Princesses Behaving Badly (28 page)

Things only got worse after their first meeting. Once the prince beat his hasty retreat, Caroline declared that he was fatter than in his portrait. At dinner that night, she was her worst possible self (trying to be clever but coming off as unhinged), as was Prinney (cold, rude, and drunk). But the show had to go on, and the couple was married two days later, on April 8, 1795. According to contemporary reports, the bridegroom looked “like death” and was obviously wasted; weepy and loud, he had to be held up by his groomsmen. According to Caroline, he spent their wedding night passed out in the fireplace. They went on their honeymoon with all of his “constantly drunk and dirty” mates, plus his mistress to boot.

Surprisingly, the pair did manage to get on well enough for Caroline to become pregnant almost immediately, though the birth of their daughter Charlotte, on January 7, 1796, did little to foster a rapprochement. Three days after she was born, George made out a new will leaving everything to his “wife” (dear Mrs. Fitzherbert) and “one shilling” to Caroline.

By June 1796, Prinney’s hatred of Caroline was intractable. “My abhorrence of her is such … that I shudder at the very thoughts of sitting at the same table as her, or even being under the same roof,” he wrote. The feeling was mutual. Just a year later, they officially separated. But what
God and country had joined, no man could put asunder; neither the king nor Parliament would grant permission to divorce. Protestants (ironically, see Anne Boleyn) took divorce very seriously, and the marriage was important diplomatically. They were stuck with each other.

Of the two of them, Prinney was undoubtedly better off. As a male royal, it was expected that he would have mistresses. But for Caroline, adultery would mean a wealth-stripping split. That left her in a delicate position, which was particularly difficult for a woman with no sense of delicacy whatsoever.

European courts practically ran on rumor, and Caroline’s behavior did little to stop the chatter. She was a big fan of the plunging neckline—as in, nipples out—and appeared to apply her makeup with a trowel. She could be a charming hostess but was also an incorrigible flirt who sometimes disappeared for hours with a gentleman friend, leaving her other guests to try to politely ignore her absence. Even worse, Caroline allegedly boasted that she took a “bedfellow” whenever she wanted and “the Prince paid for all.” Sprinkled liberally with this kind of manure, rumors quickly sprouted that the princess was conducting several affairs. For a while it was just talk, but then Caroline gave the prince
almost
the scandal he needed to divorce her.

Caroline had a weird habit of collecting babies. To her credit, she seemed chiefly concerned with finding good homes for the foundlings. But in 1802, she adopted a baby boy named William Austin, known thereafter as Willikin, and bizarrely pretended that he was her own. Why she thought it would be funny to say so is unclear, but it’s likely she just wanted to cause a fuss. Her allies, including her father-in-law, King George III, dismissed the stories of a bastard child as idle talk, and her foes could prove nothing because there was nothing to prove.

But by 1806, Caroline had committed a critical error: she made enemies of the Douglases, her former friends and neighbors. It was to Lady Douglas that Caroline first pretended that Willikin was her child. After a few months of close friendship, however, Caroline grew bored with the couple and was rude when Lady Douglas came to call. When Lady Douglas wrote to Caroline implying that she had secrets about the princess she was willing to spill, Caroline reacted in a spectacularly ill-considered
fashion. She sent her former friend obscene and harassing “anonymous” letters featuring poorly drawn pictures of Lady D performing a sex act. The Douglases were quite sure the letters were from Caroline—at least one bore her royal seal.

The offended Douglases (who, it should be noted, were also perpetually broke) marched straight to the prince and made it clear they would swear that Willikin was Caroline’s bastard child. For good measure, Lady Douglas even accused the princess of trying to touch and kiss her inappropriately. Armed with such evidence, the prince demanded an investigation into his estranged wife’s supposed infidelity. The ensuing “Delicate Investigation,” as it was called, was conducted by a secret government committee. Witnesses included everyone from Caroline’s footman to her portrait painter, Thomas Lawrence. Ultimately, Willikin’s real mother testified that she’d indeed given him up to the princess when he was four months old, and the commission had no choice but to clear Caroline of all accusations. Prinney wouldn’t get his divorce so easily.

