Caroline’s former friend and neighbor Lady Charlotte Douglas, who had since become her adversary in a property case, reported that the princess had confessed to being pregnant by a lover. She would hide her pregnancy, Caroline supposedly said, by tying a cushion behind her, under her high-waisted gown, to balance out the increasing girth in front, and make it seem that she was gaining weight all over. When Lady Douglas visited Caroline in January 1803, she saw the princess with “an infant sleeping on a sofa.” “Here is the little boy,” the princess said. “I had him two days after I saw you last; is it not a nice little child?”18
It is likely that despite her enmity toward the princess, Lady Douglas’s statements were true. Caroline had probably been playing one of her bizarre jokes, taking great delight in shocking her prudish neighbor Lady Douglas with stories of a pregnancy and showing her one of the orphans she cared for. Caroline was, after all, the same woman who a decade later, after a private audience with the pope, told an inquiring friend that her interview had gone very well indeed and “You will see evident symptoms of it in nine months’ time.”19
Other servants, however, denied that their mistress had been pregnant or had committed adultery. They testified that little Willy Austin was visited frequently by his mother, the same woman who had originally arrived with the infant in her arms. The commissioners soon had Mrs. Austin herself on the witness stand, and she swore that Willy was her child. They then found a birth record of Willy Austin, born to Samuel and Sophia Austin on July 11, 1802.
The entire sordid affair contained rumor and innuendo, shrieking accusations and outraged denials, and the testimony of fired servants who bore their former mistress a grudge. On July 14, 1806, the lord commissioners stated, “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 inquiries.”20
But it was clear that Caroline had been indiscreet in her flirtations and had allowed men to visit her regularly, not always in the presence of virtuous ladies. The princess was issued stern instructions to be more discreet in the future.
But this recommendation was not likely to win Caroline’s favor. Shortly after she was cleared of adultery, she began an affair with the elegant fifty-seven-year-old Lord George Rivers, a relic of the eighteenth century who still powdered his hair. A maid later declared that one afternoon she had seen “the pillows of the sofa on the floor, the floor covered with hair powder.”21 By 1809 Caroline was having an affair with a politician, Lord Henry Fitzgerald.
As she ate, and drank, and made love to fill up the emptiness where a devoted husband should have been, her looks took a turn for the worse, as did her taste in clothes. One gentleman remarked “that the Princess is grown very coarse, and that she dresses very ill, showing too much of her naked person….”22
In 1814 Caroline, bored to tears with her life in London, decided to travel across the continent. She shook the dust of England from her sandals, joyfully leaving the scene of so many years of bitter humiliation. As she left Britain, Caroline said wistfully that she hoped her eighteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte, as “great and powerful as she may be, will not tyrannize over anyone, because they have not the good fortune to please her.”23
Caroline went about Europe thirsting to meet the famous, the talented, and the notorious, and few refused her. When traveling to Italy, she needed a courier to ride ahead to the towns she intended to visit and make hotel reservations for her entourage. An Austrian general in Milan recommended his personal assistant, the handsome thirty-year-old Bartolomeo Pergami. Measuring a full six feet three inches tall, Pergami had curly black hair and whiskers, flashing dark eyes, a broad chest, and a bold swaggering charm. When Caroline arrived in Naples, she was introduced to her new courier and immediately fell in love.
She barely bothered to hide her love affair with Pergami and even tried to look like an Italian. Her greatest physical assets had always been her fine golden hair and white complexion; now she wore a thick black wig and painted on thick dark eyebrows and rouge so heavy that she resembled a painted puppet. Attending dinners and balls in Italy, she grew heavier and danced wildly, “with a frivolity hardly fitting her age and figure,” according to one witness, her dress often slipping off her shoulders.24
The Prince of Wales, through his network of spies, kept a close watch on her activities, hoping for undeniable proof of her infidelity. If such evidence remained elusive, proof of Caroline’s increasing eccentricity manifested itself almost daily. When her cousin the duke of Baden saw her one hot day, she was wearing half a hollowed-out pumpkin shell on her head. It kept her cool, she said.
