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.

Radicalism and reaction

'The Friends of the People' 15 November 1792
Isaac Cruikshank caricatures the radicals,
Joseph Priestley and Thomas Paine
Public domain.

The reforming societies

January and February 1792 had seen the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the very radical Part 2 of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Over the next six months, cheap editions of Rights of Man were sold throughout the country.

The winter of 1791/2 had witnessed a new development in extra-parliamentary politics with the foundation of a series of radical reform clubs organised by working men. The membership of these clubs consisted mainly of artisans, journeymen, mechanics, small shopkeepers and tradesmen -  skilled working men rather than the very poor. The subscription rate was low - a penny a week. One of the first of these societies the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, established late in 1791, soon had more than two thousand members and was distributing copies of Part 1 of Rights of Man at 6d. each. 

The Sheffield Society’s arrangement into divisions was copied by the most famous of the working-men’s associations, the London Corresponding Society, founded by Thomas Hardy a master-shoemaker and devout Dissenter, on 25 January 1792. 

The admission test was an affirmative reply to three questions of which the most important was: 

‘Are you persuaded ... that every adult person, in possession of his reason and not incapacitated by crimes, should have a vote for a Member of Parliament?’ 

The membership fee was one shilling, followed by a penny a week. Within a fortnight 25 members were enrolled, and the sum in the Treasurer’s hand was 4s.1d.  By late 1792 it was claiming over 800 members, each committed to manhood suffrage and parliamentary reform ‘by all justifiable means’. Members were organised into 29 cells spread across London. These local divisions also functioned as adult education classes, with regular ‘readings, conversations and discussions’. 

In response to plebeian radicalism, a group of Foxite MPs formed the Society of Friends of the People in April 1792.  Its leaders included Charles Grey and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Fox, for tactical reasons, did not join. The subscription was two and a half guineas and the policy adopted was deliberately moderate - more equal representation and more frequent elections. Manhood suffrage was not on the agenda.

For the first time Scotland was widely involved in political reform. 
In July 1792 the Lord Provost of Glasgow presided over a meeting in which representations in favour of equal representation, frequent elections, and universal suffrage were adopted. Edinburgh founded its own branch of the Society of Friends of the People. 

The French Revolution: the British debate

Britain in 1789

At the time of the fall of the Bastille, Britain was preoccupied with domestic politics. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, had survived the Regency Crisis, and the Foxite Opposition were more divided than ever. With a Commons majority and the support of the king he appeared safe.

However, he did not have it all his own way. Since the Wilkite agitations of the 1760s various reforming movements - some more radical than others - had sprung up. From 1787 a campaign to give full civil rights to Dissenters by repealing the Test and Corporation Acts  had got underway. It was spearheaded by 'Rational Dissenters' (later to be called Unitarians) like the ministers, Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, together with well-to-do manufacturers, merchants, professional men, in both London and the provinces. The campaign was supported by Fox, but with the government opposed, it had no hope of getting through Parliament.

Richard Price
Dissenting Minister
National Library of Wales
Public Domain

The Anglican monopoly of political power was safe for the time being, but there was a great deal of bad feeling between the Church and the Dissenters. 

The Centenary celebrations

Many of the characteristics of 1790s politics were already in place before the French Revolution: the parliamentary duel between Pitt and Fox, provincial movements for parliamentary reform, the grievances of the Dissenters. The events of 1788 added a further ingredient when the centenary of the Glorious Revolution was celebrated with bonfires, revolution dinners, and balls. The tone of the celebrations was largely self-congratulatory, but in  towns such as Birmingham, Derby, Newcastle, Norwich and Sheffield, Whigs and Dissenters made common cause, toasting ‘Equal liberty to all mankind’ and the end of slavery. The radical Revolution Society toasted: 

‘May the dawn of liberty on the continent be soon succeeded by the bright sunshine of personal and mental freedom.’

 

The Regency crisis: or, the madness of King George

The White House at Kew, where George III became ill
(now demolished). Public Domain

The dilemmas of the Opposition

By the end of the 1780s the Prime Minister, Pitt the Younger, felt himself to be in a strong position. His economic policies were bearing fruit: the national debt had been cut and the navy improved after its poor showing in the American War. His political opponents, the Foxites, were fewer than 200 in a House of 558, and the king’s favour consolidated his position. Pitt and George III were never close but they knew they needed each other. This left the Foxites impotent in opposition, deeply loathing Pitt but powerless to hurt him. Politically they depended on the Prince of Wales and hoped desperately that the king would die

The Fitzherbert marriage

Maria Fitzherbert (1756-1837), 
by Sir JoshuaReynolds. 
Public Domain

On 15 December 1785 the prince had secretly marred the widowed Catholic Maria, Fitzherbert, whom he had met the previous year. The marriage was illegal according to three acts: the Act of Settlement (1701), the Act of Union (1707), both of which excluded a prince or princess married to a Catholic from succeeding to the throne, and to the Royal Marriages Act (1772). Though the couple initially kept separate establishments, the marriage was an open secret in London society, where they were constantly seen together. However the king and queen were ignorant of it.

