The trial began on Aug. 17; and Creevey thus describes the entry of the Queen. “To describe to you her appearance and manner is far beyond my powers. I had been taught to believe she was as much improved in looks as in dignity of manners; it is therefore with much pain I am obliged to observe that the nearest resemblance I can recollect to this much injured lady is a toy which you used to call Fanny Royde. There is another toy of a rabbit or a cat, whose tail you squeeze under its body, and then out it jumps in half a minute off the ground into the air. The first of these toys you must suppose to represent the person of the Queen; the latter the manner by which she popped all at once into the House, made a duck at the throne, another to the Peers, and a concluding jump into the chair which was placed for her. Lady Ann Hamilton was behind the Queen, leaning on her brother Archy’s arm.... She is full six feet high and bears a striking resemblance to one of Lord Derby’s great deer.”
Brougham and Denman both spoke for the Queen, and she was better received on the next day, the 18th. Creevey went off to his club and wrote: “Nothing can be more triumphant for the Queen than this day altogether.... The Law Officers of the Crown are damnably overweighted by Brougham and Denman.” The next day the facts adduced by the Attorney General made things look bad. A less numerous and reputable crowd appeared to cheer the Queen on the 22d. “Now,” writes Creevey, “her danger begins.” But then things began to mend; the witness in whom the prosecution had most confidence was a certain Teodoro Majocchi. Brougham forced him to contradict himself, and seeing how he was being driven into admissions, the witness continually replied, Non mi ricordo, “I don’t remember,” a phrase which became for a time proverbial. There were very few English witnesses, but when Creevey, on Aug. 25, mentioned this to the Duke of Wellington, his Grace replied, “Ho! but we have a great many English witnesses—officers.” “And this was the thing,” writes Creevey, “which frightened me most.” On the 26th the evidence of a chambermaid gave trouble, and Creevey is angry with the Queen. “This,” to quote him, “gives considerable—indeed very great advantage—to the case of that eternal fool, to call her (the Queen) no worse name.” A few days later, Sept. 8, he calls her “the idiot.”—The next day the House adjourned till the 3d October, and the divorce clause was dropped. Creevey remarks that now the Bill of Pains and Penalties was really directed against the King: its object being “to declare the Queen an abandoned woman, and the King a fit associate for her!” When the House sat on Oct. 3, Mr. Brougham made his great speech for the defence. On the 6th it came out that the husband of the Queen’s friend, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, had sold his wife’s letters to the Treasury. On the 9th Creevey reports “the town literally drunk with joy at the unparalleled triumph of the Queen.” But at 4 P.M. the weather changed. Two Naval officers, Flynn and Hownam, were called for the defence, and broke down under cross examination, so that the Queen’s guilt became almost certain. Then the government lost its advantage by committing the mistake of letting a witness, who was to have been indicted for perjury, leave the country. On the 13th the Duke of Norfolk wrote to Creevey, saying that “if this horrible bill” passed, he would feel no regret that as a Roman Catholic he could not take his seat as a Peer. At last, on Oct. 24, the trial was nearing its end and Denman began to sum up. The attack he made on the King and the Duke of Clarence, who had been especially bitter against the Queen, is a striking example of the freedom allowed to a British advocate. He compared the case to the dismissal of the virtuous Octavia by Nero and the examination of her servants by his infamous minister, Tigellinus.
He looked at the Duke of Clarence and declared that he ought to come forward as a witness and not whisper slanders against Caroline. The Queen, he said, might well exclaim, “Come forth, thou slanderer, and let me see thy face! If thou would’st equal the respectability of an Italian witness, come forth and depose in open court. As thou art, thou art worse than an Italian assassin! Because, while I am boldly and manfully meeting my accusers, thou art plunging a dagger unseen into my bosom.”
In his peroration Denman made a most unlucky slip, but he faithfully reproduced the irrational attitude of public opinion.[28] The people believed the Queen guilty and yet desired her acquittal. She had suffered so cruelly, she had been so shamefully treated, her ruin had been sought by employing spies against her, her accusers were worse than she. So Denman quoted the divine words to less guilty accusers of a sinful woman—“Go and sin no more,”—whereupon a wag wrote:
“Most gracious Queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more;
But if that effort be too great,
To go away, at any rate.”
Then followed the debate, and on the 6th of November, even with the aid of eleven of the bishops, there was a majority of only 28 in favour of the Bill of Pains and Penalties. The feeling of the peers was in accordance with Denman’s peroration. Caroline was guilty but ought not to be punished. Said Lord Ellenborough: “No man who had heard the evidence would say that the Queen of England was not the last woman in the country which a man of honour would wish his wife to resemble, or the father of a family would recommend as an example to his daughters.” (Loud cheers.) But he voted against the bill. On Nov. 8 it was proposed that the divorce clause should be tacked on to the bill. Creevey writes (Nov. 10): “Three times three! if you please, before you read a word further.—The Bill has gone, thank God! to the devil. Their majority was brought down to 9 ... and then the dolorous Liverpool came forward and struck. He moved that his own bill be read this day six months.” “I was a bad boy,” he writes next morning, “and drank an extra bottle of claret with Foley, Dundas, etc.” I need not tell the rest of poor Caroline’s story, how public feeling calmed down, especially when Parliament voted her £50,000 ($250,000) a year. How she tried to attend the Coronation, how she died, and the King ordered the body not to be taken through London, and how the people rose and forced the funeral procession to pass through the city, how at last she found rest among her ancestors in her native Brunswick. Time will not permit me to do more than allude to George’s visit to Ireland at the very time his injured wife was dying, and his speech: “This is one of the happiest days of my life. I have long wished to visit you. My heart has always been Irish. Go and do by me as I shall do by you. Go and drink my health in a bumper. I shall drink all yours in a bumper of Irish whiskey.”
Well might Byron celebrate the occasion of the Irish visit and the King’s tumultuous welcome: