Wonderfully elastic, however, were the spirits of the Princess, and at dinner, on the day when her disappointment drew tears from her eyes, she entertained a large party with some grace and more gaiety. The question of her being present at the theatre on the following Thursday was discussed, and a baronet present, whom the authoress of the ‘Diary’ partially veils under the initials of Sir J— B—, insisted that, unless Mr. Whitbread gave some very strong reasons to the contrary, the Princess would do right in going. ‘But I fancy,’ said Sir John, ‘he has some good reasons, and then she must yield. Gad!’ he added to a neighbour at table, ‘if I were she, and Whitbread didn’t please me, I would send for Castlereagh, and every one of them, till I found one that did. To tell you the truth, I am sorry the Princess ever threw herself into the hands of Whitbread—it is not the staff on which the royalties should lean.’—‘Ah!’ replied the baronet’s neighbour, ‘but at the moment he stepped forth her champion and deliverer, who was there that would have done as much?’
The sequel is too characteristic and singular to be passed over. The Princess was sometimes more vigorous than refined in her expressions, and this less from coarseness than ignorance of the value and sound of English terms. Thus, when a letter arrived from Mr. Whitbread, during this very dinner, intimating to her that there was a box reserved for her if she strongly desired to be present at the theatre when the foreign potentates were to appear there, but at the same time strongly urging her to refrain from being present, she exclaimed, after despatching a lady to request Mr. Whitbread to come to her immediately, ‘If he gives me good reasons I will submit; but if he does not, d—n me, den I go!’ ‘Those were her words, at which I could not help smiling,’ says the authoress of the ‘Diary,’ ‘but she was in no mind to smile, so I concealed the impulse I felt to laugh.’
When Mr. Whitbread waited on the Princess she received him rather coolly, and listened silently to his enumeration of the persons whose opinion it was that she should not appear at Drury Lane. He said that Mr. Tierney, Mr. Brougham, and Lord Sefton were of opinion that, however much the Princess might be applauded, the public would say it was at the instigation of Mr. Whitbread, and was not the spontaneous feeling of the people; that the more she was applauded, the more they would say so, and that if, on the contrary, a strong party of the Prince Regent’s friends and paid hirelings were there, and that one voice of disapprobation were heard, it might do her considerable harm. ‘Besides,’ continued Mr. Whitbread, ‘as the great question about an establishment for your Royal Highness comes on to-morrow, I think it is of the utmost importance that no one should be able to cast any invidious observation about your forcing yourself on the public, or seeming to defy your Royal Highness’s husband.’ In fine, the Princess was overruled.
In the midst of her disappointments she was enlivened by renewed hopes of a visit from the Emperor of Russia, whose expressed intention to that effect was said to have given considerable uneasiness to the Regent. Meanwhile, the Princess found solace in various ways—and not always in the most commendable, if we are to put implicit truth in the following account of a freak, which seems more like a ‘freedom’ of the ladies at the Court of Charles II. than a frolic of more modern and less lively times. Such a story is best told in the words of a witness—Lady Charlotte Campbell.
‘To amuse herself is as necessary to her Royal Highness as meat and drink, and she made Mr. Craven and Sir W. Gell and myself promise to go with her to the masquerade. She is to go out at her back door, on the Uxbridge (Bayswater) road, of which “no person under Heaven” (her curious phraseology) has a key but her royal self, and we are to be in readiness to escort her Royal Highness in a hackney-coach to the Albany, where we are to dress. What a mad scheme at such a moment, and without any strong motive either to run the risk! I looked grave when she proposed this amusement; but I knew I had only to obey. I thought of it all night with fear and trembling.’ In the supplementary matter to the ‘Diary’ we have the following detail as the ‘curious story respecting this masquerade’:—‘The Princess,’ says the editor, apparently, ‘it was related to me by undoubted authority, would go to the masquerade, and, with a kind of girlish folly, she enjoyed the idea of making a grand mystery about it, which was quite unnecessary. The Duchess of York frequently went to similar amusements incognita, attended only by a friend or two, and nobody found fault with her Royal Highness. The Princess might have done the same; but no!—the fun, in her estimation, consisted in doing the thing in the most ridiculous way possible. So she made two of the ladies privy to her schemes; and the programme of the revel was that her Royal Highness should go down her back staircase with one of her ladies, while the cavaliers waited at a private door which led into the street, and then the partie quarée was to proceed on foot to the Albany, where more ladies met her Royal Highness, and where the change of dress was to be made. All of this actually took place; and Lady —— told me she never was so frightened in her life as when she found herself at the bottom of Oxford Street, at twelve at night, on her cavalier’s arm, and seeing her Royal Highness rolling on before her. It was a sensation, she told me, betwixt laughing and crying, that she should never forget. The idea that the Princess might be recognised, and of course mobbed, and then the subsequent consequences, which would have been so fatal to her Royal Highness, were all so distressing that the party of pleasure was one of real pain to her. This mad prank, Lady —— told me, passed off without discovery, and certainly without any impropriety whatever, except that which existed in the folly of the thing itself. It was similar imprudences to this which were so fatal to the Princess’s reputation.’ And no wonder, if indeed these stories, as alleged, are true in their details, or are founded on truth.
