July 1960
This book begins with a brief account of the Prince Regent’s affair and secret marriage with Maria Fitzherbert. Nine years later George III’s first bout of insanity, and the Prince’s enormous debts which it was not thought that Parliament would discharge unless he made a suitable marriage to ensure the succession, precipitated this necessity. His parents had each a niece who were possible candidates, and for reasons unknown - or for none at all - the Prince determined upon Caroline of Brunswick the elder and plainer of the two and his father’s relation.
The offer of marriage was made when Caroline was twenty-six, ‘florid, gauche, stocky and over-dressed’, but ‘vastly happy with her future expectations’, Lord Malmesbury, who was sent to fetch her, did his best to knock a little discretion into her, but when she had a tooth extracted and sent to him, he may well have despaired as he thought it ‘nasty and indelicate’. From the moment that the Prince set eyes upon her he began to hate her; he was in tears during the wedding ceremony, and according to Caroline, spent the first night dead drunk upon the floor. However, nine months all but a day from the date of the wedding. Princess Charlotte was born of this union; a few months later the Prince formally signified his desire for an immediate separation, and Caroline moved from Carlton House to Blackheath. Such was her conduct there that a Delicate Investigation was ordered by the King to inquire into the embarrassing possibility of one of Caroline’s ‘adopted children’ in fact being her own natural child. The Investigation, while it did not condemn her on this major point, uncovered so much unbecoming behaviour that she was grudgingly absolved and moved to Kensington Palace.
Here, insulted and humiliated in every direction, granted the minimum access to her own daughter and absolutely forbidden any communication with her husband, she at length decided to go abroad. She had spent twenty years in England, repressed and ridiculed, and she had neither the intelligence nor dignity to improve or to endure her horrible situation. When she returned to England six years later as Queen of England, it was to face a trial for adultery with her Italian courtier which it was intended should result in her divorce and dispossession of all her rights as Queen: the trial lasted fifty-two days, split the country and was finally abandoned, but not before her already tattered reputation had been publicly shredded. She died barely a month after the Coronation from which she was turned away, and chose for the inscription on her coffin ‘The Injured Queen of England’.
Miss Richardson, whose life of Bernhardt I very much enjoyed last year, has tackled this difficult subject with skill and exactly the right kind of detachment, portraying Caroline as pathetic and unprepossessing in equal degrees, so that one sees her as the victim of her - to put it mildly - natural irresponsibility. (Two of her brothers were imbecile, but one supposes that in view of her uncle, George III’s, condition, mental instability was not an excuse for her that the Royal Family were in a position to make: had it been, she might have been more kindly treated, and the appalling unnecessity of the squalid and wearisome trial might have been avoided.) It seems to me to be an accomplished, fair and extremely readable work, and the most remarkable illustration of folies de rigeur that I have encountered.