In Naples, Caroline traveled about in a coach made in the form of a conch shell. It was led through the streets by a small child dressed as Cupid in flesh-colored tights, leading two tiny ponies. In the vehicle sat a rotund, black-wigged, berouged woman in a sheer gown, the skirt of which barely hung past her chubby knees. Next to her sat Willy Austin, now a gangly lad of thirteen whom all Naples believed to be her son and whom she called “the little Prince.”25 Her astonishing carriage was preceded by Pergami on horseback, blazing forth in a military uniform that made him look like a circus ringmaster.
The princess and her entourage took a ten-month Mediterranean voyage to Tunisia, Sicily, Egypt, and Istanbul. She entered Jerusalem as Jesus had, astride an ass. After this adventure, she returned to her house in Lake Como with a colorful suite of Turks, Arabs, and Africans, as well as shadowy Italians—friends and family of Pergami. Pergami’s mother worked as the princess’s laundress, perhaps so no one else could testify later about stained sheets.
In 1816 Princess Charlotte married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who later became the king of Belgium. The following year Charlotte died giving birth to a dead son. Caroline was devastated; not only had she lost her only child, but her hopes for a brighter future as queen mother, reinstated to her royal status, had died with Charlotte.
The only link between them buried, George saw no reason for delaying his much-longed-for divorce. In 1818 he wrote his lord chancellor, “My whole thoughts (are turned) to the endeavoring to extricate myself from the cruelest as well as the most unjust predicament that even the lowest individual, much more a Prince, ever was placed in, by unshackling myself from a woman who has for the last three and twenty years not alone been the bane and curse of my existence, but 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.”26
But his ministers explained that the precarious state of the nation, riddled with rebellious factions, ruled out such an unpopular move. The British people would not take to a womanizing monarch divorcing the mother of his dead child. Furthermore, despite the reams of evidence accumulated over the years, nothing proved inconclusively Caroline’s adultery with Pergami.
George sent a commission of experienced lawyers to Milan to try to dig up irrefutable evidence. The Milan Commission, as it came to be known, found cast-off servants willing to talk. Although the commissioners high-mindedly declared bribes would not be paid, working-class people demanded at least travel expenses and recompense for lost wages.
While George was eagerly digging up evidence of his wife’s adultery, he had never ceased committing adultery himself. His mistress Lady Jersey, who had so offended Caroline upon her arrival in England, had given way to Lady Hertford, who by 1820 had been replaced by Lady Conyngham. Along the way there had been adventures with actresses, singers, and dancers. The virtuous Mrs. Fitzherbert, George’s secret Catholic wife, had made a dignified retreat from the field in 1811.
As the investigation into Caroline’s conduct inched forward, in January 1820 old mad King George III finally died. Caroline, whether her husband liked it or not, was now queen of
England. King George IV, who had been planning his coronation for more than forty years, was horror-stricken at the thought that this nightmare of a wife could claim to be crowned beside him. Indeed, whenever the new king went forth he heard, to his grinding chagrin, cheers for good Queen Caroline.
According to British tradition, each Sunday ministers asked their flock to pray for members of the royal family by name. Caroline had always been mentioned as Princess of Wales. But the new king positively forbade any church prayers for Caroline as queen. Though George was head of the Church of England, he was not head of the Kirk of Scotland, and the Scots prayed twice as fervently for her, a fact which irked George mightily. Often the king couldn’t sleep at night as he lay in bed imagining Scottish prayers for his detested wife winging their way heavenward.
