The Queen Of Hearts
When the Prince of Wales married Caroline of Brunswick, things started badly and went swiftly downhill!
Scandal, betrayal and a messy divorce played out in the press? No, this isn’t a modern royal story but the life of Caroline of Brunswick
Some marriages are made in heaven. Others, such as that of George, Prince of Wales, and his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, are straight from hell. Far from being a romantic fairytale, when Caroline married the heir to the throne, it was the start of one of the most vitriolic royal tales that history has ever known.
Today we’re used to our media-savvy royals gazing into one another’s eyes, filled with hope for the future and dreams of a happy family, but in the Georgian era, love often didn’t come into it. In the case of George and Caroline, the marriage was one of necessity. A compulsive spender with a love of women, George was drowning in debt. When he went cap in hand to his father, King George III, and begged for a handout, the monarch offered him a deal. If the prince would agree to marry Caroline, the daughter of the king’s sister, then his debts would be settled. Caroline’s family, meanwhile, accepted the suit readily. The princess had proven difficult to match with a prospective husband so to be offered the hand of the heir to one of the most powerful thrones in the world was an offer they couldn’t and wouldn’t turn down.
What the Prince of Wales didn’t think to mention was the little fact that he was already married, having secretly wed Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow, a decade earlier. Though that marriage was invalid under the terms of the Royal Marriages Act, Maria Fitzherbert considered it binding. Yet George knew that he had been checkmated and grudgingly said yes, he would marry Caroline of Brunswick. She was duly summoned to England and plans were laid for a glittering royal wedding. Upon arrival she found that her appointed lady-in-waiting was to be none other than Frances Villiers, the Countess of Jersey. Lady Jersey was a scheming and manipulative social climber. She was also the mistress of the Prince of Wales and, keen to stay in her lover’s favour, was determined to report back on everything that Caroline said or did. There were, as was once said, three people in the marriage from the start.
The omens for the couple were terrible from the beginning. Upon arriving in London and meeting the prince, Caroline declared that he was far fatter than his portraits and not half so handsome. For his part, George carped that Caroline’s stench turned his stomach. At their very first meeting
George demanded brandy to calm his horrified nerves then ran to the company of his mother.
The public thought differently though, and as the family settled to a tense supper on the eve of the wedding, vast crowds gathered at the palace walls and called for the princess to give them a wave. This she did, much to the chagrin of her unpopular fiancé, who slammed the window to keep out the noise. It was an inauspicious start to a marriage of convenience that lurched from one scandalous disaster to another, and all of it in the full glare of the public spotlight.
It wasn’t a blushing bridegroom who made his way to the altar of the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace on 8 April 1795. Instead, George was insensible with drink. The Prince of Wales was so paralytic throughout his wedding ceremony that his groomsmen had to physically drag him to the altar then hold onto him to keep him upright. He wept openly during the vows and tried to crawl from the chapel on his hands and knees as the Archbishop of Canterbury led the party in prayers. When the wedding night rolled around, it went as well as might be expected. Far from carrying his blushing bride over the threshold, George passed out in the thankfully empty fire grate. Caroline left him there and climbed into bed alone.
Though the Prince and Princess of Wales spent precious few nights together, the unfortunate couple somehow managed to have a child.
Princess Charlotte of Wales, their only offspring, was born almost nine months to the day of their wedding. George, however, claimed that his bride was not only unhygienic, but far from virginal. Though he had dozens of lovers and she very likely had had none before her husband, George declared that he could never be intimate with her again or he would be left physically ill. For this royal couple, the concept of the heir and the spare was one that would remain unfulfilled.
The writing was on the wall for the newlyweds and within two years of that fateful ceremony in St James’s Palace, the Prince and Princess of Wales were irretrievably estranged. For George, however, matters were typically complicated. Though he might hate Caroline, his father, George III, adored her. His own marriage to Charlotte, the prince’s mother, was devoted and he had hoped that wedding bells might be all that were needed to set his eldest son on the straight and narrow. Seeing how George was treating Caroline, the king was incensed. His sympathies were all with the humiliated, dumped bride. George III knew too well of the prince’s dissolute and immoral ways. He knew too of Maria Fitzherbert, having heard rumours regarding the entanglement even if he was never made aware of the wedding that had taken place all those years ago.
For George though, Mrs Fitzherbert was yesterday’s news and whilst the Prince of Wales went back to his womanising ways, Caroline set up residence across town. At her home in Blackheath she became a celebrated hostess, often entertaining the prince’s most influential political foes. This drove George to distraction and he became convinced that she must be sleeping with the illustrious men who beat a path to her door, seeing this as the final humiliation. He did all he could to discredit Caroline, including accusing her of having an illegitimate child and subjecting her to a lengthy enquiry into her conduct, but Caroline continued to prevail. The so-called Delicate Investigation found that William Austin, the child George claimed was proof of his wife’s infidelity, was in fact the son of a destitute couple. William’s mother had come to Blackheath in search of work and Caroline had offered to take her son into her home and raise him with the best of everything. When William’s parents appeared at the enquiry, the verdict became inevitable.
