12
The Trial of Queen Caroline
SOME hint of Lady Holland’s irritation with her sister-in-law during Georgiana’s last days must have filtered through to Caroline, for we find her, in a letter to her brother, declaring that she would not think of coming to Holland House unless he invited her personally. Holland was quick to smooth her ruffled feathers – ‘Lady Holland feels it must appear awkward neither to see nor write to you when so near’1 – and the old familiar intercourse between the two households was gradually resumed. Caroline Fox shared many of her brother’s qualities. Like him she loved reading and, though neither a beauty nor a wit, she had acquired a poise and breadth of information from her upbringing amidst the intellectual circle surrounding her uncle, the first Lord Lansdowne, which stood her in good stead at Holland House. Her brother trusted her political judgement; from his earliest days, when travelling on his grand tour, he had been accustomed to share his views with her. Less extreme in her likes and dislikes than Lady Holland but still a fervent Foxite, she was in many ways a more reliable sounding board than his wife.
The Hollands had returned from France to new problems and divisions amongst the Whigs. The repeal of the suspension of habeas corpus in January 1818 removed one main subject of contention with the government, but the Whig attempts to oppose an Indemnity Bill, indemnifying those who had misused their powers during the suspension, were easily defeated. During the debates on the subject, noted Holland with characteristic modesty, ‘I acquired by practice more fluency in speaking than I had hitherto possessed, and got the ear of the House in a degree that placed me higher in the rank of speakers than I had hitherto aspired to be or perhaps could ever really deserve.’2
At the age of 45, Holland was growing into the role of elder statesman. He was also a benevolent figure. He was not in touch with the great changes in society which the industrial revolution was bringing about; like Fox, who confessed he could not get through Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, he was not much interested in trade or economic questions. But his hatred of injustice and oppression, perhaps born of his sufferings as a schoolboy, was a consistent theme throughout his career. His private charities were numerous, often to those of very different opinions from his own, whether French priests who had fled to England during the Revolution or impoverished radical writers like William Godwin. In Parliament he steadily pursued a liberal course. ‘It is certain,’ wrote Brougham in his Statesmen in the Time of George III, ‘that whenever any occasion arose of peril to the great cause of toleration the alarmed eye first turned to him as the refuge of the persecuted.’3
As well as supporting the Whigs’ main policies on Catholic Emancipation and electoral reform, Holland made a number of interventions of his own. His repeated petitions on behalf of debtors who were held in prison indefinitely, often in appalling conditions, did much to secure the Act of 1812 which put a limit to their punishment. He campaigned against the game laws allowing the use of lethal mantraps and spring guns against poachers, and served as commissioner when the bill to remove them went through the Lords. He moved the second reading of a bill to abolish the death penalty for stealing, a motion which failed at the time but which subsequently passed into law. During the war he protested against the government’s failure to exchange prisoners of war; in 1811, because of his ‘generous and compassionate spirit’,4 he was petitioned directly by the crew of a French ship, La Baleine, who had been prisoners for over seven years. He called for the limitation of ex officio (or government) evidence, whereby the Attorney General could hold a suspected person for an indefinite period without giving his reasons, or applying to the courts. And in 1818, when the Alien Bill, allowing political exiles to be expelled without notice, was revived, he managed to prevent the closing of a loophole – whereby, under Scottish law, foreigners who had shares in the Bank of Scotland became naturalized subjects – by prolonging the debate in the House of Lords till it was too late to include it.
Holland had a special interest in this last measure: Talleyrand’s illegitimate son, the Comte de Flahaut, Napoleon’s ADC at Waterloo, who had fled to Britain after Napoleon’s defeat, had availed himself of the Scottish anomaly to stay there. Saved from expulsion by Holland’s delaying tactics, he would be forever grateful to Holland House, where his Napoleonic connections made him a special favourite with Lady Holland. Others might find her difficult, but for Flahaut she was a guardian angel, adored for her goodness by all ‘true and generous hearts’.