Caroline, by nature easygoing and forgiving, was furious that her name had been removed from the liturgy. Moreover, while she visited Rome, the Vatican, which had always given her royal honors, stopped doing so at the request of the British government. She vowed to fly to England like a Fury and take revenge on her errant husband. Wisely leaving Pergami and her Italian suite in Italy, she landed at Dover in June 1820. At her arrival guns fired off a royal salute, and the streets were crowded with supporters, some of whom, seeing young Willy Austin, called three cheers for “Mr. Austin, her majesty’s son!”27
Thousands had waited since early morning to welcome her, dressed in their Sunday best, crying “God save the Queen!” Arriving in Canterbury, she found the town illuminated with torches and ten thousand eager citizens cheering her. Cannons were fired and bonfires lit. This fulsome welcome, however, certainly had more to do with their loathing of the king than their love for the queen. She had become an icon of oppression at the hands of a tyrant king, just as the people felt oppressed at his hands. The cheers followed her all the way to London.
In the face of such broad support, Caroline generously offered to live abroad in return for a reasonable allowance and the restoration of her name to the liturgy. But George would not budge. No prayers for her. Moreover, he wanted a divorce. He brought forward the Milan Commission documents to both houses of Parliament to consider a bill of pains and penalties to exile Caroline, take away her titles, and dissolve her marriage with the king due to her adultery with Pergami.
Both the king and queen had very dirty laundry, and it was a catastrophic idea to wash it before the British public, advertising all its stains, stench, and filth by means of an eager British press. As one member of the House of Commons said of this messy case, either the king was betrayed, or the queen insulted. Either way, no good would come of it.
The British public remained firmly on Caroline’s side. When a boatload of Italian witnesses for the prosecution landed in Dover, they were attacked by furious fishwives who beat them with sticks and scratched their faces until they could retreat to safety. Hearing the news, other boats bearing witnesses turned back.
As queen, Caroline had found decorum with lightning speed. No more pumpkins on her head or dresses cut so low that her breasts dangled out of them. She looked the picture of middle-aged respectability in her high-necked gowns of black or white satin, her long dark cloaks trimmed with ermine, and her modest bonnets. On August 17 the queen rode in triumph to her trial at the House of Lords. Among the 258 peers judging her were two of her former lovers, the husband of the king’s current mistress, and the son of his former one.
The first days of opening statements, legal wrangling, oratorical effusions, and political grandstanding passed tediously in the sticky August heat. One day the queen was observed to be sleeping deeply during a speech. Lord Henry Holland promptly wrote an epigram:
Her conduct at present no censure affords
She sins not with courtiers but sleeps with the Lords.28
Interest picked up when Caroline’s former servants took the stand. Several testified to having seen Pergami creeping about corridors at night half naked holding a candle, holding the princess on his lap, or sitting next to her in bed. Hotel maids described stained sheets and Pergami’s slippers in the princess’s bedroom.
A Swiss chambermaid related that one night, when Pergami had been out of town on business, she had bedded down with her mistress. But in the middle of the night Pergami returned and threw the maid out of the room, taking her place. “I have also seen Pergami in the princess’s room when she was at her toilette, when she had no skirts on,” the maid continued. “Pergami turned round and said, ‘Oh! How pretty you are. I like you much better so.’”29
A servant named Giuseppe Rastelli had the most shocking evidence. He reported that while riding past the princess’s carriage on horse, he looked in the window and saw Caroline and Pergami, both sound asleep, her hand resting lovingly on his private parts.