Caroline had also won another decision, this one in the court of public opinion. Because the investigation was meant to be secret, it was, of course, common knowledge among the gossips at court. Details filtered down through the newspapers in a series of leaked documents. Caroline won the sympathy of the British public by portraying herself as a maligned wife and mother who was denied access to her child. But most of her support came because everyone hated Prinney. The British people and press had no use for fools, especially fat drunken ones who wasted taxpayer money on mistresses and wine. Novelist Jane Austen, writing in 1813 about Caroline, summed it up best: “Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can because she is a woman and because I hate her husband.”

However much the public loved Caroline, her aristocratic peers did not. Her social isolation was nearly complete after King George III was declared insane in 1811; the prince officially then became regent, which meant that friendship with Caroline was a political liability for anyone who wanted to be received at court. Moreover, she had committed the one sin that fashionable
English society could not forgive: she’d become a bore. Caroline’s exasperated ladies-in-waiting were fed up hearing about how she’d been monstrously treated by the royal family, how she hated them, and the various creative ways she’d like to see them die. (Sometimes after dinner, Caroline would spend the evening sticking pins into a wax doll made to look like the prince, before melting it over the fire. This same behavior would have gotten her beheaded had she lived in Anne Boleyn’s day; see “The Sorceress Princesses,
this page
.) In August 1814, Caroline left England, spending the next six years traveling. In Geneva that October, the now blowsy woman of 46 embarrassed herself and everyone around her by attending a ball in her honor “dressed
en Vénus
, or rather not dressed further than the waist.” The next year, an English aristocrat who met Caroline in Genoa described her as a “fat woman of fifty years of age, short, plump and high colored,” wearing a “pink bodice cut very low and a short white skirt which hardly came below her knees.” Another recalled her black wig and “girl’s white frock” cut “disgustingly low” to her stomach.

Caroline bounced around Europe and the Mediterranean, sometimes received by aristocratic houses but more often snubbed, especially as stories of her strange behavior spread. Having lost the last of her respectable entourage by the end of 1815, she was attended by a ragtag group of hangers-on and adventurers, itinerant show players and musicians, and scandalous persons of low birth. She engaged in affairs wildly and publicly, canoodling with everyone from the king of Naples (brother-in-law of Napoleon and therefore an enemy to England) to her Italian valet, or so the gossips said. So complete was her break with the court that no official word was sent of her daughter Charlotte’s marriage on May 2, 1816. When Charlotte died in childbirth on November 6, 1817, Caroline, then living in an Italian villa on Lake Como, found out by reading about the tragedy in the newspaper.

In January 1820, poor mad George III died, and Prinney became His Majesty George IV. But he flat-out refused to allow Caroline to be queen. In June of that year, his ministers offered her an astounding £50,000 a year (about $6 million) to renounce her title and never return. Instead, she came bustling back to England, aglow with righteous indignation and bleating about her rights.

Caroline did have supporters back home. Despite her long absence, the British public loved her even more when they saw her thumbing her nose at the much-hated royal family. Her return was attended by pro–Queen Caroline rallies, most of which turned into window-breaking riots, while mobs stood under the king’s window and called him “Nero.” Even the military seemed on the verge of mutiny. Meanwhile, the country’s two main political parties girded their loins: Caroline’s side was taken up by the opposition party, the Whigs; they were opposed to the Tories, who were the king’s favorites and the party in power. The king declared he’d rather abdicate than recognize Caroline as queen.

With rebellion staring them in the face, the British government was forced to act. In August 1820, the Pains and Penalties Bill was brought before Parliament, an effort to legally dissolve Caroline and George’s marriage by declaring her guilty of adultery. But if the government was trying to
avoid
a scandal, they failed spectacularly—the resulting trial aired all sorts of shocking and ridiculous details. First to take the stand was an Italian servant of Caroline’s who testified that her supposed lover, the Italian valet Bergami, did not often sleep in his own bed. Further, he claimed he once heard sounds “like the creaking of a bench” coming from a tent in which Bergami and Caroline were together. Another witness claimed that the chamber pots in Caroline’s rooms contained a “good deal” more than a single person could produce. And still another claimed that he’d come upon Bergami and Caroline asleep in a carriage, her hand upon his “private part” and his upon hers.

