Behind the Palace Doors (31 page)

The future King George IV was still Prince of Wales when he was forced into a second marriage, with his first cousin Caroline of Brunswick in 1795. The couple were, as shall be seen, horribly mismatched, though they did manage to produce an heir, Princess Charlotte, in 1796
.

The Prince of Wales called his first wife his “dearest and only belov’d Maria.” The words he chose for his second were slightly less effusive. She was, he said, “the vilest wretch this world ever was cursed with, who I cannot feel more disgust for her personal nastiness than I do from her entire want of all principle. She is a very monster of iniquity.”

The calamitous union of the future king George IV with his cousin Caroline of Brunswick was doomed before it ever began. The prince was a selfish, overindulged libertine, thoroughly loathed by the British people, who only agreed to marry as a means of abating his colossal debts. And Princess Caroline came with her own set of deficits, not the least of which was her reputation for being, as Lord Holland reported, “exceedingly loose.” She also smelled, bathing infrequently and rarely changing her underwear. And she lacked all tact.

Sir James Harris, Earl of Malmesbury, was given the task of asking for Caroline’s hand and escorting her to England. He thought her not unattractive, even if she was short and stocky, with “a head always too large for her body, and her neck too short.” And though at first he found the princess’s exuberance appealing, he soon discovered “that her heart is very,
very
light, unsusceptible of strong or lasting feelings.” The more Caroline spoke, the more Malmesbury urged her to keep quiet when she met her betrothed; otherwise he was sure the Prince of Wales would be repelled by this gauche creature. She had “no judgment,” he observed; “caught by the first impression, led by the first impulse … loving to talk, and prone to confide and make missish friendships that last twenty-four hours. Some natural, but no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity.”

Few saw any chance of a happy marriage, particularly Queen Charlotte, who had heard horrifying tales about Princess Caroline’s out-of-control behavior and reported them to her brother: “They say that her passions are so strong that the Duke [of Brunswick, Caroline’s father] himself said that she was not to be allowed even to go from one room to another without her Governess, and that when she dances, this lady is obliged to follow her for the whole of the dance to prevent her from making an exhibition of herself by indecent conversations with men.”

King George was one of the few who were enthusiastic about the bride he had selected, his niece, “whose amiable qualities will, I flatter myself, so fully engage your attention that they will divert it from objects not so pleasing to the nation.” Lady Jersey, the prince’s mistress, also approved. Lord Holland reported that, according to the Duke of Wellington, her support of her lover’s marriage to a woman of supposedly “indelicate manners, indifferent character, and not very inviting appearance” arose “from the hope that disgust for the wife would secure constancy to the mistress.”

It was Lady Jersey, not the prince, who was there to greet Caroline upon her arrival in England, and she immediately set to work trying to make the already dumpy princess look worse. She insisted on a less flattering gown for Caroline and over-applied rouge to her cheeks. The mistress needn’t have worried, however, as the prince was instantly repelled when he met his bride-to-be on April 5, 1795. Lord Malmesbury recorded the scene at St. James’s Palace: “He raised her (gracefully enough), and embraced her, said barely one word, turned around, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and calling me to him, said, ‘Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.’ ”

George then stormed out of the room, leaving the bewildered princess alone with Malmesbury. “My God,” she cried, “is the Prince always like that?” Then, seemingly aware of what sent the prince scurrying away, she remarked, almost in retaliation, “I find him very fat, and nothing like as handsome as his portrait.”

Princess Caroline may have been flighty and impulsive, but she wasn’t stupid. She not only recognized that she was not pleasing to the prince, but she understood Lady Jersey’s agenda—and she resented it, especially since the mistress was to be a member of her household. That night at dinner she tried to make light of what was turning out to be an untenable situation. Her attempt failed—utterly. She was, according to Malmesbury, “flippant, rattling, affecting raillery and wit, and throwing out coarse vulgar hints about Lady Jersey, who was present.” The Prince of Wales was, he added, “evidently disgusted.”

Three days after their first, disastrous meeting, the prince and the cousin he was coming to despise were married in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. George was so bombed on brandy that the Duke of Bedford had to keep him propped up, while Lord Melbourne noted that he “was like a man doing a thing in desperation; it was like Macheath going to his execution.”

After the wedding ceremony, the Prince of Wales conducted his new bride to a reception in the queen’s apartments. They barely spoke a word. Lady Maria Stuart said he looked “like Death and full of confusion, as if he wished to hide himself from the looks of the whole world.… I think he is much to be pitied. The bride, on the contrary, appeared in the highest spirits, when she passed by us first, smiling and nodding to every one.… What an odd Wedding!”

