The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick

by Charles Bradlaugh

The wretched reign of George IV. commenced on the 30th January, 1820. Mr. Buckle speaks of "the incredible baseness of that ignoble voluptuary who succeeded George III. on the throne." The coronation was delayed for a considerable period, partly in consequence of the hostility between the King and his unfortunate wife, and partly because of the cost. We find the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville writing of the coronation: "I think it probable that it will be put off, because the King will not like it unless it be expensive, and Vansittart knows not how to pay for it if it is." Generous monarchs, these Brunswicks! Thousands at that moment were in a state of starvation in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Lord Cassilis writes: "There seems nothing but chaos and desolation whatever way a man may turn himself.... the lower orders existing only from the circumstance of the produce of the land being unmarketable.... The weavers are certainly employed, but they cannot earn more than from six to eight shillings a week. Such is our state." When the coronation did ultimately take place, some strange expenses crept in. Diamonds were charged for to the extent, it is said, of £80,000, which found their way to one of the King's favored mistresses. The crown itself was made up with hired jewels, which were kept for twenty-one months after the coronation, and for the hire of which alone the country paid £11,000. The charge for coronation robes was £24,000. It was in consequence of Sir Benjamin Bloom-field having to account for some of the diamonds purchased that he resigned his position in the King's household. Rather than be suspected of dishonesty, he preferred revealing that they had reached the hands of Lady Conyngham. Sir George Naylor, in an infamously servile publication, for which book alone the country paid £3,000, describes "the superb habiliments which his Majesty, not less regardful of the prosperity of the people than of the splendor of his throne, was pleased to enjoin should be worn upon the occasion of his Majesty's sacred coronation."

Sir William Knighton declares that on the news of the King's death reaching the Prince Regent, "the fatal tidings were received with a burst of grief that was very affecting." The King had been mad and blind and deaf for ten years, and the Queen, years before, had complained of the Prince's conduct as unfilial, if not inhuman. With the Prince Regent's known character, this sudden burst of grief is really "very affecting."

On the 23d of February, London was startled with the news of what since has been described as the Cato Street Conspiracy. The trial of Arthur Thistlewood and his misguided associates is valuable for one lesson. The man who found money for the secret conspirators, and who incited them to treason and murder, was one George Edwards. This Edwards was well described by one of the journals of the period, "as neither more nor less than the confidential agent of the original conspirators, to hire for them the treasons they have a purpose in detecting." By original conspirators were meant Lord Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth. In the House of Commons, Mr. Alderman Wood moved formally, "That George Edwards be brought to the bar of the House on a breach of privilege. He pledged himself, if he had this incendiary in his hands, to convict him of the crimes imputed; he hoped he had not been suffered to escape beyond seas; otherwise there were honorable gentlemen who were in possession of him, so that he might be produced"—meaning by this that he was kept out of the way by the Government. "He regarded him as the sole author and contriver of the Cato Street plot. It was strange how such a man should be going about from public house to public house, nay, from one private house to another, boldly and openly instigating to such plots; and, in the midst of this, should become, from abject poverty, suddenly flush with money, providing arms, and supplying all conspirators." Mr. Hume seconded the motion. "It appeared by the depositions, not of one person only, but of a great many persons, that the individual in question had gone about from house to house with hand-grenades, and, up to twenty-four hours only preceding the 23d of February, had been unceasingly urging persons to join with him in the atrocious plot to assassinate his Majesty's Ministers. All of a sudden he became quite rich, and was buying arms in every quarter, at every price, and of every description; still urging a variety of persons to unite with him. Now, it was very fitting for the interest of the country, that the country should know who the individuals were who supplied him with the money."

As a fair specimen of the disposition of the King in dealing with his Ministry, I give the following extract from a memorandum of Lord Chancellor Eldon, dated April 26th, 1820: "Our royal master seems to have got into temper again, so far as I could judge from his conversation with me this morning. He has been pretty well disposed to part with us all, because we would not make additions to his revenue. This we thought conscientiously we could not do in the present state of the country, and of the distresses of the middle and lower orders of the people—to which we might add, too, that of the higher orders. My own individual opinion was such that I could not bring myself to oppress the country at present by additional taxation for that purpose."

