dressed to the nines, arrived in the Dean’s Yard and was observed banging on the doors, demanding entry.
At first she was denied admittance because she did not have a peer’s ticket. Her chamberlain Lord Hood argued with the door-keep, “I present to you your Queen. Surely it is not necessary for her to have a ticket.” When that argument failed Hood immediately produced a ticket signed “Wellington,” to which the door-keep replied that the ticket would only admit one, and there were four people standing before him: Hood, the queen, and her two ladies-in-waiting, one of whom was Lady Hood.
“The Queen—open!” Caroline shouted. An eyewitness reported hearing her fuming and raging, “Let me pass; I am your Queen. I am Queen of Britain!”
A page opened the door wide enough for Caroline to glimpse sentries with crossed bayonets standing just inside.
The King’s Lord High Chamberlain then dispatched his deputy to handle the hubbub, demanding, “Do your duty, shut the Hall door.”
After all these years, the fight had finally gone out of her. Demoralized and deflated, Caroline slunk away to jeers of “Shame!” “Go away!” and “Back to Pergami!”
Within days of the coronation, Caroline suffered an obstruction and inflammation of the bowels. She dosed herself with enough calomel and castor oil “to turn the stomach of a horse.” Her physicians realized she was dying. She asked to be buried in Brunswick with a simple epitaph on her coffin: Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England. According to Henry Brougham, Caroline had initially chosen the phrase “murdered queen,” but had been convinced to mollify it.
With only a few hours of life left, she told Lord Hood, “Je ne mourrais pas sans douleur, mais je mourrais sans regret”—I don’t die without sorrow, but I die without regret.
Death came to the fifty-three-year-old Caroline at 10:25 p.m. on August 8, 1821. This Queen of England who never reigned was the only monarch in British history to have been subjected to a Bill of Pains and Penalties.
George IV was aboard the royal yacht when he received the news; he retired to his cabin for the remainder of the day. The court was ordered to go into mourning for all of three weeks. The nation was not required to officially mourn their queen at all.
Bartolomeo Pergami, who never saw Caroline again after she returned to England in 1820, died in 1842 after a fall from his horse.
George IV survived his wife by nine years. He died on June 26, 1830, at the age of sixty-seven as the result of a burst blood vessel in his abdomen. He was “a man of as many gifts as frailties,” in the words of his dear friend, the statesman Charles James Fox; rarely had someone possessed so much promise and done so little with it. This mini-epitaph reads like a condemnation, but Fox may in fact have been a bit fulsome in his praise of his deceased drinking buddy, because there is little to tally up in the credits column of George IV’s reign, other than his decision as regent to continue to ally with Spain in the Peninsular War against Napoleon. Although his aesthetics were impeccable, George squandered his subjects’ goodwill with lechery and lavish spending while soldiers and sailors went unpaid, Luddite laborers rioted, and over in Ireland there were threats of civil war.
On July 16, 1830, the Times of London editorialized that “There was never an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king.” As eccentric and often disliked as Caroline had been, her husband’s popularity was even lower. For all his aesthetic sensibilities, throughout his life George IV—overweight, oversexed, and overdressed—was a hypochondriac, a moral hypocrite, an emotional bully, a glutton, a drunkard, a womanizer, and a bigamist—although Princess Lieven, who knew him well, insisted that George was not a bad man, though he was capable of bad actions. A man of great and discerning taste whose behavior was so often tasteless, George IV was buried at Windsor. He was succeeded by his younger brother William, Duke of Clarence, who ruled as William IV.
Often viewed through rosy lenses, the Regency is one of the most popular backdrops for romance novels. The setting for Jane Austen’s evergreen stories, it was an age of aesthetics, another renaissance of culture and construction that nowadays is depicted as a kinder, gentler era where manners mattered. In 1815, a veiled hint from the royal librarian James Stanier Clarke that the regent had declared his enthusiasm for Miss Austen’s writing left her with no choice but to dedicate Emma to him—although she despised his shabby treatment of Caroline of Brunswick.
“Poor woman,” Jane wrote, “I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman and because I hate her Husband. . . . [If] I must give up the princess I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved tolerably by her at first.”
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 1769-1821
RULED AS EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH: 1804-1814 AND 1815
and
JOSEPHINE DE BEAUHARNAIS
1763-1814
married 1796-1810
“Yet God is my witness that I love him much more than my life, and much more than that throne, that crown which he has given me!”
