Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (46 page)

—News of the Weird

“Hundreds of people are thronging a hospital in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to see a patient holding a piece of his own skull that fell off. Doctors say a large, dead section of 25-year-old electrician Sambhu Roy’s skull came away Sunday after severe burns starved it of blood. ‘When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burned. Within months it came off exposing the skull,’ Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay, the surgeon who treated Roy told Reuters. ‘Later, we noticed that part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the area, which can happen in such cases.’ The piece came off Sunday and hundreds of people and dozens of doctors now crowd around his bed, where he lies holding the bone. ‘Doctors say a new skull covering has replaced the old one, but I am not letting go of this one,’ Roy said. He intends to keep his prized possession for life and not hand it over to the hospital when he leaves: ‘My skull has made me famous,’ he says.”

—Yahoo! News

This just wouldn’t be an “odd” book without some crazy royals, a class of people who seem to specialize in weird behavior. Here’s the story of a royal couple whose scandalous fights fed the gossip columns and outraged the public…200 years ago. Some things never change.

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IG SPENDER

When George, England’s Prince of Wales, turned 21 in 1783, the British government gave him a birthday present of £60,000 (about $6.2 million in today’s dollars). And his father, King George III, set him up with an annual allowance of £50,000 ($5.2 million). Most people could get by on that, but young Prince George couldn’t. He blew every penny—and much more—on expensive dining, furniture, tailors, racehorses, home renovations, and anything else his heart desired. By his mid-30s, George was broke—and in addition, he owed a staggering £660,000 ($70 million) in debts.

Normally, lending money to a future king was a good idea: After he was crowned, such “investors” could call in their loans and expect a handsome repayment. But George was so deep in debt that his funding completely dried up. Nobody would lend him money until his father, the king, intervened…with two conditions: He wanted George to marry a princess and produce an heir. If the prince would do these two things, the king promised, he’d raise his allowance and help pay down his debts.

There was one small problem: George was
already
married—and worse, to a Catholic woman. As the future head of the Anglican Church, George was forbidden by law to marry a Catholic. But he had, in a secret ceremony a few years earlier, and the marriage had soured since then. Now, badly in need of cash, George reached an agreement with his father: George would pretend he wasn’t married, and his father would pretend to believe him. The search for a princess was on.

George considered a number of potential brides before settling on his first cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick, Germany. He did
so sight unseen—the two had never met. They “introduced” themselves by sending each other small portraits: Each liked what they saw, so they agreed to marry. But painted portraits can be deceiving. Unlike his picture, George was grossly overweight and widely considered unattractive; he was once described as looking “like a woman in men’s clothes.”

And if George was already on his way to earning his nickname “Prince of Whales,” the future “Princess of Whales” was close behind. Caroline was also pudgy, and was missing most of her teeth; those few she had left were rotten. But even worse than the sight of Caroline was her smell: Like many people of the 18th century, she rarely changed her clothes or bathed.

To make matters worse, Princess Caroline had a well-known reputation for loose morals and indiscretion—very unfitting for a future queen of England. “All amusements have been forbidden her because of her indecent conduct,” the prince’s brother wrote home after meeting Caroline and hearing stories of her lewd conversations—and worse—with men. “There, dear brother, is a woman I do not recommend at all.” But George ignored his brother. He had decided on Caroline, whom he still had not met, and that was that.

George’s determination lasted until the moment he met Caroline in person, three days before their wedding. His desire then vanished, never to return. Was it her gap-toothed grin? Or the stench? Whatever it was, when chubby Prince George finally laid eyes on his unattractive bride, he backed away, exclaiming to a friend, “I am not very well. Pray get me a glass of brandy.” Then he ran from the room.

Princess Caroline was equally unimpressed. “Does the prince always act like this?” she said as he ran off. “I think he’s very fat and nothing like his portrait.”

At the wedding three days later, George showed up so drunk that he couldn’t stand without assistance, and so agitated that he looked like he was about to cry. But somehow the wedding went off without a hitch, and nine months later—to the day—Caroline gave
birth to a baby girl named Charlotte. His commitment to produce an heir having been fulfilled, George separated from Caroline.

That could have been the end of it. George and Caroline might have been able to lead completely separate lives, appearing together only on public occasions when duty called. They
might
have been able to, were it not for the fact that Caroline, for all her faults, became an extremely popular princess, adored by the public—and that drove George crazy. So George shut her up in one of his houses, refused to let anyone visit her without his approval, and even installed his own mistress as her lady in waiting. Word of George’s cruel treatment leaked out, and, added to rumors of his own drunkenness, debauchery, and reckless spending, made him the most despised man in England. Meanwhile, Caroline became more popular than ever.