On the 23d of March, Henry Hunt, John Knight, Joseph Johnson, Joseph Healey, and Samuel Bamford were, after six days' trial at York, found guilty of unlawfully assembling. Lord Grenville feared that, if acquitted, Peterloe might form a terrible bill of indictment against the Ministry. His Lordship writes on March 29th, to the Marquis of Buckingham: "It would have been a dreadful thing if it had been established by the result of that trial that the Manchester meeting was under all its circumstances a legal assembly." His Lordship knew that the magistrates and yeomanry cavalry might have been indicted for murder had the meeting been declared legal. Sir C. Wolseley and the Rev, J. Harrison were at this time being prosecuted for seditious speaking, and were ultimately found guilty on April 10th. In May the state of the country was terrible; even Baring, the Conservative banker, on May 7th, described the "state of England" to a full House of Commons, "in the most lamentable terms." On the 8th we find Mr. W. H. Fremantle saying of the King, "His language is only about the Coronation and Lady Conyngham [his then favorite sultana]; very little of the state of the country." Early in June, it being known that Queen Caroline was about to return to England, and that she intended to be present at the Coronation, the King offered her £50,000 a year for life to remain on the Continent, and forbear from claiming the title of Queen of England. This Caroline indignantly refused. The Queen's name had, by an order in Council, and on the King's direction, been omitted from the Liturgy as that of a person unfit to be prayed for, and on the 6th of July a bill of pains and penalties was introduced by Lord Liverpool, alleging adultery between the Queen and one Bartolomeo Bergami. To wade through the mass of disgusting evidence offered by the advisers of the King in support of the bill is terrible work. It seems clear that many of the witnesses committed perjury. It is certain that the diplomatic force of England was used to prevent the Queen from obtaining witnesses on her behalf. Large sums of the taxpayers' money were shown to have been spent in surrounding the Princess of Wales with spies in Italy and Switzerland. Naturally the people took sides with the Queen. To use the language of William Cobbett: "The joy of the people, of all ranks, except nobility, clergy, and the army and the navy, who in fact were theirs, was boundless; and they expressed it in every possible way that people can express their joy. They had heard rumors about a lewd life, and about an adulterous intercourse. They could not but believe that there was some foundation for something of this kind; but they, in their justice, went back to the time when she was in fact turned out of her husband's house, with a child in her arms, without blame of any sort ever having been imputed to her. They compared what they had heard of the wife with what they had seen of the husband, and they came to their determination accordingly. As far as related to the question of guilt or innocence they cared not a straw; they took a large view of the matter; they went over her whole history; they determined that she had been wronged, and they resolved to uphold her."

On the 6th of August, the Duchess of York died. Dr. Doran thus writes her epitaph: "Her married life had been unhappy, and every day of it was a disgrace to her profligate, unprincipled, and good-tempered husband."

In the month of September Lord Castlereagh was compelled to admit that the expenses incurred in obtaining evidence from abroad, against the Queen, had been defrayed out of the Secret Service money. The trial of Queen Caroline lasted from the 17th of August until the 10th of November, when, in a house of two hundred and seven peers, the Queen was found guilty by a majority of nine votes. On this, Lord Liverpool said that "as the public sentiment had been expressed so decidedly against the measure," he would withdraw the bill. Amongst those who voted against the Queen, the names appear of Frederick Duke of York and William Henry Duke of Clarence. They had been most active in attacking the Queen, and now were shameless enough to vote as her judges. While the trial was proceeding, the Duke of York's private conversation "was violent against the Queen." He ought surely, for very shame's sake, this Prince-Bishop, to have remembered the diamonds sent by the King his father to Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, of Brunswick. Being the bearer of the jewels, his Royal Highness the Duke of York and Prince-Bishop of Osnaburg, stole them, and presented them to Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke. Mr. Denman, the Queen's Solicitor-General, was grandly audacious in his indictment of the King's brothers for their cowardly conduct. In the presence of the assembled Lords, he, without actually referring to him by name, denounced the Duke of Clarence as a calumniator. He called on the Duke to come forward openly, saying, "Come forth, thou slanderer!" And this slanderer was afterwards our King! The Queen, in a protest against the bill, declared that "those who avowed themselves her prosecutors have presumed to sit in judgment upon the question between the Queen and themselves. Peers have given their voices against her, who had heard the whole evidence for the charge, and absented themselves during her defence. Others have come to the discussion from the Secret Committee with minds biased by a mass of slander, which her enemies have not dared to bring forward in the light." Lord Dacre, in presenting the protest to the assembled peers, added: "Her Majesty complained that the individuals who formed her prosecutors in this odious measure, sat in judgment against her. My Lords, I need not express an opinion upon this complaint; delicacy alone ought to have, in my opinion, prevented their becoming her accusers, and also her judges."

George IV. was guilty of the vindictive folly of stripping Brougham of his King's Counsel gown, as a punishment for his brilliant defence of the Queen.

While the trial of the Queen was going on, it might have been thought that the King would at any rate affect a decency of conduct. But these Brunswicks are shameless. Speaking of the cottage at Windsor, on August 11th, Mr. Fremantle says: "The principal object is of course the Lady Conyngham, who is here. The King and her always together, separated from the rest, they ride every day or go on the water, and in the evening sitting alone.... The excess of his attentions and enjouement is beyond all belief." On December 17th, Mr. Fremantle finds the King ill and says: "The impression of my mind is that the complaint is in the head." Most of the Brunswicks have been affected in the head. Either George I. was insane, or George II. was not his son. George II. himself had certainly one or two delusions, if not more. George III.'s sanity is not affirmed by any one. It may be a question whether or not any allegation of hereditary affection is enough, however, to justify an appeal to Parliament for a rearrangement of the succession to the throne.

On the 9th of January, 1821, King George IV. wrote a private letter to Lord Chancellor Eldon, in the "double capacity as a friend and as a minister," in order to influence the proceedings then pending in the law courts "against vendors of treason and libellers."