—Empress Josephine in 1809
SHE WAS A WOMAN WITH A PAST; HE, A MAN WITH A future that would become legendary. He considered empire his destiny. When she was a girl, a fortune-teller read her cards and informed her that “she would one day be more than queen of France, but that she would not die a queen.”
; And when Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais met—each of them ambitious in their own way, each one a survivor—their initially lopsided relationship was commenced out of convenience. Yet over time they would come to complement each other perfectly. As Napoleon told her, “Nature has given me a strong and resolute character; she has made you of lace and gauze.”
Known as “Rose” until Napoleon summarily renamed her Josephine, she was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie in Trois-Îlets, Martinique—a Creole whose family owned a sugar plantation. Her own rise from provincial teen to Paris belle began when her paternal aunt Edmée, the mistress of Martinique’s governor François de Beauharnais, arranged for Rose’s passage to Paris to wed her lover’s son, Alexandre, a vicomte.
So in 1779, sixteen-year-old Rose, petite and still carrying a bit of puppy fat, sailed for France. Except for the domestic rudiments taught to girls at the time, she was uneducated and decidedly uncultured. In contrast, Alexandre, a rising military officer, was a pompous, swaggering, sexually precocious youth who had already fathered a bastard child with a married mistress some years his senior. But he would not receive his inheritance until he wed—hence his haste to rush to the altar.
Josephine and Alexandre were married on December 13, 1779, and both parties were immediately miserable. Alexandre left his unsophisticated wife at home as often as he could, while he rejoined his regiment and his mistress. Yet the couple spent enough time together to produce two children—Eugène, born on September 3, 1781, and Hortense, born on April 10, 1783. Fortunately, both of them took after their sweet-tempered, kindhearted mother.
Leaving Rose in Paris, Alexandre sailed for Martinique with his mistress in tow, hoping to secure an appointment there, which of course would conveniently keep him as far from his wife as possible. After absorbing his lover’s toxic insinuations that Rose had been a promiscuous slut before he met her, he amassed a collection of false accusations about her sexual conduct, accumulated through bribery. Even as Alexandre hypocritically defended his own acts of infidelity, he wrote to Rose to inform her that he could no longer be wed to a woman who was such a hussy. He therefore considered their marriage to be over, and insisted that she enter a convent.
So, in 1784, at the age of twenty-one, Rose moved into the convent of Penthémont, a haven for upper-class Parisiennes who needed to retreat from the outside world for a while. There, she began to model herself after the chic and sophisticated young aristocrats who were her fellow boarders.
Despite his charges of unladylike conduct, her husband could produce no proof of any infidelities on her part. Disgusted with having her reputation unfairly dragged through the mud, Rose petitioned for a formal separation. The following year, she won a judgment against Alexandre to the tune of five thousand livres a year and the restoration of her honor.
Meanwhile, at Penthémont, Rose had amassed a terrific wardrobe, which was clearly above her means. A shopaholic even in her leanest days, Rose took lovers who paid her bills, a common arrangement in late-eighteenth-century France. With no husband, and of course no employment, she did whatever she could to survive and feed her children. Rose made an extremely desirable mistress, renowned for her sympathetic personality, charm, and graciousness. She was graceful and petite (historians’ conjectures on her height range from five feet to five feet four inches) with light brown hair, and amber eyes that often changed color. Her voice, with its lilting island cadences, and her slow, seductive walk were aphrodisiacs. On top of those languorous qualities, she was a good listener.
Having gotten back on her feet, Rose sailed to Martinique to visit her family, luckily avoiding the outbreak of the French Revolution. After spending two years on the island, she returned to France in 1790 to find the entire world as she had known it turned topsyturvy. The monarchy had been replaced with a republican government formed by the revolutionary faction that had stormed the Bastille a year earlier. And the president of the new Constituent Assembly was her ex-husband, Alexandre de Beauharnais!
Rose became a popular fixture at the fashionable intellectual salons, but admitted that she was “too indolent to take sides” in the heated political discussions of the moment. A friend claimed that Rose’s attention “wandered from any discussion of abstract ideas,” but she was adept at faking it and knew when to remain silent to avoid revealing her ignorance. Meanwhile, as Alexandre’s alimony and child support payments were spotty at best, Rose continued to take lovers as a survival mechanism. Among them were the most prominent and powerful men of the day, including Paul Barras and, possibly, Jean-Lambert Tallien.
