A family at war: (3) the Queen Caroline affair

Queen Caroline in 1820
National Gallery of Scotland
Public domain

The Milan Commission

In the period after Charlotte's death, Caroline remained in Italy, increasingly under Pergami's influence. From the Regent's perspective, the death of their daughter opened up the possibility that he could divorce Caroline by Act of Parliament - provided he could find the evidence of adultery - and possibly remarry. 

In 1818 he appointed a commission of three persons, William Cooke, a barrister, J. A. Powell, a solicitor, and Major J. H. Browne, who spoke some Italian, to go to Milan and gather evidence against Caroline. In July 1819 they reported that there was conclusive evidence of adultery, but the government disagreed, believing it was not strong enough to be irrefutable. However, their evidence was to form the basis of the subsequent accusations against Caroline.

The return to England

On the death of George III and the accession of the Regent as George IV on 29 January 1820, Caroline’s name was omitted from the prayers for the royal family in the Anglican Prayer Book. She decided to return to England to claim her rights. Before she set sail she received at St Omer a letter on behalf of the king in which it was proposed to allow her £50,000 per annum on condition that she lived abroad and never visited England. But she turned it down and on 5 June 1820 she sailed from Calais. At Dover she was received with a royal salute, and the crowd was so immense that she had to take temporary refuge in the York Hotel. At Canterbury a hundred torches were lit for her and 10,000 people awaited her. At Gravesend people drew her carriage through the town. At Shooters Hill the radical pamphleteer, William Cobbett was awaiting her with a laurel bough. 

William Cobbett, radical pamphleteer
and defender of the Queen
Public domain

On her arrival in London she went to the house of her friend, the radical MP Alderman Wood, in South Audley Street. Shortly afterwards, she appointed the lawyer, Thomas Denman, as her defence council. Meanwhile the mob rampaged around her house, householders were forced to light up, and the Home Secretary’s windows were broken.

A family a war: (2) The Regent, his wife and daughter

Princess Charlotte of Wales
by George Dawe, 1817
Museum of New Zealand
Public domain

'The Regent's Valentine'

With George III’s final descent into madness, Caroline, Princess of Wales, lost her most powerful protector, her father-in-law. In February 1811 her husband became Regent, though with restricted powers. Caroline did not share his dignity, and she was pointedly excluded from a dinner at Carlton House for the exiled French royal family in June. In October 1812 she went to Windsor to visit her daughter but was denied access. There may have been a good reason for this. Charlotte later reported that on one occasion Caroline had locked her and a suitor in a bedroom, saying, ‘I leave you to amuse yourselves’.

With the coming of the Regency, Princess Charlotte was more under her father’s power than ever. But she was the undisputed heiress presumptive to the throne. At the age of 15 she had strong likes and dislikes and strong political opinions.

On 17 January 1812 the Regency restrictions expired and the Regent now had full power to appoint and dismiss his ministers. It had been expected that he would dismiss Spencer Perceval’s Tory government and bring in the Whig opposition, but to the dismay of his supporters, he kept them on. Princess Charlotte, a staunch Whig, ran weeping from a dinner at Carlton House and was later praised for her action by Lord Byron in his poem 'To a Lady Weeping'.


With the Regent now supporting the Tories, Caroline turned to the Whigs. Her case was taken up by the ambitious Whig lawyer and politician, Henry Brougham.  On 12 January 1813 he wrote a letter of remonstrance for her to send to the Regent, which he refused to open. The letter, popularly known as ‘The Regent’s Valentine’, was published in the Whig paper, the Morning Chronicle, on 10 February, and the result was a wave of sympathy for Caroline. The matter was debated by the Privy Council, who concluded that the Regent was the best judge of how his daughter should be educated and whom she should meet.  In an attempt to enhance her case, Caroline ordered the details of the Delicate Investigation to be published. The scandalous details of her indiscreet behaviour should have lost her public sympathy, but they did not.

A family at war: (1) The Brunswick marriage

Caroline of Brunswick (1804)
by Sir Thomas Lawrence
Public domain

One of the best accounts of the troubled lives of the later Hanoverians is found in Janice Hadlow's The Strangest Family. The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians (William Collins, 2014). You can read a review here. For Caroline, I have consulted Flora Fraser's The Unruly Queen. The Life of Queen Caroline (Papermac, 1996). If you want to explore the documents created by the royal family, you can see those that have already been digitized here.

George III and his family

 In September 1761 George III, newly ascended to the throne, married the eighteen-year-old German princess, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Between 1762 and 1783 the couple produced fifteen children and all but two survived infancy, the eldest being George, Prince of Wales.

Queen Charlotte, by Benjamin West
Yale Center for British Art
Public domain

Although George had previously been in love with Lady Sarah Lennox and had desperately wanted to marry her, he did not regret his choice of Charlotte, and until his descent into madness, his marriage was a success. This was just as well, as the Hanoverian kings faced two restrictions in their choice of wives:

1. Because of the Act of Settlement of 1701, the spouse of the monarch had to be a Protestant. 
2. Although four of Henry VIII's wives had been English subjects, this option was not available for George III. He was also Elector of Hanover and Hanoverian law did not allow marriage to commoners. 

These two restrictions meant, in practice that the wives of the Hanoverian kings all came from Germany. Before 1806 'Germany' meant one of the three hundred states that made up the Holy Roman Empire.

The prince's debts

In 1783 the Prince of Wales came of age. This meant that he was allowed to set up his own household, and after much haggling Parliament voted him £62,000 per annum. This money was quickly spent in the prince's extravagant life-style and his two great building projects, Carlton House on the Mall and the Pavilion at Brighton. Over the years the debts mounted and by 1794 they had reached crisis point; William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Prime Minister, noted that they now stood at £552,000 and would take twenty-five years to clear. By this time Britain was at war, and funds were short. Parliament would only grant George a new allowance if he married: his many brothers had failed to produce legitimate children and the country wanted an heir.