A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

The Queen, meanwhile, had left Rome, where she had been staying for some time and where she complained of the want of deference shown to her by the Papal authorities. She was hurrying back to England, and had written to Brougham requesting him to meet her at Saint Omer, and there accordingly Brougham met her. Whether he was very urgent in his advice to her to accept the terms it is not easy to know; but, at all events, it is quite certain that she refused point-blank to make any concessions, that she left Brougham with positive abruptness, and hastened on her way to England. Among her most confidential advisers was Alderman Wood, the head of a great firm in the City of London, a leading man in the corporation of the City, and a member of the House of Commons. Many eminent Englishmen—among whom were Wilberforce, Canning, and Denman, afterwards Lord Chief Justice—were {6} were warm supporters of her cause, for the good reason that they sincerely believed her to be innocent of the more serious charges against her and deeply wronged by the conduct of the King. Even her most resolute enemies had to admit that whether her conduct in thus rushing back to England and forcing herself on public notice were wise or unwise, from the worldly point of view, it certainly seemed at least like the conduct of a woman proudly conscious of her own innocence, and determined to accept no compromise which might put her in the position of a pardoned sinner. The nearer she came to England the more cordial were the expressions of sympathy she received, and from the moment she landed on English shores her way to London became like a triumphal procession.

[Sidenote: 1820—The King's divorce proceedings]

In the mean time the King and his ministers had come to an agreement which was exactly what the King had struggled for from the first, an agreement that steps should be taken in the ordinary way, according to the legal conditions then existing, for the purpose of obtaining a divorce. The course to be adopted was to bring in a Divorce Bill, and endeavor to have it passed through both Houses of Parliament. The proceedings were to open in the House of Lords, and the Queen's leading defenders—for her cause was of course to be defended by counsel as in an ordinary court of law—were Brougham and Denman. The Queen's arrival in London was a signal for the most tumultuous demonstrations of popular devotion and favor towards her, and popular anger, and even fury, against all who were supposed to be her enemies. The house in which she took up her abode was constantly surrounded by vast throngs of her sympathizers, and she used to have to make her appearance at the windows at frequent intervals and bow her acknowledgments to the crowds below. Sometimes the zeal of her admirers found a different way of expressing itself, and the window-panes of many houses were broken because the residents were known to be on the side of the King and not of the Queen. Conspicuous public men who were known, or were believed, to have taken part against her were mobbed in the streets, and even the Duke {7} of Wellington himself was more than once the object of a hostile demonstration. So widely spread, so deeply penetrating was the feeling in favor of the Queen that it was said to have found its way even into the ranks of the army, and it was believed that some soldiers of regiments quartered in London itself were to be found carousing to the health of Queen Caroline. A crowd of Italian witnesses had been brought over to bear evidence against the Queen, and these foreign invaders, nearly all of humble rank, had to be sheltered in buildings specially erected for their protection in the near neighborhood of Westminster Hall, and had to be immured and guarded as if they were malefactors awaiting trial and likely to escape, in order that they might be safe from the outbreaks of popular indignation.

It told heavily for the case of the Queen, in the minds of all reasonable and impartial people, that while the King's foreign witnesses were drawn for the most part from a class of persons who might be supposed easily open to subornation and corruption, a great number of distinguished men and women came from various parts of Europe in which the Queen had resided to give evidence in her favor, and to speak highly of her character and her conduct. The manner in which the proceedings against the Queen were pressed on by the Ministry had one immediate result to their disadvantage by depriving them of the services of George Canning, then one of the most rising of European statesmen. Canning was strongly impressed with a belief in the Queen's innocence and he could not consent to become one of her formal public accusers, which he must have done were he to remain a member of the administration. Canning, therefore, after a time, gave up his place as a member of the Government, and he left the work of the prosecution, as it may be called, to be carried on by men less chivalrous and less scrupulous. It is not necessary to go at any length into the story of the proceedings before the House of Lords. These proceedings would have been made memorable, if there were nothing else to make them so, by the speeches which Brougham and {8} Denman delivered in defence of the Queen. Never perhaps in the course of history have the ears of a monarch's advisers been made to tingle by such sentences of magnificent and scathing denunciation poured out in arraignment of the monarch's personal conduct. Denman, indeed, incurred the implacable hostility of George because, in the course of his speech, he introduced a famous citation from Roman history which, although intended to tell heavily against the King, was mistakenly believed by some of the King's friends to convey a much darker and deeper imputation on the sovereign than that which was really in Denman's mind.

