Her progress from Dover to London was a perfect ovation. Mr. Brougham had given her good advice at St. Omer. ‘If,’ he said, ‘your Majesty shall determine to go to England before any new offer can be made, I earnestly implore your Majesty to proceed in the most private and secret manner possible. It may be very well for a candidate at an election to be drawn into towns by the population, and they will mean nothing but good in showing this attention to your Majesty; but a Queen of England may well dispense with such marks of popular favour, and my duty to your Majesty binds me to say very plainly that I shall consider any such exhibition as both hurtful to your Majesty’s real dignity and full of danger in its probable consequences.’ ‘That Brougham is afraid,’ said the Queen; and so he was—afraid of her, afraid of some scandal, unknown to him then, coming out after her arrival. If he could have had his way he would not have consented to her coming to England at all. The people saw in her a victim of persecution, and for such there is generally a ready sympathy. They were convinced, too, that she was a woman of spirit, and for such there is ever abundant admiration. There was not a town through which she passed upon her way that did not give her a hearty welcome, and wish her well through the fiery ordeal which awaited her. She reached London on the evening of the 7th of June, 1820, and the popular procession of which she was the chief portion passed Carlton House on its route to the residence of Alderman Wood, in South Audley Street. There Alderman Wood used to spread a rug for her Majesty to tread upon, when, to satisfy the loud-tongued mob, she appeared twenty times a day on the little balcony. The Attorney-General would not allow his wife to call on her; and Mrs. Denman received a similar prohibition from Mr. Denman, who, subsequently, regretted the course he had taken.
The Queen had scarcely found refuge beneath the alderman’s hospitable roof when Lord Liverpool in the House of Peers, and Lord Castlereagh in the House of Commons, conveyed a message from the King to the parliament, the subject of which was that, her Majesty having thought proper to come to this country, some information would be laid before them, on which they would have to come to an ulterior decision, of vast importance to the peace and well-being of the United Kingdom. Each minister bore a ‘green bag,’ which was supposed and perhaps did contain minutes of the report made by the Milan commissioners touching her Majesty’s conduct abroad. The ministerial communications were made in the spirit and tone of men who, if not ashamed of the message which they bore, were very uncertain and infinitely afraid as to its ultimate consequences.
Not that they were wanting in an outward show of boldness. The soldiers quartered at the King’s Mews, Charing Cross, had been so disorderly some days previous, allegedly because they had not sufficient accommodation, that they were drafted in two divisions to Portsmouth. When the Queen was approaching London a mob assembled in front of the guard-house, and called upon the soldiers still remaining there to join them in a demonstration in favour of the Queen. Lord Sidmouth, who was passing on his way to the House of Lords, seeing what was going on, proceeded to the Horse Guards, called out the troops there, and stood by while they roughly dispersed the people. It was called putting a bold face upon the matter, but less provocation on the part of a government has been followed by revolution.
A desire to compromise the unhappy dispute was no doubt sincerely entertained by ministers, and all hope was not abandoned, even after the arrival of the Queen. Mr. Rush, the United States ambassador to England at this period, permits us to see, in his journal, when this attempt at compromise or amicable arrangement of the affair was first entered upon by the respective parties. On the 15th of June that gentleman dined at Lord Castlereagh’s with all the foreign ambassadors. ‘A very few minutes,’ he says, ‘after the last course, Lord Castlereagh, looking to his chief guest for acquiescence, made the signal for rising, and the company all went to the drawing-room. So early a move was unusual: it seemed to cut short, unexpectedly, the time generally given to conversation at English dinners after the dinner ends. It was soon observed that his lordship had left the drawing-room. This was still more unusual; and now it came to be whispered that an extraordinary cause had produced this unusual scene. It was whispered by one or another of the corps that his lordship had retired into one of his own apartments to meet the Duke of Wellington, as his colleague in the administration, and also Mr. Brougham and Mr. Denman, as counsel for the Queen in the disputes pending between the King and Queen.’ Mr. Rush, after mentioning that the proceedings in parliament were arrested for the moment by members purporting to be common friends of both King and Queen, proceeds to state that ‘the dinner at Lord Castlereagh’s was during this state of things, which explains the incident at its close, the disputes having pressed with anxiety on the King’s ministers. That his lordship did separate himself from his guests for the purpose of holding a conference in another part of his own house, in which the Duke of Wellington joined him as representing the King, with Mr. Brougham and Mr. Denman as representing the Queen, was known from the former protocol, afterwards published, of what took place on that very evening. It was the first of the conferences held with a view to a compromise between the royal disputants.’ On the 28th of June the American ambassador was at the levée at Carlton House, where he learns that ‘the sensibilities of the King are intense, and nothing can ever reconcile him.’ The same diplomatist then presents to us the following graphic picture: ‘The day was hot, excessively so for England. The King seemed to suffer. He remarked upon the heat to me and others. It is possible that other heat may have aggravated in him that of the weather. Before he came into the entrée room, from his closet, —— of the diplomatic corps, taking me gently by the arm, led me a few steps with him, which brought us into the recess of a window. “Look!” said he. I looked, and saw nothing but the velvet lawn covered by trees in the palace gardens. “Look again!” said he. I did; and still my eye only took in another part of the same scene. “Try once more,” said he, cautiously raising a finger in the right direction. —— had a vein of drollery in him. I now for the first time beheld a peacock displaying his plumage. At one moment he was in full pride, and displayed it gloriously; at another he would halt, letting it drop, as if dejected. “Of what does that remind you?” said ——. “Of nothing,” said I; “Honi soit qui mal y pense!” for I threw the King’s motto at him, and then added that I was a republican, he a monarchist, and that if he dreamt of unholy comparisons where royalty was concerned I would certainly tell upon him, that it might be reported at his court. He quietly drew off from me, smiling, and I afterwards saw him slyly take another member of the corps to the same spot, to show him the same sight.’
Meanwhile, the contending parties in parliament wore about them the air of men who were called upon to do battle, and who, while resolved to accomplish their best, would have been glad to have effected a compromise which, at least, should save the honour of their principal. As Mr. Wilberforce remarked, there was a mutual desire to ‘avoid that fatal green bag.’ There were many difficulties in the way. The Queen, naturally enough, insisted on her name being restored in the Liturgy; and none of her friends would have consented for her, nor would she have done so for herself, that she should reside abroad without being introduced by the British ambassador to the court of the country in which she might take up her residence. The government manifested too clearly an intention not to help her in this respect, for they remarked that, though they might request the ambassador to present, they could not compel the court to receive her. They wanted her out of the way, bribed splendidly to endure an indelible disgrace. She was wise enough, at least, to perceive that to consent to such a course would be to strip her of every friend, and to shut against her the door of every court in Europe.
Mr. Wilberforce hoped to act the ‘Mr. Harmony’ of the crisis, by bringing forward a motion expressive of the regret of parliament that the two illustrious adversaries had not been able to complete an amicable arrangement of their difficulties, and declaring that the Queen would sacrifice nothing of her good name nor of the righteousness of her cause, nor be held as shrinking from inquiry, by consenting to accept the counsel of parliament, and forbearing to press further the adoption of those propositions on which any material difference of opinion is yet remaining. The Queen’s especial advocate, Mr. Brougham, felicitously contrasted the eager desire of ministers to get rid of her Majesty, by sending her out of the country with all the pomp, splendour, and ceremonies connected with royalty, with their meanness in allowing her to come over in a common packet, and to seek shelter in the house of a private individual. He added that the only basis on which any satisfactory negotiation could be carried on with her Majesty was the restoration of her name to the Liturgy. Mr. Denman, in alluding to the case of Sophia Dorothea, which had been cited by ministers as precedent wherein they found authority for omitting the Queen’s name from the Liturgy, remarked that, ‘As to the case of the Queen of George I., to which allusions had been made, it was not at all in point. She had been guilty of certain practices in Hanover which compromised her character, and was never considered Queen of England. On the continent she lived under the designation of Princess of Halle; and though the Prince of Wales had afterwards called her to this country for the purpose of embarrassing the government of his father, to which he happened to be opposed, still she was never recognised in any other character than Electress of Hanover.’ In this statement it will be seen that the speaker calls her Queen whom he denies to have been accounted as such, and he adds that the Prince of Wales called her to this country in his father’s lifetime, when he had no power to do so; whereas he simply expressed to his friends his determination to invite her over if she survived his father as Queen-dowager of England. This invitation he never had the power of making, for his mother’s demise preceded the decease of his father. Mr. Denman was far happier in his allusion to a ministerial assertion that the omission of the Queen’s name from the Liturgy was the act of the King in his closet. This assertion was at once a meanness and a falsehood, for, as Mr. Denman remarked, no one knew of any such thing in this country as ‘the King in his closet.’ Indeed the ministers were peculiarly unlucky in all they did; for while they asserted that the omission was never made out of disrespect towards the Queen, they acknowledged that it never would have been thought of but for the revelations contained in the fatal green bag as to her Majesty’s alleged conduct. Finally, the House agreed to Mr. Wilberforce’s motion.
