Of course this petition was really a political pamphlet, introduced for no other purpose but the exposition of certain opinions. The Queen’s replies to the popular addresses borrowed something of the tone of this document, and were partly sarcastic, partly serious, in regretting that an impartial tribunal was not to be found on this occasion in the House of Lords.
Her Majesty now once more changed her residence from Portman Street to Brandenburgh House, the old suburban residence of the Margravine of Anspach, on the banks of the Thames, near Hammersmith, where watch and ward were nightly kept by volunteer sentinels from among some of the more enthusiastic inhabitants of the vicinity. The distance, however, was too great to enable her Majesty to repair conveniently to the House of Lords when her trial should be in progress. The widow of Sir Philip Francis had compassion upon her, and made her an offer, promptly accepted, of the widow’s mansion in St. James’s Square. It was next to that of her great enemy, Lord Castlereagh; and to reach the House of Lords she would daily have to pass Carlton House, the residence of the husband who was so blindly bent upon consigning her to infamy.
In the midst of these preparations for a great event died a princess as unfortunate as Caroline, but one who bore her trials with more wisdom. The Duchess of York, the wife of the second son of Queen Charlotte, died on Friday, the 6th of August. Her married life had been unhappy, and every day of it was a disgrace to her profligate, unprincipled, and good-tempered husband. She endured the sorrows which were of his inflicting with a silent dignity and some eccentricity. In her seclusion at Oatlands this amiable, patient, and much-loved lady passed a brief career, marked by active beneficence. Her blue eyes, fair hair, and light complexion are still favourite themes of admiration with those who have reason to gratefully remember her. A great portion of her income was expended in founding and maintaining schools, encouraging benefit societies, and relieving the poor and distressed. But her benevolence had an eccentric side, and the indulgence of it was the only indulgence she allowed herself. She loved the brute creation, and had an especial admiration for dogs. Of these she supported a perfect colony; and daily might her canine friends, of every species and in considerable numbers, be seen taking their airing in the park, often with their benevolent hostess leading the way and taking delight in witnessing their gambols. She, perhaps, was the more attached to them because she had been so harshly used by man; and a touch of misanthropy was probably the basis of her regard for animals. The progeny of her established favourites were boarded out among the villagers, and in the park was a cemetery solely devoted as the burial-ground of her quadruped friends. They rested beneath small tombstones, which bore the names, age, and characters of the canine departed. In these things may be seen the weak side of her character; but it was a weakness that might be easily pardoned. Her character had its firm, and perhaps humorous, side. She had patronised a party of strolling actors, and sent her foreign servants, who could comprehend little, to listen to the moan of Shakspeare murdered in a barn. Shortly after, an earnest and itinerant Wesleyan hired the same locality, and the Duchess ordered the household down to listen to the sermon. The foreigners among them pleaded their ignorance of the language as an excuse for not going. ‘No, no,’ said the Duchess; ‘you were ready enough to go to the play, and you shall also go to the preaching. I am going myself;’—and in the barn at Weybridge the official successor of John Wesley expounded Scripture to the lineal successor of Frederick the Great.
She had not the spirit of Caroline, and was all the happier for it. The latter, indeed, was more harshly tried, but she in some degree provoked the trial, and was now suffering the consequences of the provocation. The Queen gave a few days to retirement, in consequence of the death of the Duchess; and, this duty performed, she was again in public, working with energy and determination to accomplish the restoration of a name which had been tarnished by her own indiscretion. And indiscretion is perhaps one of the most ruinous ingredients in a character. It is a torch in the hand of the careless, firing the very garments of the bearer.