It was a time when the mob was accustomed to speak pretty plainly. What a contrast is this pedestrian ramble by night, to dress for Mrs. Chichester’s masquerade, to the state procession of the Regent into the city, where he twice dined—once at an entertainment given by the merchants, and once at a banquet given by the lord mayor and corporation! On the latter occasion especially his passage from Temple Bar nearly to the dinner-table itself was assailed by most uncomplimentary vociferations on the part of the populace. Their most general cry was, ‘Where’s your wife?’—and that portion of the mob which apparently consisted of women was loudest in its unsavoury exclamations against the Vicegerent of the kingdom. He dined with what appetite he might, and he made the Lord Mayor (Domville), according to ancient custom when kings sat at the board of a first magistrate, a baronet; but he registered a vow, which he never broke, that never again would he condescend to be a guest among citizens to whose table he could not pass without running the gauntlet through the scourge of vile tongues that attacked him on his way. His mother, Queen Charlotte, did subsequently honour a lord mayor with her presence; but at her, too, the loud popular tongue wagged so insolently that the royal lady, although she courageously concealed her alarm, became indisposed on her return home, where she was first seized with those cruel spasmodic attacks which ultimately overcame her strength and surrendered her to death.
But the way in which the populace resented on the head of the Prince his conduct to his wife was but small consolation to the latter for the disappointment and insults which she experienced at the hands of her persecutors. She may be said to have been literally ejected from court. She was not allowed to present her own daughter, although that daughter had declared she would be presented by her mother or by nobody. It was not enough either that the foreign sovereigns and great captains for or with whom her father had fought and shed his blood—it was not enough that these should be induced to turn away from the house where dwelt a lady who, through her father, at all events, had some claims upon such small courtesy—but the determination that she should not meet them at court was more insulting still. The Queen thought she had skilfully provided against every possible emergency, when the two drawing-rooms were announced as about to be held in 1814. It was doubtless intended, at first, not to exclude the Princess from both, but simply to prevent her from being present at the one to be graced by the Regent and his imperial and royal guests. But the Regent himself was determined that his consort should not be permitted to appear at either. He addressed a letter to his mother, in which he modestly intimated that her court would be no court without him; that he should attend both drawing-rooms to lend them greater lustre (almost as much was expressed in words); and that, as he had resolved never to encounter his wife, it was of course necessary that she should stay away. The Queen accepted the conclusion as logically arrived at; and to the dignified letters addressed to her by the Princess—letters which would have been as touching as they were dignified had they been of her own inditing, and not the vicarious sentiments of her friends—the Queen addressed now taunting, now contemptuous replies. The spirit of them was, in a bitter insinuation, that though the commission which had examined into her conduct had pronounced her free from guilt, her husband would account of her as still guilty, and the court would hold her as one convicted. In this correspondence ‘Caroline P.’ shines with more lustre than ‘Charlotte R.’ The latter appears so to have hated the former as to be glad of the opportunity to insinuate that she was infamous.
But ‘Caroline’ turned from exchanging sharp notes with ‘Charlotte’ to addressing her husband. He might, she said, possibly refuse to read the letter, but the world must know that she had written it. In this communication she states she would have exercised her right of appearing at the drawing-room had she not been ‘restrained by motives of personal consideration towards her Majesty.’ She protests against the insult, appeals to her acquittal, to her restoration thereupon by the King to the full enjoyment of her rank in his court, and she adds: ‘Since his Majesty’s lamented illness, I have demanded, in the face of parliament and the country, to be proved guilty, or to be treated as innocent. I will not submit to be treated as guilty.’ There is something, too, of the taunting style which the Queen could manage with so much effect in the succeeding passage. The Prince had vowed that never again would he meet her, either in public or in private. ‘Can your Royal Highness,’ she asks, ‘have contemplated the full extent of your declaration?... Occasions may arrive (one, I trust, is far distant) when I must appear in public, and your Royal Highness must be present also.... Has your Royal Highness forgotten the approaching marriage of our daughter, and the possibility of our coronation.’... The illustrious heir of the House of Orange had announced himself to her, she said, as her future son-in-law; and then she adds, coupling the presence of the Orange Prince with that of the illustrious strangers in the metropolis: ‘This season your Royal Highness has chosen for treating me with fresh and unprovoked indignity; and of all his Majesty’s subjects I alone am prevented, by your Royal Highness, from appearing in my place to partake of the general joy, and am deprived of the indulgence in those feelings of pride and affection permitted to every mother but me.’ It was possible, as the writer remarked, that this letter was never read to the exalted individual to whom it was addressed. It is certain that the letter was not thought worthy of notice. But the presumed writer was determined that, escaping the courteous notice of her husband, it should not escape the more general notice of the world. She accordingly sent copies of her correspondence with the Queen and one of the correspondence of the latter with the Prince to the House of Commons, with an expression of her fears that there were ‘ultimate objects in view pregnant with danger to the security of the succession and the domestic peace of the realm.’
This communication raised a discussion, and Mr. Methuen proposed an address to the Prince, requesting him to acquaint the house by whose advice he had determined never to meet the Princess. The proposition, however, was withdrawn. Mr. Bathurst, the only government advocate, stated that no imputation was intended against the character of the Princess. ‘The charges of guilt,’ he admitted, ‘had been irresistibly refuted at a former period.’ The so-called exclusion from court, he said, simply resolved itself into the non-invitation of the Princess to a court festival—nothing more. But, as Mr. Whitbread subsequently remarked, ‘such non-invitation was an infliction worse than loss of life: it is loss of reputation, blasting to her character, fatal to her fame.’ The government thought to pacify the Princess by holding out to her the prospect of an increase of income; but her friends in parliament asserted that she would scorn to barter her rights for an increased income, or to allow her silence to be purchased in exchange for an adequate provision.