Meanwhile public affairs took a dramatic new turn when, in August 1819, a mass meeting demanding electoral reform at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester was broken up by a cavalry charge, which killed 11 people and injured hundreds more. The Peterloo massacre, as it became known, was widely condemned, and the general indignation was increased when the government, within a day of receiving the news, sent a letter signed by the regent, congratulating the magistrates who had ordered it. ‘The Parliament, however, as then constituted,’ wrote Holland in his memoirs, ‘had no sympathy with the sufferers; and when convened in November passed several angry and restrictive laws without repugnance or even the formality of inquiry.’5
The laws in question were the controversial Six Acts, the most important of which forbade the publication of ‘seditious libels’ (in principle, anti-government opinions) and severely restricted the right of public assembly. The Foxite Whigs protested vigorously, but the Grenvillites, fearful of the breakdown of law and order, supported the government’s measures. The long alliance with Grenville was at an end, though Holland remained good friends with him in private. He had always admired his integrity, and quoted his uncle’s opinion of him in his memoirs. ‘I like Grenville very much,’ said Fox in 1805. ‘He is a direct man.’6
Holland had been one of the most effective speakers against the Six Acts. Public meetings, he contended, were a useful vent for popular feeling; by stifling all expressions of dissent, discontents would be driven underground, leading to the far more serious danger of secret cabals and conspiracies. How far his views were prophetic was shown only two months later, with the shocking discovery, on 24 February 1819, of the so-called Cato Street Conspiracy. Its leader, the radical speaker Arthur Thistlewood, angered and frustrated by the new laws, had plotted to murder Lord Liverpool and all his Cabinet, and set up a revolutionary regime. Thistlewood and three other plotters were hanged, the rest sentenced to transportation for life, a sufficient example, in the government’s view, to scare off other troublemakers. Cobbett had fled to the United States, other leading radicals were in prison and the Whig grandee Lord Fitzwilliam had been dismissed as a Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding in Yorkshire for allowing a public meeting in protest at Peterloo. For the time being the policy of repression seemed successful.
But other forces were at work, this time of an unexpected kind, to prove that popular opinion could not always be denied. On 30 January 1820, George III had died, after a twilight life of almost ten years. The first important question when George IV succeeded to the throne was his proposed divorce of his detested wife, Queen Caroline, on the grounds of her misconduct and adultery. The blatant hypocrisy of the charges against her, in view of his own notorious profligacy, aroused furious indignation across the country and for a moment the monarchy itself seemed threatened.
Caroline, who had been living abroad since 1814, had arrived in London to claim her rights in June and was immediately welcomed as a heroine. Having failed to buy her off with an offer of £50,000 a year to live abroad and renounce her title, the king had persuaded a reluctant government to bring divorce proceedings against her in the House of Lords. The outcry against him was terrific. The press, supposedly muzzled under the Six Acts, outdid itself in scurrility; the authorities, faced with the possibility of widespread disorder, dared not use the law against it.
The Whigs, remembering their cavalier treatment by the regent in 1811–12 were quite happy to harass the king, and Brougham, who had been out of politics for the last three years, constituted himself the queen’s great champion. Holland had been privately approached by Liverpool to ask if he would take part in a committee to examine the evidence against her. ‘I declined,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘…on private rather than public grounds, thinking my name by no means an advantageous one to be selected for a judicial inquiry on a matter connected with divorce.’7
True to this decision Holland stayed aloof from the hurly-burly of the trial, instead amusing himself as a spectator by writing nonsensical puns and epigrams on the various indecencies which occurred in the evidence, and tossing them across the table for the diversion of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon. ‘I believe,’ he wrote later, ‘I was the only Lord practised in public speaking who asked not a single question during the enquiry.’8
Despite the salacious nature of the evidence against her – in particular her relations with her equerry Bartolomeo Pergami – the injured queen would sometimes nod off during her trial. For Holland it was the excuse for an epigram:
Here her conduct no proof of the charges affords,
Like most of his fellow Whigs, he was mildly sympathetic to the queen. Lady Holland, who still hoped to be received at court, took the side of the king. This led to strained relations with her husband, as Creevey reported to his wife:
Holland set off at four in the morning for Oxford to help Lord Jersey at his county meeting [in support of Queen Caroline]. It was with the greatest difficulty my lady let him go, and he begged me not to mention it before her as it was a very sore subject.10
In the end the clamour against the bill was so great that after the third reading the government announced that it would be postponed. In the eyes of the public it was an acquittal. There was a general illumination in London (with the natural exception of Carlton House), ships on the river were lit up, and thousands of people, accompanied by bands and music, surged through the streets carrying torches and busts of the queen. Two months later, when Caroline drove to St Paul’s for a service of thanksgiving for her acquittal, the Times described the crowds as bigger than any ever seen in history.
