Lives of the Queens of England of the House of Hanover, volume 2 (of 2)

The secret committee charged with examining the documents in the sealed bags made their report early in July. This report was to the effect that the documents contained allegations, supported by the concurrent testimony of witnesses of various grades in life, which deeply affected the honour of the Queen, charging her, as they did, with a ‘continued series of conduct highly unbecoming her Majesty’s rank and station, and of the most licentious character.’ The committee reluctantly recommended that the matter should become the subject of solemn inquiry by legislative proceeding.

The ministers postponed any explanation as to the course to be adopted by them upon this report until the following day. The Queen exhibited no symptoms of being daunted by it. She appeared in public on the evening of the day on which the report was delivered, and, if cheers could attest her innocence, the vox populi would have done it that night. As the Queen’s carriage was passing in the vicinity of Kensington Gate it encountered that bearing the Princess Sophia. The two cousins passed each other without exchanging a sign of recognition, and the doughty livery servants of the Princess showed that they had adopted the prejudices or convictions of their portion of the royal family by refusing obedience to the commands of the mob, which had ordered them to uncover as they passed in presence of the Queen.

On Wednesday, the 5th of July, Lord Liverpool brought in the ever-famous Bill of Pains and Penalties, a bill of degradation and divorce. Lord Liverpool had previously protested against a divorce. Why he now turned to a still more dangerous expedient he explains in a letter inserted in his Memoirs. ‘In the case of a private individual the question of divorce is a question of personal relief. The law of man, not the law of God, says properly in this case, we will not give you the relief unless by your conduct you are entitled to it. But the King does not, and cannot, apply for relief as an individual; his accusation is a public accusation, resting on public grounds. Adultery in a Queen is a crime against the State. The private offence is merged in the public crime, and must follow the effect of it. How is it possible to entertain a charge of recrimination against a King, who in the eye of the law can do no wrong?’

The Queen demanded, by petition, to be furnished with the specific charges brought against her, and to be heard by her counsel in support of that demand. The House refused, and Lord Liverpool went on with his Bill.

The Queen again interfered by petition, requesting to have the nature of the charges against her distinctly stated, and to be heard in support of her request by counsel. These requests were negatived. Lord Liverpool then, in introducing the bill, did his utmost to save the King from being unfavourably contrasted in his character of complainant with the Queen in that of defendant. He alleged that their Majesties were not before the House as individuals. The parties concerned were the Queen as accused party and the State! The question to be considered was whether, supposing the allegations to be substantiated, impunity was to be extended to guilt, or justice be permitted to triumph. The bill he thus introduced noticed the various acts of indiscretion which have been already recorded. These were the familiarity which existed between herself and her courier, whom she had ennobled, and in honour of whom she had unauthorisedly founded an order of chivalry, of which he had been appointed grand master. The bill further accused her of most scandalous, vicious, and disgraceful conduct ‘with the said Bergami,’ but was silent as to time and place. The document concluded by proposing that Caroline Amelia Elizabeth should be ‘deprived of her rank, rights, and privileges as Queen, and that her marriage with the King be dissolved and disannulled to all intents and purposes.’ The bill, in short, pronounced her infamous. It was the penalty which she paid for the exercise of much indiscretion. Earl Grey complained of the want of specification, and asserted her Majesty’s right to be furnished with the names of witnesses. Lord Liverpool, however, treated the assertion as folly, and the claim made as unprecedented and inexpedient.

A copy of the bill was delivered to the Queen by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. She received it not without emotion, and this was sufficiently great to give a confused tone to her observations on this occasion. Had the bill, she said, been presented to her a quarter of a century earlier, it might have served the King’s purpose better. She added that, as she should never meet her husband again in this world, she hoped, at least, to do so in the next, where certainly justice would be rendered her.