Far from providing proof that the wife of the heir to the throne had conceived a child with another man, all that the Delicate Investigation managed to prove was that Caroline was even more charitable and caring than had already been known. By the time the investigation found her not guilty of adultery, the public had fallen for the queen of hearts. They loved Caroline and her celebrated philanthropy as much as they hated George, who was loathed for his largesse and shamelessly immoral ways, all of it funded by the hard-pressed taxpayer. William Austin, meanwhile, the little boy saved from poverty at Blackheath, became Caroline’s faithful retainer until the day of her death.
Tired of her husband’s spies and with her access to her only child restricted following the Delicate Investigation, Caroline came to believe that she would never be able to live the life she wanted if she remained in England. Though it meant leaving her daughter, Charlotte, behind, Caroline left Britain and travelled to Europe, stopping first in
“The Prince of Wales was so paralytic during his wedding that his groomsmen had to drag him to the altar”
her homeland of Brunswick before she continued on her way. Once she was embarked on her continental travels Caroline really began to kick up her heels and there was nothing her furious husband could do about it. She travelled the continent and settled in Italy, where she took up with a former soldier named Bartolomeo Pergami. The Princess of Wales installed the dashing gentleman as her chamberlain and, if the rumours were to be believed, her lover too. The couple lived openly together with Pergami’s young daughter and in the United Kingdom the people rejoiced at the knowledge that she was making a right royal fool of her husband.
Through all of this, George seethed and fretted. Though he had no shortage of lovers of his own, the knowledge that Caroline had managed to win not only the love of the people but also find personal happiness drove the capricious prince into a fury. He sent spies to Europe, intending to gather evidence of her adultery and secure a divorce once and for all. George’s agents interviewed witnesses and servants and began to assemble a pile of circumstantial evidence, including rumours of shared beds, of the couple bathing together or trysting in sheltered carriages. They even reported back on whether the amount of urine in a bedroom chamberpot suggested that it had been used by one or two people overnight!
The prince was certain that it was dynamite and when he had all the evidence he could muster, he delivered it to Parliament along with a request for a divorce.
What George hadn’t reckoned with was the ill health of his ailing father. With his son reigning as Prince Regent since 1811, George III had been confined at Windsor for almost a decade. Blind, immobile and totally in the grip of his infamous madness, the old king died on 29 January 1820. Suddenly the Regent was catapulted onto the throne and for the newly-enshrined King George IV, nothing could be more embarrassing than his fun-loving wife, who was reported to dance without her stays and cavort in gowns that left nothing to the imagination. With time pressing and his coronation approaching, George was determined that she wouldn’t be crowned as queen alongside
him. More than anything, he needed to finalise that divorce.
Although Parliament offered Caroline a generous payment to stay in Europe and keep her head down, she had other ideas. Determined to face the House of Lords and the divorce proceedings that her husband had initiated, she headed for Britain and arrived to a hero’s welcome. She was greeted by the Pains and Penalties Bill, an audacious scheme to put Caroline on trial for adultery. If she was found guilty, she would lose her title, her reputation would be in tatters and her marriage would be over. With his carefully gathered evidence, George was sure he couldn’t lose. Of course, just as he was in so many things, George was proved wrong. Ably defended by her skilful counsel, Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, Caroline cut a confident figure before the Lords. Brougham savaged the witnesses for the prosecution and outside the walls of
Westminster, the public couldn’t get enough of the scandal. Newspapers reported daily on proceedings and printshops, balladeers and diarists fuelled the appetite for gossip. Far from being outraged to hear of Caroline’s supposed fling with her chamberlain, the public loved it, and the princess became a rallying point for radicals and romantics alike. She was finally showing the dissolute George what it was like to be humiliated and as the trial limped along, he began to realise that he had made a terrible mistake.
In the event, however, the Lords found in favour of George by the narrowest majority imaginable and the bill was passed with a majority of just nine votes. Across the country the mood turned bitter and Lord Liverpool, the prime minister and no friend to Caroline, declared that the bill would not proceed to the Lords. There was to be no divorce for George IV and Caroline of Brunswick.
The delighted Caroline basked in her triumph. She was not only still married, she was now on the road to becoming queen and when the day of the Coronation came around, Caroline was at Westminster Abbey by dawn. She toured from door to door demanding admission but found them all barred to her on the express orders of the new king. Some of the doorkeepers jeered at Caroline’s efforts and to add to the humiliation, so did the public who had for so long adored her. Never before had Caroline misjudged the mood of the country so badly as she did on that day in July 1821. The people who had gathered to watch the magnificent Coronation procession did so because they were ready to party. They no longer had any time for Caroline’s drama and, just as they had built her up, now they tore her down.
Humiliated, Caroline retreated into seclusion in Brandenburg House and died within a few short weeks. King George IV was finally free of the woman he hated. Yet it was a pyrrhic victory, for the monarch’s health was failing too. Decades of feasting and carousing had left him obese and sickly and he died less than a decade after his wife, as isolated at Windsor as his beloved father had been before him. For Caroline and George, the ill-fated cousins who became husband and wife, the price of marriage had been high indeed.
“There were rumours of shared beds and baths. George’s spies even reported back on the contents of the couple’s chamberpots!”