Caroline put up with the abuse until the end of 1799, when she told George that she no longer considered herself bound by his rules and moved to a small house outside of London. But as soon as she was out from under her husband’s thumb, the princess's loose morals and lack of discretion began to reassert themselves. She threw wild dinner parties during which she danced topless, flirted shamelessly with male guests, and, after selecting one of them as her favorite, disappeared downstairs for “indecent interludes.”

Prince George reveled in the stories told by Caroline’s dinner guests, and hoped they would damage her reputation and provide him with the proof he needed to sue for divorce on grounds of adultery.

He got his chance in 1805, when a story began to circulate that a four-year-old boy whom Caroline had adopted was actually her natural son. What better evidence for adultery than an illegitimate son? George pushed the prime minister into launching what became known as the “Delicate Investigation.” But the commission eventually concluded that there was no solid evidence to prove adultery. It turned out that the boy really was adopted after all.

The seamy investigation made George even less popular and generated even more sympathy for Caroline, whom the public saw as an “injured and unprotected female.” Every sin George committed stuck to him like glue, but Caroline got away with everything.
When she went out in public, people applauded; when he went out, they threw things at him. All George could do was wait and hope for an opportunity to rid himself of the woman he called the “vilest wretch this world was ever cursed with.”

In 1817, George and Caroline’s only daughter, by now 21 and married to a Belgian prince, died after giving birth to a stillborn son. Now living in Europe, Caroline felt that her daughter’s death had severed her last ties to George. So she sent word to him that she would agree to a “divorce by consent,” in which neither party had to admit to adultery. George agreed, but the British government refused: For the divorce to be legal, they said, Caroline had to admit to being an adulteress. And she wasn’t about to do that.

That meant Prince George would have to file suit and try to prove her guilty of adultery in open court…but again, the government wouldn’t let him. Caroline was still well loved by the British public, and George’s advisers knew that battling her in a nasty lawsuit might spark a rebellion. Keeping in mind the revolution that had toppled the French monarchy only 30 years earlier, they knew they couldn’t risk it. So George was right back where he started—married to a woman he couldn’t stand, and powerless to do anything about it.

The matter came to a head in January 1820, when George’s father, King George III, died. Prince George became King George IV…and Caroline was now the Queen of England. The thought of it was more than George could bear, but now that he was king, he figured he was in a position to rid himself of his queen. So he pushed the House of Lords into introducing the “Pains and Penalties Bill,” a bit of legislation with the sole purpose of annulling his marriage and stripping Caroline of her title of queen.

On June 5, 1820, Caroline returned to England to defend her honor in person. And judging from the size of the crowd that turned out to greet her, she was more popular than ever.

For three long, lurid months, the House of Lords debated the Pains and Penalties Bill. Each of Caroline’s alleged indiscretions was recounted in vivid, painstaking detail, mostly provided by spies
George had hired. Gavel-to-gavel press coverage inflated the story into a massive public spectacle, and restless crowds began to gather outside Parliament. After weeks of debate, it became clear that even if Caroline wasn’t guilty of
all
the allegations made against her, she was probably guilty of plenty of them. But the Lords, all too aware of that mob outside their chambers, quietly quashed the bill and made sure it never became law. The spectacle was over.

The queen was still the queen—George had lost again, this time for good. But he had one last insult to dish out: His coronation—the formal crowning ceremony—had been delayed until the queen’s status was resolved. Now that the matter was closed, George had his legal advisers find out whether a queen was entitled to be crowned in her own right, or whether she could only be crowned at the pleasure of the king. This time the king’s advisers sided with him—Caroline had no independent right to participate in the coronation. George immediately barred her from the ceremony. Queen Caroline showed up at Westminster Abbey anyway, but when she tried to enter the building, the guards slammed the door in her face.

But the day had greater repercussions than George had planned: Caroline, upset by the snub, fell ill that night. Three weeks later, she died. Her body was returned to Germany and buried in a tomb marked CAROLINE, THE INJURED QUEEN OF ENGLAND.

King George was finally free of his wife, but it didn’t bring him happiness. By now 57, morbidly obese, alcoholic, and addicted to medicinal opium, he spent his time in seclusion at Windsor Castle, where he died in 1830 at the age of 67. He never did win the love of his subjects, as his wife had; he was as despised in death as he was in life. Even his own brother, the new King William IV, left George’s funeral early, before the coffin had been lowered into the ground.

“There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King,” the London
Times
wrote after his death. “What eye has wept for him? If he ever had a friend, a devoted friend in any rank of life, we protest that the name of him or her never reached us.”

We found a bunch of old words that nobody uses much anymore. See if you can guess their definitions.