To the Lords she sent a message expressive of her indignant surprise that the bill should assume her as guilty simply upon the report of a committee before whom not a single witness had been examined. Her friends continued to harass the government. In the Commons, Sir Ronald Ferguson attempted, though unsuccessfully, to obtain information as to the authority for the organising of the Milan commission for examining spies. That commission, he intimated, originated with the vice-chancellor, Sir John Leach, and had cost the country between thirty and forty thousand pounds, for one half of which sum, he added, Italian witnesses might be procured who would blast the character of every man and woman in England.

The feeling against Italians did not require to be excited. Those who arrived at Dover to furnish evidence against the Queen were very roughly treated; and so fearful were the ministers that something worse might happen to them, that they were, after various changes of residence in London, transferred to Holland, much to the disgust of the Dutch, before they were finally cloistered up in Cotton Garden, at hand to furnish the testimony, for the bringing of which they received very liberal recompense.

Meanwhile, Dr. Parr, in ponderous sermons, exhorted her Majesty not to despise the chastening of the Lord; and the Queen’s devout deportment at divine service was cited by zealous advocates as evidence in favour of her general propriety.

Indeed the Queen had no more zealous champion than the almost octogenarian Parr. On the fly-leaf of the Prayer-book in the reading-desk of his parish church at Hatton he entered (and one can hardly say of Dr. Parr’s act on this occasion dispar sibi) a stringent protest against the oppression to which she had been subjected; adding a conviction entertained by him of her complete innocence, and expressing a determination, although forbidden to pray for her by name, to add a prayer for her mentally, after uttering the words in the Liturgy, ‘all the Royal family.’ In his heart the stout old man prayed fervently; nor did he confine himself to such service. A friend, knowing his opinions, his admiration of the Queen, and the friendly feelings which had long mutually existed between them, earnestly begged of him not to interfere in her affairs at this conjuncture. Dr. Parr answered the request by immediately ordering his trunk to be packed, and by proceeding to London, where he entered on the office of her Majesty’s chaplain, procured the nomination of the Rev. M. Fellowes to the same office, and in conjunction with him, and often alone, wrote those royal replies to popular addresses which are remarkable for their force, and for the ability with which they are made to metaphorically scourge the King, without appearing to treat him with discourtesy.

There was as much zeal, and perhaps more discretion, in those impartial peers who, on occasion of Lord Liverpool moving the second reading of the Bill for the 17th of August, insisted on the undoubted right of the Queen, as an accused party, to be made acquainted with the names of the witnesses who had come over to charge her with infamy. Lord Erskine was particularly urgent and impressive on this point, but all to no purpose, except the extracting an assurance from Lord Chancellor Eldon that the accused should have, at a fitting season, a proper opportunity to sift the character of every witness as far as possible. Lord Erskine repeatedly endeavoured to obtain the full measure of justice for the accused which he demanded. The Queen herself entered a hearty protest against the legal oppression, and further begged by petition that, as the names of the witnesses against her were withheld, she might at least be furnished with a specification of the times and places, when and where she was said to have acted improperly. The request was characterised by Lord Eldon as ‘perfectly absurd,’ seeing that the Queen could make no use of the information, if she intended, as declared by her, to defend her case at the early period named, of the 17th of August. The reply was harsh, insulting, and illogical.

But to harshness and insult she became inured by daily experience. It may be safely said that, if such a drama had to be enacted in our own days, the press would certainly not distinguish itself now exactly as it did then. Party spirit might be as strong, but there would be more refinement in the expression of it. And assuredly, not even a provincial paper would say of a person before trial as a Western journal said of the Queen—that she was as much given to drunkenness as to other vices, and that it was ridiculous to hold up as an innocent victim a woman who, ‘if found on our pavement, would be committed to Bridewell and whipped.’