But it was a dangerous age, and everyone’s position was precarious. Alexandre was imprisoned for committing a perceived military blunder. In April 1794, Rose’s apartment was ransacked for sensitive documents belonging to her ex-husband. After the suspicious papers were uncovered, Rose was arrested and imprisoned in Les Carmes. There, amid seven hundred other inmates, she awaited execution.
Alexandre was condemned on July 21 and was felled by the “national razor,” Madame Guillotine, a few days later. But shortly after the July 28 execution of Robespierre, one of the most formidable architects of the revolution, Rose and three thousand other political prisoners were released. The period known as the Terror had ended and Paris was quick to resume its gaiety under a new government known as the Directory, or Directoire.
Also making the salon circuit was a man known as “Barras’s little Italian protégé,” a twenty-six-year-old brigadier on half pay, Napoleone Buonaparte. Like Rose, who was born just a few months after France wrested Martinique from British control, Napoleone was an island outsider in the glittering social circles of Paris. Several weeks before his birth, his native Corsica had been taken from the locals by the French, but his family had cast their lot with the conquerors.
He’d trained for a military career since the age of nine, revealing himself (even as a child) to be sharp-tempered, arrogant, self-sufficient, and quick to take offense while preserving a rigid sense of decorum. A report on his conduct as a cadet stated that he was “solitary, haughty, egotistical. . . . Reserved and studious, he prefers study to any kind of amusement. . . . He enjoys reading good authors and has a sound knowledge of mathematics and geography. . . . He is most proud and ambitious.”
At the time they met, the soigné but unintellectual Rose seemed an ill match for the studious history buff, her elegance an odd foil for the diminutive (measured in the Parisian foot, which was 12.789 inches, he was approximately five feet six) career soldier with the gloomy, introspective personality. His lanky dark hair was “ill combed and ill powdered”; he wore a ratty oversized overcoat everywhere he went; and his “complexion [was] yellow and seemingly unhealthy”—all of which combined to produce a “slovenly look,” according to Laure Permon, a former childhood friend who knew him well. Not only that, his skin was marked by scabies, which he had contracted while in Toulon staving off the royalists and the British military detachment that supported them.
But Napoleone was a rising star, a success at Toulon in 1793 when he was only twenty-four. By 1795 he was commander of the Army of the Interior and then, through the assistance of his friend Paul Barras, secured a post within an influential department of the Committee for Public Safety in Paris. Perfectly placed to move up in the world in every way, and changing the spelling of his name to appear more “French,” he decided that in his quest for status, wealth, and power, it was time to find a rich wife.
He’d had his eye on Barras’s lover and salon hostess, Rose de Beauharnais. It was a fluid society as far as liaisons were concerned, and some historians have conjectured that Barras did not mind when his Corsican friend took Rose off his hands, whether temporarily or permanently, as her possessive nature was a bit high-maintenance for him. Rose’s rapt attention to his war stories at dinner one evening cemented Napoleon Bonaparte’s desire for her. He yearned for recognition and her praise had stroked his ego into a lustful frenzy.
They became lovers
—if not that night, then not too much later. For Rose, the affair was a pleasant diversion, but Napoleon was smitten. After their first night between the sheets Rose gave him a sketch of herself as a memento. Only hours after leaving her bed, he scribbled a rhapsodic note headed “seven in the morning”: I awaken full of you. Between your portrait and the memory of our intoxicating night, my senses have no respite. Sweet and incomparable Josephine [by now he had renamed her], what is this strange effect you have upon my heart? What if you were to be angry? What if I were to see you sad or troubled? Then my soul would be shattered by distress. Then your lover would find no peace, no rest. But I find none, either, when I succumb to the profound emotion that overwhelms me, when I draw from your lips, from your heart, a flame that consumes me. . . .
You will be leaving the city at noon. But I shall see you in three hours. Until then, mio dolce amor, I send you a thousand kisses—but send me none in return, for they set my blood on fire.
However, the poet had a pragmatist’s soul. Before pursuing a serious involvement with Josephine, Napoleon visited her notary to inquire about her wealth.
Their blossoming courtship was nearly nipped in the bud when he learned that she had substantially bent the truth about her family’s plantation income. She scarcely had a sou to her name. But she was well connected. And he was madly in love, despite her bad teeth, rotted down to black stubs from all the sugar she consumed as a child.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 35