The announcement of the resolution to which the House of Commons had come was made to her Majesty, now residing in Portman Street, in an address conveyed to her by Mr. Wilberforce and three other members of the Lower House. On this occasion all the forms of a court were observed. The bearers of the address appeared in full court dress. The Queen, in a dress of black satin, with a wreath of laurel shaded with emeralds around her head, surmounted by a ‘plume of feathers,’ stood in one portion of the little drawing-room; behind her stood all the ladies of her household, in the person of Lady Anne Hamilton, and on either side of her Mr. Brougham and Mr. Denman, her Majesty’s Attorney and Solicitor Generals, in full-bottomed wigs and silk gowns. As the deputation approached, the folding doors which divided the members in the back drawing-room from the Queen and her court in the front apartment were then thrown open, and the four gentlemen from the House of Commons knelt on one knee and kissed her Majesty’s hand. Having communicated to her the resolutions of the House, the Queen, through the attorney-general, returned an answer of some length, the substance of which, however, was, that with all her respect for the House of Commons she could not bind herself to be governed by its counsel until she knew the purport of the advice. In short, she yielded nothing, but appealed to the nation. When the assembled crowd learned the character of the royal reply its delight was intense, and certainly public opinion was generally in favour of the Queen and of the course now adopted by her. There was one thing she and the public too supremely hated, and that was the formation of a secret committee, formed principally too of ministerial adherents, and charged with prosecuting the inquiry against her, without letting her know who were her accusers or of what crimes she was accused, and without affording her opportunity to procure evidence to rebut the testimony brought against her. Against such a proceeding she drew up a petition, which she requested the Lord Chancellor to present. That eminent official, however, asserting that he meant no disrespect, excused himself on the ground that he did not know how to present such a document to the House, and that there was nothing in the journals which could tend to enlighten him.
The petition, however, the chief prayer in which was that the Queen’s counsel might be heard at the bar of the House against an inquiry by secret committee, was presented by Lord Dacre, and the prayer in question was agreed to.
The request of Mr. Brougham was for a delay of two months, previous to the inquiry being further prosecuted, in order to leave time for the assembling of witnesses for the defence—witnesses whom the Queen was too poor to purchase, and too powerless to compel to repair to England. Her Majesty’s Attorney-General asked this the more earnestly as some of the witnesses on the King’s side were of tainted character, and one of them was an ex-domestic of the Queen’s, discharged from her service for robbing her of four hundred napoleons. The learned advocate concluded by expressing his confidence that the delay of two months would not be considered too great an indulgence for the purpose of furthering the ends of justice, and providing that a legal murder should not be committed on the character of the first subject of the realm. The best point in Mr. Denman’s speech in support of the request made by his leader was in the quotation from a judgment delivered by a former lord chancellor, and which was to this effect—it was delivered with the eyes of the speaker keenly fixed on those of Lord Eldon—‘A judge ought to prepare the way to a just sentence, as God useth to prepare His way, by raising valleys and taking down hills, so when there appeareth on either side a high hand, violent prosecutions, cunning advantages taken, combination, power, great counsel, then is the virtue of a judge seen to make inequality equal, that he may plant his judgment as upon an even ground.’
While the Lords were deliberating on the request for postponement, Lord Castlereagh was inveighing in the Commons against the Queen herself, for daring to refuse to yield to the wishes of parliament, and rejecting the advice to be guided by its counsel. Such rejection he interpreted as being a sort of insult which no other member of the House of Brunswick would have ventured to commit. ‘That illustrious individual,’ he said, ‘might repent the step she had taken.’ Meanwhile, the Commons suspended proceedings till the course to be decided upon by the Lords was finally taken. In the latter assembly Earl Grey made a last effort to stay the proceedings altogether, by moving that the order for the meeting of the secret committee to consider the papers in the ‘green bag’ should be discharged. The motion was lost, but an incident in the debate which arose upon it deserves to be noticed. The omission of the Queen’s name from the Liturgy had been described as the act of the King in his closet. Lord Holland now charged the Archbishop of Canterbury as the adviser of the act; but Lord Liverpool accepted the responsibility of it for himself and colleagues, as having been adopted by the King in council, at the ministerial suggestion.