On cross-examination all of the servants admitted to being well paid for their time and living expenses in England or to being dismissed by the princess for poor work performance, admissions which served to destroy the value of their testimony. Caroline’s defense attorney, Henry Brougham, relentlessly discredited witnesses and pointed out inconsistencies in testimony, ripping the prosecution’s case to shreds. “Was it not a curious thing that these people, all of them poor,” he thundered, “should be brought over to England to live in luxury and idleness and should be in receipt of great rewards?”30
Brougham derided the government’s evidence as the “tittle-tattle of coffee-houses and alehouses, the gossip of bargemen on canals and… cast-off servants.”31 He described the Milan Commission as “that great receipt of perjury—that store house of false swearing and all iniquity.”32
In the heated debates which followed the concluding statements of both sides, the general feeling was echoed by Lord Ellenborough who, admitting “the queen was the last woman any one would wish his own wife to resemble,” felt forced to vote against the bill.33
As Brougham later said, “The strength of the Queen’s case lay in the general demurrer which all men, both in and out of Parliament, made, viz., admit everything to be true which is alleged against the Queen, yet, after the treatment she had received ever since she first came to England, her husband had no right to the relief prayed by him, or the punishment sought against her.”34
Perhaps Caroline had put it best herself in a letter written to her husband which she sent to a newspaper for publication. “From the very threshold of your Majesty’s mansion the mother of your child was pursued by spies, conspirators, and traitors…,” she wrote. “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….”35
After closing arguments, the bill to condemn the queen would have three readings, each one followed by a debate and a vote. The vote of the third reading would be the judgment of the case. On November 6, after one of the longest debates in British history, 123 lords voted for the bill to condemn the queen and 95 against it. After discussion, a second reading of the bill resulted in 108 for condemnation and 99 against. The government then withdrew the entire bill before a third reading could officially vindicate Caroline. And yet she was already vindicated; the British peers wisely chose to punish hypocrisy rather than adultery.
For five nights the major British cities were illuminated in support of the queen’s victory and the king’s defeat. George was so stunned that he talked of abdicating and leaving the country forever.
A few days after the trial, a Sicilian, Iacinto Greco, who had served as Caroline’s cook in 1816 during her visit to Syracuse, arrived with shocking new evidence. He reported that after dinner one evening he opened a door and saw “the Princess on the sofa at the further end of the saloon—Pergami was standing between her legs which were in his arms—his breeches were down, and his back towards the door—at which I was. I saw the Princess’s thighs quite naked—Pergami was moving backwards and forwards and in the very act with the Princess.”36
Pergami looked back and saw the cook, and the next day he was fired.
When asked why he had not come forward sooner, Greco replied that his wife had told him that the English would cut off his head. But his testimony arrived too late and could not be used against the freshly vindicated queen.
The trial over, the king could now make plans for his coronation. Much to his irritation, he had not obtained the desired divorce and Caroline was still queen of England. On May 5, 1821, the king was told, “Sire, your bitterest enemy is dead.” “Is she, by God!” George replied, his face beaming with joy.37 But it was, alas, only Napoleon who had died, not Caroline. And Caroline made it known that she would attend the coronation and ruin it by demanding that she, too, be crowned.
But at his coronation on July 19, Caroline made the mistake of planning a grand entrance once everyone was seated and the ceremony about to begin. Hearing of this, George had all the doors locked once the guests were inside and hired prizefighters to stand guard. Hammering on the door with her fist Caroline cried, “The Queen—open!” The pages opened the door a crack, and the sentries inside stood resolutely with crossed bayonets. According to an eyewitness seated in the hall, Caroline “was raging and storming and vociferating. ‘Let me pass; I am your Queen, I am Queen of Britain.’” The lord high chamberlain sent his deputy who, with a voice that rang throughout the entire abbey, cried, “Do your duty, shut the Hall door,” and the pages slammed the great door shut in the queen’s face.38
His Majesty King George IV, puffed up with wine, pork chops, and pride, held in his monstrous bulk with a specially designed contraption of whalebone and corset strings. He strode through his coronation magnificently, gleeful in the knowledge that his wife was fruitlessly banging on the doors of Westminster Abbey.
That night Caroline invited several friends for supper. Her friend Lady Anne Hamilton wrote, “Her Majesty put on the semblance of unusual gaiety, but the friends who were around her observed that though she labored hard to deceive them, she only deceived herself, for while she laughed, the tears rolled down her face—tears of anguish so acute that she seemed to dread the usual approach of rest.”39
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