Public opinion had triumphed but the queen’s own story would end in tragedy. Over the next few months there was a gradual reaction against her as the Tory papers moved to the attack. There were satirical songs and rhymes about her; a series of grotesque cartoons showed her gambolling with her lover, or lolling beside a pile of empty brandy bottles; even her supporters began to feel embarrassed by her indiscretions. On 29 July 1821, the day of the king’s coronation, the queen, who had announced her intention of attending the ceremony, was forcibly turned away at the door of Westminster Abbey. This last humiliation was a death blow; already unwell, she died from an inflammation of the stomach a few weeks later.
It was a sorry end to an unedifying saga. For Holland the whole affair had been a dangerous farce, which reflected no credit on anyone concerned, least of all the institution of the monarchy. But his memoirs provide an amusing coda to the story. On 21 May 1821, Napoleon died on St Helena. The news, which reached England before the queen fell ill, was announced to the king in ambiguous terms: ‘I have, sir, to congratulate you. Your greatest enemy is dead.’ ‘Is she, by God?’ the king exclaimed, thus unguardedly betraying where his real priorities lay.11
The Hollands had been spending the summer months in Paris when on 4 July an anonymous note to Lady Holland was left on their doorstep with a five-word message: ‘Le grand homme est mort.’ The official news of Napoleon’s death, which came out a few hours later, provoked surprisingly little reaction from the public at large. ‘The perfect Apathy of everyone high and low here upon such an event as Napoleon’s death astonishes and puzzles me’, wrote Lady Bessborough from Paris,
it seems to me a mixture of ingratitude and stupidity. It was cried about the streets and the affiche describing it sold with ballads and accounts of the Process, and for the most part no notice taken or even many of the papers bought. Except by Ly Holland, who closed her door one eve. & is really quite low spirited with it, no one seems to think about it.12
In his will Napoleon left Lady Holland a gold snuffbox, with an antique Greek cameo on the lid, which had been given to him by Pope Pius VI; the card inside was inscribed in his own hand: ‘L’empereur Napoléon à Lady Holland, témoignage de satisfaction et d’estime’.13 On 14 September, the day after the Hollands returned to Holland House from Paris, Bertrand and Montholon, the leaders of Napoleon’s entourage on St Helena, arrived there in full Napoleonic uniform to deliver the emperor’s gift in person.
It was a controversial legacy, and one which gave rise to much critical publicity. One Whig writer, Lord Carlisle, published a seven-verse poem in the weekly magazine John Bull, urging her to throw it in the Thames. The first verse read as follows:
Lady, reject the gift, ’tis tinged with gore
Those crimson spots a dreadful tale relate;
It has been grasp’d by an infernal power;
Byron, living in Italy, but an avid reader of the English newspapers, was quick to spring to her defence:
Lady, accept the box a hero wore
In spite of all this elegiac stuff
Let not seven stanzas written by a bore
Throughout his stay in St Helena, in order to make sure her gifts to Napoleon got through to him, Lady Holland had been in friendly correspondence with Sir Hudson Lowe. Lowe might have been forgiven for thinking that he and Lady Holland were on the best of terms. However, there had already been complaints from Montholon and others about his rigid and unsympathetic attitude to his prisoner. Among other petty restrictions, he had made a habit of holding back newspaper articles and caricatures which were favourable to Napoleon. Two months before Napoleon’s death he had written to Lady Holland apologizing to her for withholding two caricatures she had sent and hoping he had not aroused her ‘reprehension’. His motives, he explained, were humane; he did not want to excite false hopes in Napoleon by showing him the views of those who found ‘talents to admire’ in him.
Soon after his return to England Lowe came to call at Holland House. The door, which had once opened so easily, was closed to him; when he gave his name and asked for Lady Holland, he was told she was not at home. A day or two later he received a note from her:
I was in London when you were good enough to call at Holland House, but am not sorry at an opportunity of acknowledging your attentions by writing, as I confess I should have some difficulty in conversing with you on subjects connected with them, being one of that numerous class you describe in your letter of 5th March as seeing in the late great man chiefly, if not exclusively, ‘talents to admire’.16
Lady Holland had five copies of her letter made, perhaps intending to publish it. She never did so, but now Sir Hudson could no longer be of use to her, she could at least express her anger at his treatment of Napoleon by delivering a crushing snub. The unfortunate governor, conscientious and upright but totally unsuited for his near impossible task, has been badly treated by posterity. He would fare no better at Holland House.