The addresses to the Queen now became greater in number and stronger in language. The replies to them also became more energetic and menacing in expression. They were still popularly ascribed to Dr. Parr, and, from whomsoever proceeding, the author very well kept in view the personage for whom and the circumstances under which he was speaking. Thus, to the deputation from Canterbury, one paragraph of the royal reply was in these words: ‘When my accusers offered to load me with wealth, on condition of depriving me of honour, my habitual disinterestedness and my conscious integrity made me spurn the golden lure. My enemies have not yet taught me that wealth is desirable when it is coupled with infamy.’ This was something of self-laudation; but in answer to the Norwich address the Queen directed attention from herself to the perils which menaced the State through her prosecution. The manner of that prosecution was described by her as ultimately threatening the vital interests of individual and general liberty. ‘The question at this moment is not merely whether the Queen shall have her rights, but whether the rights of any individual in the kingdom shall be free from violation.’ There was more dignity in this sentiment and language than in the Queen’s letter addressed to the King. Of course this epistle was not the Queen’s, but a mere manufacture, which the King, naturally enough, would not read, or at least would not acknowledge that he had read. ‘Your court became much less a scene of polished manners and of refined intercourse than of low intrigue and scurrility. Spies, bacchanalians, tale-bearers, and foul conspirators swarmed in those places which had before been the resort of sobriety, virtue, and honour.’ But the object of the letter was less to contrast the Regent’s court with that of the Queen Charlotte than to protest against the constitution of the court before which she was to be tried. In that court, she said, her accusers were her judges; the ministers who had precondemned her commanded the majority; and the husband who sought to destroy her exercised an influence there perilous to the fair award of justice. She demanded to be tried according to law: ‘You have left me nothing but my innocence,’ she remarked, ‘and you would now, by a mockery of justice, deprive me of the reputation of possessing even that.’
In the reply to the Middlesex address occurs the sole admission of blame attaching to her through indiscretion. ‘My frank and unreserved disposition may, at times, have laid my conduct open to the misrepresentations of my adversaries.’ But ‘I am what I seem, and seem what I am. I feel no fear, except it be the fear that my character be not sufficiently investigated. I challenge every inquiry. I deprecate not the most vigilant scrutiny.’ Against the method of carrying on the scrutiny she continued to protest most heartily. ‘In the bill of Pains and Penalties,’ she replied to the address from Shoreditch, ‘my adversaries first condemn me without proof, and then, with a sort of novel refinement in legislative science, proceed to inquire whether there is any proof to justify the condemnation.’ To the more directly popular mind, to the address of the artisans, for instance, she delivered an answer in which there is the following passage: ‘Who does not see that it is not owing to the wisdom of the Deity, but to the hard-heartedness of the oppressors, when the sweat of the brow during the day is followed by the tear at its close?’ This was stirring up popular opinion against the King, of whom she invariably spoke as her ‘oppressor.’ She, however, as significantly directed the public wrath against the peers in her reply to the Hammersmith address, wherein she says: ‘To have been one of the peers who, after accusing and condemning, affected to sit in judgment on Queen Caroline, will be a sure passport to the splendid notoriety of everlasting shame.’ The married ladies of London went up to her with an address of encouragement and sympathy. Her answer to this document contained an asseveration that she was not unworthy of the sympathy of English matrons. ‘I shall never sacrifice that honour,’ she observed, ‘which is the glory of a woman.... I can never be debased while I observe the great maxim of respecting myself.’ An eye-witness well remembers seeing several of these ladies (principally wives of small shopkeepers) descend from the hackney coaches in which they were conveyed to Brandenburgh House. They descended the steps as a man comes down a ladder! The Queen’s answer to them was, however, full of dignity. But her reply to the inhabitants of Greenwich had even more of the matter in it that would sink deep in the bosoms of mothers. After alluding to the period when she was living happily with her daughter, among those who were now addressing her, she added: ‘Can I ever be unmindful that it was a period when I could behold that countenance which I never beheld without vivid delight, and to hear that voice which to my fond ear was like music breathing over violets? Can I forget? No; my soul will never suffer me to forget that, when the cold remains of the beloved object were deposited in the tomb, the malice of my persecutors would not even suffer the name of the mother to be inscribed upon the coffin of her child. Of all the indignities I have experienced, this is one which, minute as it may seem, has affected me as much as all the rest. But if it were minute, it was not so to my agonising sensibility.’ But she observed in her reply to the Barnard Castle address: ‘My conscience is without a pang—and what have I to fear?’ Her Majesty at the same time seldom allowed an opportunity to escape of placing the King in, if the phrase may be allowed, a metaphorical pillory. ‘To pretend,’ she thus spoke to the Bethnal Green deputation, ‘that his Majesty is not a party, and the sole complaining party, in this great question, is to render the whole business a mere mockery. His Majesty either does or does not desire the divorce which the bill of Pains and Penalties proposes to accomplish. If his Majesty does not desire the divorce, it is certain that the State does not desire it in his stead; and if the divorce is the desire of his Majesty, his Majesty ought to seek it on the same terms as his subjects; for in a limited monarchy the law is one and the same for all.’ In the answer to the people of Sheffield the same spirit is manifested. ‘It would have been well for me,’ she exclaims, ‘and perhaps not ill for the country, if my oppressor had been as far from malice as myself; for what is it but malice of the most unmixed nature and the most unrelenting character which has infested my path and waylaid my steps during a long period of twenty-five years?’ Her complaint was, that during that quarter of a century her adversaries had treated her as if she had been insensible to the value of character. ‘For why else,’ she asks, in addressing the Reading deputation, ‘why else should they have invited me to bring it to market, and let it be estimated by gold? But—a good name is better than riches. I do not dread poverty, but I loathe turpitude, and I think death preferable to shame.’ Finally, she flattered the popular ear by placing all the authorities in the realm below that of the sovereign people. In her reply to one of the City Ward addresses occurs the assertion that, ‘If the power of king, lords, and commons is limited by the fundamental laws of the realm, their acts are not binding when they exceed those limitations. If it be asked: “What then?—are kings, lords, and commons answerable to any higher authority?” I distinctly answer, yes. “To what higher authority?” “To that of God and of the people.”’ Lord John Russell, too, told the King that the crown was held at the will and pleasure of the parliament; and the Queen, speaking on that hint, now maintained that crown and parliament were, under certain contingencies, beneath the heel of the peuple souverain.
It perplexed many of the clergy that the Princess of Wales should be continued to be prayed for up to the period of George III.’s death, but that Queen Caroline should not be named in the Liturgy after the decease of the only true friend she ever had in the royal family. One military chaplain, a Mr. Gillespie, of a Scotch Yeomanry regiment, was put under arrest for daring to invoke a blessing upon her in his extemporary prayer for the royal family; but this was the only penalty inflicted for the so-called offence.
CHAPTER X.
THE QUEEN’S TRIAL.
The Queen’s reception by the House of Lords—Royal progress to the House—The Queen’s enthusiastic reception by the populace—Their treatment of the King’s party—Marquis of Anglesea—The Duke of Wellington’s reply to them—The Attorney-General’s opening speech—Examination of Theodore Majocchi—The Queen overcome at the ingratitude of this knowing rogue—Disgusting nature of the evidence—Other witnesses examined—Mr. Brougham’s fearless defence of the Queen—Mr. Denman’s advocacy not less bold—His denunciation of the Duke of Clarence—Question of throwing up the bill entertained by Ministers—Stormy debates—Lords Grey and Grosvenor in favour of the Queen—Duke of Montrose against her—Ministerial majority—The Queen protests against the proceedings—The Ministers in a minority—The bill surrendered by Lord Liverpool—Reception of the news by the Queen—Her unspeakable grief.
The Queen’s trial, as the proceedings in the House of Lords were called, commenced on the 17th of August. ‘Now we are in for it, Mr. Denman,’ said her Majesty’s Attorney-General to her Solicitor-General. With what spirit Brougham went in for it has been left on record by Lord Denman himself, in the ‘Memoir’ edited by Sir Joseph Arnould.