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.


On the following day the king sent a message to the Lords accompanied by the evidence of the Milan Commission. A committee was appointed and on 5 July the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool promised the introduction of

‘a bill entitled an Act to deprive her Majesty Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, of the Title, prerogatives, Rights, Privileges and Exemptions of Queen Consort of this Realm, and to dissolve the Marriage between his Majesty and the said Caroline Amelia Elizabeth’.

The Queen was clearly being used by her supporters. Brougham was advancing his career.  Radical MPs were venting their frustrations over the lack of movement for parliamentary reform. The mob were suffering from the trade depression that followed the ending of the Napoleonic wars. As William Cobbett said, they did not care whether the queen was guilty or not - but they were against the king and the government. One commentator said

‘Caroline was an injured wife, although I could not doubt that she was a depraved woman’.

Caroline with Pergami
Victoria and Albert Museum
Museum number: S.51-2008

The trial

Caroline was tried by her peers in Westminster Hall, amid heavy police precautions. The proceedings began on 17 August 1820. On 19 August the Attorney General began his speech, tracing the queen’s Italian adventures. On 21 August the questioning of witnesses began in the Lords. The Queen was defended by Brougham, who questioned the Italian witness, the Queen’s former servant, Teodoro Majocchi, so aggressively that he was reduced to ‘Non mi ricordo',  eighty times, which rapidly became a catchphrase. She was accused of having committed adultery with Pergami in November 1814 - the evidence was the imprints of two bodies on the bed. On the voyage back from the Holy Land, she slept alone with Pergami under a tent on board, and he alone was present when she bathed below decks. All this was reported in the newspapers.

The Queen and Pergami share a bath
according to Majocchi's evidence
Public domain

On 3 October the defence began. Brougham’s argument in essence was that the queen was a defenceless woman who had been forced to flee abroad and had been pursued by malice and slander: it would be monstrous to ruin the honour of an English queen on the basis of mere tittle-tattle. 

On 6 November the Lords divided on the second reading of the bill: contents 123, non-contents 95; a majority for the bill of only 28. On the third reading the majority was only 9 (108/99). The evenness of the vote convinced the government that the nation was too divided for them to able to proceed. On 10 November Liverpool suddenly announced that further consideration of the bill should be adjourned for six months. The queen’s friends claimed that this was a triumphal acquittal, and Brougham’s defence of the queen raised him to the summit of his profession. As the queen left the Lords, she was greeted by tumultuous crowds. For five nights the chief cities in Britain were illuminated.

Caroline then demanded full rights as a monarch. On 30 November she went in state to St Paul’s Hammersmith to return public thanks for her acquittal. One banner had ‘The Queen’s Guards are the People’. Civic authorities accompanied her in procession. Addresses continued to pour in.

The coronation and Caroline's death

By the time the king was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 19 July 1821, a great deal of public opinion had swung behind the king. The queen presented herself for admission but she was firmly repulsed and was mocked by the crowd. Sir Walter Scott declared that the queen’s cause was

‘a fire of straw which has not burned to the very embers’.

She was taken ill at Drury Lane theatre on the night of 30 July and died on the night of 7 August, possibly from a gastro-intestinal tumour. Her funeral was as disorderly as her life, and in the skirmishes two men were killed. She was buried in her native Brunswick and was quickly forgotten. The demonstrations at her funeral were the last manifestation of mass radical political action until 1830.

Tomb of Queen Caroline,
St Blasius Cathedral, Baunsweig.
Lower Saxony

Significance

The Queen Caroline affair came at a pivotal moment. Politically it occurred when memories of the Peterloo massacre and the Cato Street conspiracy were fresh in the public mind. It was a tense time and political passions were easily aroused.

1. Loyalists rallied to the king and condemned the queen in the strongest terms, galvanising the most significant loyalist reaction for a decade. Their mouthpiece was the often scurrilous newspaper, John Bull. In 1820 new and more aggressive loyalist groups sprang up. Orange lodges were on the increase in England and the Constitutional Association was instituted to prosecute radicals.
2. The queen’s cause was taken up by the radicals. William Cobbett wrote: ‘the fact is that the Queen’s cause naturally aligns itself with that of the Radicals. They are complainants, and so is the Queen’. 
3. The affair brought sexual relations into political life to an unprecedented degree. Radicals focused much on their propaganda on the plight of Caroline as a wronged wife denied her rights. It coincided with a new emphasis on domesticity and family values.