But ministers themselves were not on a bed of roses. They were exceedingly embarrassed by the Queen’s announcement that she intended to be present every day in the House of Lords during the progress of what was now properly called ‘The Queen’s Trial.’ Their anger, too, was excited at the sharp philippics against them inserted in her Majesty’s replies to the addresses presented to her. In those replies the passages complained of wounded more than those against whom they were pointed; and the authors of them had, no doubt, some mirth over sentences intended to spoil it in the breasts of ministers charged with rebelliously seeking to dethrone their lawful Queen. The royal replies, too, were equally, but not so directly, severe against those former counsellors and advocates of her Majesty who were now arrayed on the side of her Majesty’s enemy. These replies were, of course, not censured by the ministerial opponents in either House of Parliament. The addresses which called them forth, however, did not escape reproach from this quarter. Lord John Russell, in a letter to Mr. Wilberforce, does not indeed go so far as reproach. He says: ‘I regret, though I cannot severely blame, the language of many of the addresses that have been presented to the Queen.’

Lord John acknowledged the political nullity of the Whigs at this time, but he held that the Wilberforce party in the Commons were sufficiently powerful to have successfully resisted the scandal which the Government had brought upon the kingdom. ‘In your hands, sir,’ he says, ‘is perhaps the fate of this country. The future historian will ask whether it was right to risk the welfare of England—her boasted constitution, her national power—on the event of an inquiry into the conduct of the Princess of Wales in her villa upon the Lake of Como? From the majority which followed you in the House of Commons, he will conclude you had the power to prevent the die being thrown. He will ask if you wanted the inclination.’

To this letter Lord John Russell appended a form of petition to the King, which may not uncourteously be termed the petition of the powerless Whig statesman. This petition smartly and smartingly complimented his Majesty upon his liberality in offering to allow his Queen fifty thousand a year, and to introduce her to a foreign court, at a time when he pretended to know that she was, allegedly, perfectly worthless, as woman, wife, and mother. With the domestic broils of King and Queen Lord John would not interfere; but, the King having made of them an affair of state, the ‘humble petition’ informs his Majesty that he has been exceedingly ill-advised. With excellent spirit does Lord John place upon record his abhorrence of enacting laws to suit a solitary case—laws ‘which at once create the offence, regulate the proof, decide upon the evidence, and invent the punishment.’ He asks if the Queen will escape from justice in the event of the bill not passing? Are the ministers afraid lest she may so defraud justice?—why, ‘that the Queen has not fled from justice is not only the admission, but forms one of the chief charges, of her prosecutors.’ Her prosecution, then, will not serve the State. Can the revelation of her alleged iniquity at Como or Athens serve or influence public morals in England? What is the situation of the Queen? asks Lord John, who thus replies to his own query: ‘Separated from her husband during the first year of her marriage, she has been forced out of that circle of domestic affections which alone are able to keep a wife holy and safe from evil. For the period to which the accusation extends she has been also removed from the control of public opinion—the next remaining check the world can afford on female behaviour.’ Lord John perhaps makes a low estimate of female virtue when he thus concludes that women cease to be ‘holy and safe from evil’ when they cease to have a share in domestic affections or to be controlled by public opinion. There is more sly humour in what follows than there is of correctness in the noble lord’s estimation of female virtue. The drawer-up of the petition reminds the King that what most distresses him is ‘the uncrowning a royal head without necessity. We see much to alarm us in the example, nothing to console us in the immediate benefit.’ Not, says the petitioner, slyly, that we do not recognise the right of parliament to alter the succession to the crown. ‘None respect more than we do the Act of Settlement which took away the crown from its hereditary successors and gave it to the House of Brunswick;’ and, as the writer alludes to the possibility of the new subject of strife bringing the country to the verge of a civil war, he of course intimates that parliament may again be called upon to regulate the succession. The sum of the petition is to let the Queen alone. ‘From her future conduct your Majesty and the nation will be enabled to judge whether the reports from Milan were well founded, or whether they were the offspring of curiosity and malice.’ The prayer of the petition, therefore, is that parliament be prorogued, and ‘thus end all proceedings against the Queen.’

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.