[Sidenote: 1821—Queen Caroline and the King's coronation]

The case may be briefly said to have broken down. In the House of Lords, where the friends of the sovereign were most powerful, there was only a majority of nine for the third reading of the Bill of Divorce, and the Bill if persevered in would yet have to encounter the House of Commons. The Government, therefore, made up their minds to abandon the proceedings, and thereupon the friends of the Queen exulted tumultuously over the victory they had won. But the struggle was not by any means at an end. The royal coronation had yet to come, and the King was anxious that the ceremonial should be got through at as early a date as possible. The Queen announced her determination to present herself on the Day of Coronation and claim her right to be crowned as Queen Consort of George the Fourth. Then the advisers on both sides went to work anew with the vain hope of bringing about something like a compromise which might save the sovereign, the Court, and the country from scandalous and tumultuous scenes. Again the Queen was offered the allowance which had been tendered to her before, on the old conditions that she would behave quietly and keep herself out of sight. Again she insisted that her name must be included in the Royal Liturgy, and again the King announced his resolve to make no such concession. Then the Queen once more made it known that her resolve was final, and that she would present herself at Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day. George had been advised {9} that all historical precedents warranted him in maintaining that the King had an absolute right to direct the forms of the ceremonial to be used on such an occasion, and he declared that he would not allow the Queen to take any part in the solemnity or even to be present during its performance. The Queen wrote letters to the King which she sent to him through his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. George sent back the letters unopened to Lord Liverpool, with the announcement that the King would read no letter addressed to him by the Queen, and would only communicate with her through the ordinary official medium of one of his ministers.

The letters thus written on both sides have long since been published, and the perusal of them will probably impress most readers with the idea of a certain sincerity on the part of both the principal writers, the King and Queen. Let us speak as harshly and as justly as we may of the King's general conduct, of his mode of living, and of the manner in which he had always treated the Queen, we shall find it hard not to believe that there was in the depth of George's mind a fixed conviction that he had real cause of complaint against his unhappy wife. Let us, on the other hand, give the fullest recognition to the fact that although the scandalous levities in the conduct of the Queen abroad told heavily against her, we are none the less compelled to admit that her letters to the King, and her demand to be included in the Coronation ceremonies, seemed to be part of the conduct of a woman who will not and cannot admit that she has done anything to forfeit her place at her husband's side.

The whole story seems now so preposterously out of keeping with all the associations of a modern Court that it startles our sense of historical credibility when we find by the actual dates that men and women are still living who might have been carried by their nurses to see the crowds round Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day of King George the Fourth. The Coronation took place on July 19, 1821, and the whole ceremony was got up in the most costly, the most gorgeous, and, as it would seem now {10} to a calm and critical reader of history, in the most theatrical style. The poor Queen did, indeed, make an attempt to take the place which she claimed in the performances at Westminster Abbey. "It was natural," says Miss Martineau, "that one so long an outcast and at length borne back into social life by the sympathies of a nation should expect too much from these sympathies and fail to stop at the right point in her demands." Miss Martineau adds, however, and her words will carry with them the feelings of every reader now, "It would have been well if the Queen had retired into silence after the grant of her annuity and the final refusal to insert her name in the Liturgy." The Queen, of course, failed to obtain an entrance to Westminster Abbey. It had been arranged by orders of the King that no one was to be allowed admission, even to look on at the ceremonial, without a ticket officially issued and properly accredited with the name of the bearer. The Queen, therefore, was allowed to pass through the crowded streets, but when she came to the doors of the Abbey the soldiers on guard asked for her ticket of admission, and of course she had none to present. Some of the friends who accompanied her indignantly asked the soldiers whether they did not recognize their Queen, the Queen of England; but the officers in command replied that their orders were strict, and the unhappy Caroline Amelia was literally turned away from the Abbey door. The King had accomplished his object.

[Sidenote: 1821—Death of Queen Caroline]

The poor woman's story comes to an end very soon. On August 2, only a few days after the Coronation, it was made known to the public that the Queen was seriously ill. She was suffering, it appears, from internal inflammation, and the anxieties, the excitements, the heart burnings, the various agonies of emotion she had lately been undergoing must have left her poorly prepared. On August 7 her condition became so alarming to those around her that it was thought right to warn her of her danger. She quietly said that she had no wish to live, that she hoped not to suffer much bodily pain in dying, but that she could leave life without the least regret. She {11} died that day, having lived more than fifty-two years. It was her singular fate, however, that even in her death, which otherwise must have brought so much relief, she became a new source of trouble to her royal husband. George had made up his mind to pay a visit after his coronation to his subjects in Ireland, to "the long cherished isle which he loved," as Byron says, "like his bride." He had got as far as Holyhead on his way when the news reached him of the Queen's illness, and he thought that it would be hardly becoming for him to make his first public appearance in Ireland at such a moment, and to run the risk, perhaps, of having his royal entrance into Dublin accompanied by the news that his Queen had just died. Then, when the news of her death did actually reach him, it was still necessary to make some little delay—joy bells and funeral bells do not ring well together—and thus George, even as a widower, found his wife still a little in the way. The remains of Caroline Amelia were carried back to her native Brunswick, and there ended her melancholy story. It is impossible not to regard this unhappy woman as the victim, in great measure, of the customs which so often compel princes and princesses to leave reciprocal love out of the conditions of marriage. "The birds which live in the air," says Webster's immortal "Duchess of Malfi,"