Behind the Palace Doors (32 page)

The unrelenting hostility between the Prince and Princess of Wales, as well as their own selfish pursuits, left little room for parenting. Their daughter, Princess Charlotte, was sometimes used as a public relations prop in their escalating marital war, “dandled by each parent in turn for extra dramatic effect,” as Thea Holme wrote. Mostly, though, she was ignored. George appeared particularly indifferent to his daughter, even if he did occasionally dote on the little girl. Charlotte felt his absence keenly.

“Oh how I wish I could see more of you!” the princess wrote to her father. “But I hope I shall in time. I am sensible how irksome it must be to you to see me, feeling I can be no companion to you to amuse you when in health; and am too young to soothe you when in affliction. Believe me that I am always truly happy when I do see you.”

Part of the prince’s lack of regard for his daughter sprang from the unsettling characteristics she shared with her mother, his detested wife. Charlotte was a vibrant, engaging, and essentially good-hearted girl, but at times a bit wild.

“One of her fancies was to ape the manner of a man,” recalled Charlotte’s childhood friend George Keppel. “On these occasions she would double her fists, and assume an attitude of defence that would have done credit to a professed pugilist. What I disliked in her, when in this mood, was her fondness for exercising her hands upon me in their clenched form.”

There was indeed something of the rough-and-tumble tomboy in the princess, a high-spiritedness some of her contemporaries deemed distinctly unladylike. She “goes swaggering about,” reported Lady Albina Cumberland, “and twangs hands with all the men, is in awe of no one and glories in her independent way of thinking.” Lord Glenbervie recorded in his diary that the princess’s conversation was “forward and dogmatical on all subjects, buckish about horses, and full of expressions very like swearing.” Few of these characteristics were likely to endear the boisterous princess to her dad.

When King George III finally succumbed to permanent madness late in 1810, the Prince of Wales became regent. He planned an extravagant party to celebrate. “I have not been invited, nor do I know if I shall or not,” fifteen-year-old Charlotte wrote to her governess. “If I should not, it will make a great noise in the world, as the friends I have seen have repeated over and over again it is my duty to go there; it is proper that I should. Really I do think it will be very hard if I am not asked.” She wasn’t.

If Charlotte craved affection from her father, she was more ambivalent about her mother. Caroline’s maternal instincts—like so much else about her—were a little off-kilter. Certainly she never bothered to modify her outlandish behavior around her teenaged daughter, and thus Charlotte was exposed to a long line of Caroline’s consorts. The young princess was understandably disturbed by her mother’s antics and once said that “she could not think she was her daughter, as she showed such a want of character.” Nevertheless, Charlotte did recognize
how terribly mistreated her mother was. “I believe her to be both a
very unhappy
& a very
unfortunate
woman,” she wrote, “who has had great
errors
, great
faults
, but is really oppressed and cruelly used.”

The prince regent, as George was now known, ordered strict limitations on Caroline’s visits with Charlotte, particularly after he learned that his estranged wife had been arranging liaisons in her home between their daughter and a womanizing officer by the name of Captain Charles Hesse.
^*
Caroline’s reaction to the restrictions was not really that of a broken-hearted mother deprived of her daughter; she didn’t care all that much. Rather it was one of a vengeful wife who saw the opportunity to make trouble with George and his family—“teazing and worrying them,” as she wrote.

When Queen Charlotte refused to intercede on Caroline’s appeal for more time with Charlotte, the prince regent wrote to his mother to express himself gratified for the “very kind and considerate and well judged and most prudent method” she had adopted to “baffle this not only extraordinary … but most impudent fresh attempt on the part of this most mischievous and intriguing infernale” to affect a fondness for her daughter “which she never did feel and [was] totally incapable of feeling to create a discord or confusion in the family under the pretence of seeing her.”

The prince regent’s assessment of his wife’s motives was fairly accurate, even if it was made in the midst of his blind hatred toward her. Caroline’s concern for Princess Charlotte extended only so far as it suited her, as evidenced by her rash
decision to leave England for good in 1814. She had been warned that such a drastic step could jeopardize her daughter’s position as heir apparent because George could divorce her while she was away, remarry, and sire a son. Plus, as shall be seen, Charlotte needed her at the time. Caroline didn’t care.

“She decidedly deserts me,” Princess Charlotte wrote in despair. “After all if a
mother
has not feeling for her child or children
are they to teach it to her
or can they
expect to be listened to with any hopes of success
?”

Caroline’s desertion of her daughter occurred in the midst of a terrible situation Charlotte was enduring with her father. The prince regent was determined to exercise absolute control over his heir. In one instance he even told her governess that “Charlotte must lay aside the idle nonsense of thinking that she has a will of her own; while I live she must be subject to me as she is at present.”

As part of the domination he maintained over his daughter, George herded her into an engagement with Prince William of Orange, even after assuring her that she would have a say in whom she wed. Such a marriage would entail living in Holland, at least for some part of the year, and sleeping with Prince William—neither of which appealed to the princess.

“As to going abroad,” Charlotte wrote to her friend Priscilla Burghersh,

Rather than proceed in an arrangement she found so odious, Charlotte took the bold step of breaking off the engagement. Her father was furious, and in his wrath he dismissed her servants and decreed that she would live, essentially, under house arrest. Desperate to escape such a fate, Charlotte ran away to her mother, only to find Caroline inflexible in her determination to leave England. The princess had no choice but to return and live in the isolated circumstances her father had ordered.

“Nothing can be so wretchedly uncertain and uncomfortable as my situation,” she wrote to Priscilla Burghersh. “I am grown thin, sleep ill and eat but little. Bailly [Dr. Matthew Baillie] says my complaints are all nervous, and that bathing and sailing will brace me; but I say Oh no! no good can be done whilst the mind and the soul are on the rack constantly, and the spirits forced and screwed up to a certain pitch.”

Harmony was eventually restored, and Princess Charlotte was allowed to marry the man of her choice, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, in 1816. It was an ideal match; one of the rare royal marriages that actually worked. “We lead a very quiet and retired life here,” Charlotte wrote from her country estate in Surrey, “but a very,
very
happy one.” Alas, the sweet idyll would not last. The year after her wedding, Princess Charlotte died suddenly after giving birth to a stillborn baby son. She was only twenty-one, and the outpouring of grief that followed rivaled that for another Princess of Wales almost two centuries later.

As her daughter died, Princess Caroline was off gallivanting across Europe and making quite a spectacle of herself—as a
stripper, essentially. At a ball in Naples, for example, she appeared “in the most indecent manner, her breast and her arms being entirely naked,” and in Athens she had “dressed almost naked and danced with her servants.” After seeing her at another ball, Lady Bessborough painted a particularly garish portrait of the princess in a letter to Granville Leveson-Gower: “I cannot tell you how sorry and ashamed I felt as an Englishwoman. In the room, [dancing], was a short, very fat elderly woman, with an extremely red face (owing I suppose to the heat) in a girl’s white frock-looking dress, but with shoulder, back and neck quite low (disgustingly so) down to the middle of her stomach; very black hair [she was wearing a black wig] and eyebrows, which gave her a fierce look, and a wreath of light pink roses on her head.”

Inappropriate dress aside, though, the most scandalous aspect of Princess Caroline’s behavior was the flagrant affair she conducted with her strapping chamberlain, Bartolomeo Pergami, reports of which filtered back to Britain from all over Europe. There was the letter from Florence about her continuing “exceedingly prodigal behavior” and her “intimacy” with Pergami, which was “the subject of conversation everywhere.” And from Hanover came news of Caroline’s “very incongruous conduct,” which “created general astonishment and justly merited indignation.”

The couple simply seemed incapable of discretion, as a long list of servants and others attested. Caroline’s coachman, Giuseppe Sacchi, for one, saw on several occasions Pergami slip into the princess’s room, where he found them in the morning, “both asleep and having their respective hands upon one another. Her Royal Highness had her hand upon a particular part of Mr. Pergami, and Mr. Pergami had his own upon that of her Royal Highness.… Once … Pergami had his breeches loosened … and the Princess’s hand was … upon that part.”

Caroline had decided that she would never return to England, but that all changed early in 1820 when King George III
died and her estranged husband became King George IV. The wayward princess now determined that she would take her place as queen. And there was nothing the government could do to stop her, despite the new king’s most intensive efforts.

“It is impossible for me to paint the insolence, the violence and the precipitation of this woman’s conduct,” reported Lord Hutchinson, part of a deputation sent to France to urge Caroline’s quiet retirement. “I never saw anything so outrageous, so undignified as a queen, or so unamiable as a woman.… She has really assumed a tone and hauteur which is quite insufferable, and which nothing but the most pure and unimpeached innocence could justify.… We have at length come to a final and ultimate issue with this outrageous woman. She has set the King’s authority at defiance, and it is now time for her to feel his vengeance and his power. Patience, forbearance and moderation have had no effect on her. I must now implore His Majesty to exert all his firmness and resolution: retreat is impossible. The Queen has thrown down the gauntlet of defiance. The King must take it up.”

Yet for all his huffing and puffing, King George IV was powerless against Caroline’s onslaught. He was almost universally loathed, and she—personifying all opposition to the king and his government—was warmly embraced by the masses. “No Queen, no King!” the people shouted.

“This brave woman,” as
The Times
called Caroline, was raucously received from the moment she arrived at Dover on June 5, 1820. The diarist Charles Greville rode out to watch the queen enter London and reported, “The road was thronged with an immense multitude the whole way from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. Carriages, carts, and horsemen followed, preceded, and surrounded her coach the whole way. She was everywhere received with the greatest enthusiasm. Women waved pocket handkerchiefs, and men shouted wherever she passed.”

George IV, faced with the nightmarish possibility of a revolution in support of his monstrous wife, had one weapon left to destroy her (or so he thought): Bartolomeo Pergami. A Bill of Pains and Penalties was introduced into the House of Lords accusing Caroline of having conducted herself toward Pergami with “indecent and offensive familiarity and freedom,” and of having carried on “a licentious, disgraceful, and adulterous intercourse” with him. And for such behavior, the bill sought to “deprive her Majesty Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of the title, prerogatives, rights, privileges, and pretensions of Queen Consort of this realm, and to dissolve the marriage between his Majesty and the said Queen.”

The inquiry that followed produced compelling evidence against Caroline, but the majority of people seemed not to care. “All the world is with her,” declared Sir James Mackintosh. Roving mobs attacked anyone they believed was not on the queen’s side, while cartoonists gleefully attacked the king. The nation was riveted by the case.