That evening the prince passed out in the fireplace, where he stayed all night. The next morning he consummated the union. “It required no small [effort] to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person,” he wrote. Sex hardly improved George’s disposition toward his wife, but at least she got pregnant and bore the next heir to the throne, Princess Charlotte. With that accomplished, the prince left her bed for good. He wanted nothing more to do with his wife. “I had rather see toads and vipers crawling over my victuals than sit at the same table with her,” he declared.

Caroline was all but abandoned by George, who preferred dallying with his mistress, Lady Jersey, and racking up more debts. While he was away, he made sure his wife’s movements were severely restricted. “She drives always alone,” the lawyer Charles Abbot noted in his journal, “sees no company but old people put on her list.… She goes nowhere but airings in Hyde Park. The Prince uses her unpardonably.”

Except for the king, who always took her part, Caroline had no support within the royal family. “I don’t know how I shall be able to bear the loneliness,” she wrote to a friend in Germany. “The Queen seldom visits me, and my sisters-in-law show me the same sympathy.… The Countess [of Jersey] is still here. I hate her and I know she feels the same towards me. My husband is wholly given up to her, so you can easily imagine the rest.”

Although Lady Jersey’s influence over the prince was beginning
to wane, she was still a formidable adversary, a monster, really, who, having “no happiness without a rival to trouble and torment,” as one contemporary said of her, relished humiliating the Princess of Wales at every opportunity. “It cannot have been difficult,” wrote author Thea Holme. “Caroline was gauche, unversed in etiquette, stumbling in her English and apt when nervous to blurt out tactless comments and opinions, or to make coarse jokes, all of which were noted by Lady Jersey and relayed to the Prince.” No wonder Caroline loathed her, or bristled over the fact that her husband’s mistress had been foisted upon her as a member of
her
household.

When Caroline wrote to George requesting Lady Jersey’s removal, she received a curt response, and a dismissal of sorts. “Nature has not made us suitable to each other,” the prince wrote. “Tranquil and comfortable society is, however, in our power; let our intercourse therefore be restricted to that.”

By this time, George’s hatred of his wife had grown virulent. The marriage had not served its one purpose: to resolve his money problems. In fact, they had become even worse. Infinitely more galling, though, was Caroline’s popularity with the people—especially as he was so reviled. “Poor woman,” the novelist Jane Austen later wrote. “I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman and because I hate her Husband.”
True Briton
lavished praise upon “the amiable and accomplished personage [Caroline], who had been the object of so much unmerited ill treatment.”

Caroline’s mass appeal as the wronged wife was vividly demonstrated one evening when she attended the opera. “The house,”
The Times
reported, “seemed as if electrified by her presence, and before she could take her seat, every hand was lifted to greet her with the loudest of plaudits. The gentlemen jumped on the benches and waved their hats, crying out
‘Huzza!’….
If the Princess will only afford the public a few more opportunities of testifying their respect for suffering
virtue, we think it will bring more than one person to a proper reflection.” Her sense of humor intact, the princess told the Duke of Leeds that “she supposed she could be guillotined … for what had passed this evening.”

George was desperate to be rid of the “infamous wench,” but his father, George III, absolutely forbade a formal separation. “You seem to look on your disunion with the princess as merely of a private nature,” the king wrote to his son, “and totally put out of sight that as Heir Apparent of the Crown your marriage is a public act, wherein the Kingdom is concerned; that therefore a separation cannot be brought forward by the mere interference of relations.”

Caroline did eventually establish her own residence near Blackheath. Before leaving her husband’s home, she blasted him for his abominable behavior toward her: “Since I have been 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.”

Free from the tyranny of the prince, who had reunited with Mrs. Fitzherbert, Caroline really let loose—on an epic scale. “The poor Princess is going headlong to her ruin,” wrote Lady Charlotte Campbell. “Every day she becomes more imprudent in her conduct, more heedless of society.… The society she is now surrounded by is disgraceful.” Lady Hester Stanhope called Caroline “an impudent woman … a downright whore … she danced about, exposing herself like an opera girl … she was so low, so vulgar.” Most scandalous of all, Lady Douglas alleged the princess had gotten pregnant and that the little boy whom she more or less adopted—William Austin, or Willikin, as Caroline called him—was actually her child.

An inquiry into this allegation, known as the Delicate Investigation, produced some extremely lurid testimony—like
the statement from Roberts, the princess’s footman, who said she was “very fond of fucking.” Ultimately, though, there was no proof that Caroline had committed adultery, which would have been a treasonable offense and, George had hoped, grounds for the dissolution of their miserable marriage. (The princess later remarked that she had only committed adultery once, “with the husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert!”)

Although Princess Caroline was exonerated after the Delicate Investigation, her reputation was in ruins. Even the king, her most stalwart supporter, was forced to concede that she was guilty of great “levity and profligacy” and declared that “no nearer intercourse” with the royal family could be “admitted in future than outward marks of civility.”