A copy of the bill was delivered to the Queen by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. She received it not without emotion, and this was sufficiently great to give a confused tone to her observations on this occasion. Had the bill, she said, been presented to her a quarter of a century earlier, it might have served the King’s purpose better. She added that, as she should never meet her husband again in this world, she hoped, at least, to do so in the next, where certainly justice would be rendered her.
To the Lords she sent a message expressive of her indignant surprise that the bill should assume her as guilty simply upon the report of a committee before whom not a single witness had been examined. Her friends continued to harass the government. In the Commons, Sir Ronald Ferguson attempted, though unsuccessfully, to obtain information as to the authority for the organising of the Milan commission for examining spies. That commission, he intimated, originated with the vice-chancellor, Sir John Leach, and had cost the country between thirty and forty thousand pounds, for one half of which sum, he added, Italian witnesses might be procured who would blast the character of every man and woman in England.
The feeling against Italians did not require to be excited. Those who arrived at Dover to furnish evidence against the Queen were very roughly treated; and so fearful were the ministers that something worse might happen to them, that they were, after various changes of residence in London, transferred to Holland, much to the disgust of the Dutch, before they were finally cloistered up in Cotton Garden, at hand to furnish the testimony, for the bringing of which they received very liberal recompense.
Meanwhile, Dr. Parr, in ponderous sermons, exhorted her Majesty not to despise the chastening of the Lord; and the Queen’s devout deportment at divine service was cited by zealous advocates as evidence in favour of her general propriety.
Indeed the Queen had no more zealous champion than the almost octogenarian Parr. On the fly-leaf of the Prayer-book in the reading-desk of his parish church at Hatton he entered (and one can hardly say of Dr. Parr’s act on this occasion dispar sibi) a stringent protest against the oppression to which she had been subjected; adding a conviction entertained by him of her complete innocence, and expressing a determination, although forbidden to pray for her by name, to add a prayer for her mentally, after uttering the words in the Liturgy, ‘all the Royal family.’ In his heart the stout old man prayed fervently; nor did he confine himself to such service. A friend, knowing his opinions, his admiration of the Queen, and the friendly feelings which had long mutually existed between them, earnestly begged of him not to interfere in her affairs at this conjuncture. Dr. Parr answered the request by immediately ordering his trunk to be packed, and by proceeding to London, where he entered on the office of her Majesty’s chaplain, procured the nomination of the Rev. M. Fellowes to the same office, and in conjunction with him, and often alone, wrote those royal replies to popular addresses which are remarkable for their force, and for the ability with which they are made to metaphorically scourge the King, without appearing to treat him with discourtesy.
There was as much zeal, and perhaps more discretion, in those impartial peers who, on occasion of Lord Liverpool moving the second reading of the Bill for the 17th of August, insisted on the undoubted right of the Queen, as an accused party, to be made acquainted with the names of the witnesses who had come over to charge her with infamy. Lord Erskine was particularly urgent and impressive on this point, but all to no purpose, except the extracting an assurance from Lord Chancellor Eldon that the accused should have, at a fitting season, a proper opportunity to sift the character of every witness as far as possible. Lord Erskine repeatedly endeavoured to obtain the full measure of justice for the accused which he demanded. The Queen herself entered a hearty protest against the legal oppression, and further begged by petition that, as the names of the witnesses against her were withheld, she might at least be furnished with a specification of the times and places, when and where she was said to have acted improperly. The request was characterised by Lord Eldon as ‘perfectly absurd,’ seeing that the Queen could make no use of the information, if she intended, as declared by her, to defend her case at the early period named, of the 17th of August. The reply was harsh, insulting, and illogical.
But to harshness and insult she became inured by daily experience. It may be safely said that, if such a drama had to be enacted in our own days, the press would certainly not distinguish itself now exactly as it did then. Party spirit might be as strong, but there would be more refinement in the expression of it. And assuredly, not even a provincial paper would say of a person before trial as a Western journal said of the Queen—that she was as much given to drunkenness as to other vices, and that it was ridiculous to hold up as an innocent victim a woman who, ‘if found on our pavement, would be committed to Bridewell and whipped.’
But ministers themselves were not on a bed of roses. They were exceedingly embarrassed by the Queen’s announcement that she intended to be present every day in the House of Lords during the progress of what was now properly called ‘The Queen’s Trial.’ Their anger, too, was excited at the sharp philippics against them inserted in her Majesty’s replies to the addresses presented to her. In those replies the passages complained of wounded more than those against whom they were pointed; and the authors of them had, no doubt, some mirth over sentences intended to spoil it in the breasts of ministers charged with rebelliously seeking to dethrone their lawful Queen. The royal replies, too, were equally, but not so directly, severe against those former counsellors and advocates of her Majesty who were now arrayed on the side of her Majesty’s enemy. These replies were, of course, not censured by the ministerial opponents in either House of Parliament. The addresses which called them forth, however, did not escape reproach from this quarter. Lord John Russell, in a letter to Mr. Wilberforce, does not indeed go so far as reproach. He says: ‘I regret, though I cannot severely blame, the language of many of the addresses that have been presented to the Queen.’
Lord John acknowledged the political nullity of the Whigs at this time, but he held that the Wilberforce party in the Commons were sufficiently powerful to have successfully resisted the scandal which the Government had brought upon the kingdom. ‘In your hands, sir,’ he says, ‘is perhaps the fate of this country. The future historian will ask whether it was right to risk the welfare of England—her boasted constitution, her national power—on the event of an inquiry into the conduct of the Princess of Wales in her villa upon the Lake of Como? From the majority which followed you in the House of Commons, he will conclude you had the power to prevent the die being thrown. He will ask if you wanted the inclination.’
To this letter Lord John Russell appended a form of petition to the King, which may not uncourteously be termed the petition of the powerless Whig statesman. This petition smartly and smartingly complimented his Majesty upon his liberality in offering to allow his Queen fifty thousand a year, and to introduce her to a foreign court, at a time when he pretended to know that she was, allegedly, perfectly worthless, as woman, wife, and mother. With the domestic broils of King and Queen Lord John would not interfere; but, the King having made of them an affair of state, the ‘humble petition’ informs his Majesty that he has been exceedingly ill-advised. With excellent spirit does Lord John place upon record his abhorrence of enacting laws to suit a solitary case—laws ‘which at once create the offence, regulate the proof, decide upon the evidence, and invent the punishment.’ He asks if the Queen will escape from justice in the event of the bill not passing? Are the ministers afraid lest she may so defraud justice?—why, ‘that the Queen has not fled from justice is not only the admission, but forms one of the chief charges, of her prosecutors.’ Her prosecution, then, will not serve the State. Can the revelation of her alleged iniquity at Como or Athens serve or influence public morals in England? What is the situation of the Queen? asks Lord John, who thus replies to his own query: ‘Separated from her husband during the first year of her marriage, she has been forced out of that circle of domestic affections which alone are able to keep a wife holy and safe from evil. For the period to which the accusation extends she has been also removed from the control of public opinion—the next remaining check the world can afford on female behaviour.’ Lord John perhaps makes a low estimate of female virtue when he thus concludes that women cease to be ‘holy and safe from evil’ when they cease to have a share in domestic affections or to be controlled by public opinion. There is more sly humour in what follows than there is of correctness in the noble lord’s estimation of female virtue. The drawer-up of the petition reminds the King that what most distresses him is ‘the uncrowning a royal head without necessity. We see much to alarm us in the example, nothing to console us in the immediate benefit.’ Not, says the petitioner, slyly, that we do not recognise the right of parliament to alter the succession to the crown. ‘None respect more than we do the Act of Settlement which took away the crown from its hereditary successors and gave it to the House of Brunswick;’ and, as the writer alludes to the possibility of the new subject of strife bringing the country to the verge of a civil war, he of course intimates that parliament may again be called upon to regulate the succession. The sum of the petition is to let the Queen alone. ‘From her future conduct your Majesty and the nation will be enabled to judge whether the reports from Milan were well founded, or whether they were the offspring of curiosity and malice.’ The prayer of the petition, therefore, is that parliament be prorogued, and ‘thus end all proceedings against the Queen.’