Caroline, meanwhile, acted like a parody of herself, wearing a startling black wig over a face caked in rouge, sometimes nodding off during the duller parts of the proceedings. But however she conducted herself, and however damning the evidence was against her, public support for Caroline only increased. So, too, did libel against the king and his supporters. Realizing there was virtually no chance of getting the bill through both the House of Lords and the House of Commons, the measure was withdrawn.

Victory was hollow. Caroline was savvy enough to realize that although she had political supporters, she had virtually no friends. She was
shunned by most of society, and the king’s allies made sure that anyone who tried to befriend her saw their reputation shredded in the press. Moreover, the public was fickle and lacked patience for bad behavior. One bit of doggerel popular at the time went:

But she didn’t, and her humiliation wasn’t over yet. On July 20, 1821, the date of the king’s coronation, Caroline was denied entry at Westminster Abbey. As she had for most of her life, she doggedly refused to concede defeat, despite having the door literally closed in her face. She wrote to His Majesty that afternoon: “The Queen must trust that after the Public insult her Majesty received the morning, the King will grant her just Right to be crowned on next Monday.” The king did no such thing. Less than a month later, a sad and deluded Caroline died. Just 53 years old, she’d been suffering from an obstruction of her bowels, probably cancer, and had been in near-constant pain for most of the summer.

In death, Caroline won a final battle, this one for posterity. The British public mourned their queen’s passing with nationwide weeping. Even those aristocrats whose friendship she’d worn out were inclined to think of this unhappy woman kindly and with pity. Conversely, when George IV died nine years later, no one shed a tear. The
Times
declared, “There was never an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King.”

The daughter of a marriage as unhappy as that of Princess Caroline of Brunswick and the Prince of Wales was unlikely to have an easy life. And Charlotte, a spoiled tomboy with a mercurial temperament, certainly did not. Wedged between her mother and father, the little girl spent the first part of her life as a pawn in their game of one-upmanship. The prince won, and Charlotte was given over almost solely to his care.

Some care. Virtually a prisoner, she was shepherded from one gloomy palatial estate to the next. Nearly every aspect of her life was controlled by her father or the women he appointed to mind her. She was too like her mother to inspire any real affection in dear old Dad, and he usually spoke to her only when he found fault. Nothing was done with Charlotte’s comfort or happiness in mind.

Not that her mother would have filled the void any better. By the time Charlotte was 10 years old, Caroline’s interaction with her daughter was restricted to a weekly visit. Just 18 years old when her mother left for the Continent, in 1814, Charlotte was devastated, writing, “I am so hurt about it that I am very low.” Meanwhile, her father was attempting to arrange her marriage to William, the hereditary prince of Orange, a skinny kid whom Charlotte once said was so ugly, it was all she could do not to turn away when he spoke to her.

The marriage was eventually called off and Charlotte found another suitor whom she came to love immensely. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, seven years her senior, smoothed out her rough edges, and she blossomed into the kind of prudent, feminine, and sweet princess everyone had wanted her to be. And here’s where the story turns even sadder: the couple had only 18 months of marital bliss before
Charlotte died in childbirth; their son was stillborn.

The nation’s outpouring of grief was intense. Charlotte had come to represent the British people’s hope for the monarchy; their immense love for her matched their great hatred for her father. Had Charlotte lived, she would have become queen; her death left George III with no legitimate grandchildren. Ultimately, George’s fourth son, Edward, wed a suitable princess, who gave birth to Alexandrina Victoria, fifth in line to the throne. Twenty years after Charlotte’s death (and the deaths of her uncles), young Princess Alexandrina became Queen Victoria, Britain’s longest reigning monarch (so far). Without her, the country might have missed out on all the good stuff associated with the 63-year Victorian era, from Christmas trees to sexual repression.