George III and the politicians (3): the victory of Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger
Public Domain

The Rockingham administration

As noted briefly in the previous post, on 27 March 1782 Lord Rockingham became Prime Minister for the second time, following Lord North’s resignation and the Earl of Shelburne’s inability to form a government. After sixteen years in the political wilderness, his moment had come. Rockingham was First Lord of the Treasury, and Shelburne and Charles James Fox Secretaries of State. Shelburne was responsible for colonial affairs, Fox for foreign affairs – making him Britain's first Foreign Secretary. Burke had to content himself with the non-Cabinet job of Paymaster of the Forces. 

The new government brought in some important reforms, most notably Burke’s Civil Establishment Bill removing 134 royal household officers, twenty-two of them coming with a seat in Parliament and to restrict the Civil List to £900,000 per annum. It was a major achievement to carry this measure in the face of the court’s hostility and it helped to weaken the influence of the monarchy. 

The Rockingham government was always potentially unstable, because of the king’s hostility and because of divisions within the government. In particular, Fox and Shelburne disliked each other intensely and Fox and Rockingham believed that Shelburne was the king’s spy in the government.

Ministers quarrelled over the peace negotiations. As Foreign Secretary, Fox was negotiating a treaty with France and Spain, while Shelburne dealt with America. This proved a powerful source of conflict. Fox wished to give unconditional independence to the Americans, Shelburne wanted more favourable terms for Britain.

Matters came to a head at a cabinet meeting on 30 June when Fox gave notice that he would resign if the Americans were not granted independence unconditionally in advance of the peace treaty. This move would have put the peace negotiations squarely within his department. This might not, on its own, have led to a crisis, but the moment of decision was forced on the government by the death of Rockingham the next day.

George III and the politicians (1): John Wilkes

The new king

George III in his coronation robes
by Allan Ramsay
Public domain

George III succeeded his grandfather, George II, on 25 October 1760, aged twenty-two. Politics immediately took a new turn. George had hated his grandfather and was determined to reverse his policies. His grandfather’s ministers were invited and the proscriptions on the Tories were lifted. In one of his first public announcements, he stated that ‘he gloried in the name of Briton’ (meaning wasn't a German!) and was determined to be a ‘Patriot King’.  By this he meant that he wished to govern above party - unlike his grandfather who (he believed) had been a prisoner of the Whigs.

Since 1714 the Tories had been the opposition party. Now that they had lost this role, they seemed to lack purpose. Furthermore, there was no adult heir to the throne to be the focus of opposition to the monarch and his ministers. Faced with these new circumstances, the Tory party disintegrated. Politics became factionalised and everything depended on the King’s choice of minister. This inevitably put a new emphasis on this aspect of the royal prerogative.

The old guard gone

George III succeeded to the throne during the Seven Years’ War with France. He saw the war as his grandfather's war, and he wished to end it as quickly as possible. In 1761 Pitt the Elder, the Secretary of State, resigned from the government. In May 1762 the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, was forced to resign. George had got rid of the administration that had seen the greatest series of victories in British history. He could now be his own man. Or could he?

George III and the politicians (2): the Whig opposition

Charles James Fox,
 by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Public Domain

The movement for reform

John Wilkes was not really a radical, but his career energised those who were critical of the political system. The demand grew for shorter parliaments and a redistribution of seats away from the boroughs that could be managed by powerful patrons and towards the more ‘independent’ counties. Opposition politicians were increasingly appropriating the name ‘Whig’ and pursuing an agenda of limiting the power of the Crown. Their parliamentary leader was the Marquess of Rockingham, who had been briefly Prime Minister 1765-6. 

Edmund Burke

The Irishman, Edmund Burke, emerged as the most eloquent spokesman for the Whigs. Unlike most of his fellow-Whigs he came from a middle-class background, and this made him something of an outsider. He had come to London to study for the bar, but he wanted a political career. In July 1765 he became private secretary to Lord Rockingham. In 1766, thanks to the influence of Lord Verney, he was elected for the borough of Wendover. 

Edmund Burke,
by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Public Domain

In May 1770, with Lord North now Prime Minister, Burke published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. It was a defence of the Whigs and an attack on the growth of a court party which undermined successive ministries. In contrast to the prevailing view that party was ‘faction’, Burke saw it as the means of restoring integrity to public life because it would allow policy to be moulded by convictions and ideals:

Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joining endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle on which they are all agreed.

He also declared, in a now frequently misquoted statement: 

When bad men combine, the good men must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

In 1774 Burke was elected MP for Bristol, a freeman borough and the Empire’s second city. The Tories were in disarray, the Whigs were looking for a candidate, and Burke fitted the bill. His ‘Address to the Electors of Bristol’, delivered in November after he had been elected, expounded the now widely quoted principle of representative government. (This principle was to be tested to destruction when he fell out with his constituents over America.)

Politics, Georgian style

Karl Anton Hickel
William Pitt the Younger addressing the
House of Commons
 on the outbreak of war with France (1793)
Wikimedia Commons

The multi-volume and very comprehensive History of Parliament is now online and this post is very much indebted to its research.

'The King in Parliament'

Eighteenth-century Britain was not a democracy. Power rested with the landed elites who controlled Parliament and local government. The monarch had considerable prerogative powers. He summoned and dissolved Parliament and appointed ministers, peers and bishops. No prime minister could remain long in office without the support of the King.


However, following the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, the King could not rule without Parliament, which, after 1716 had to be summoned every seven years. He could not hold on to a Prime Minister who did not have the support of the Commons. The great mass of the public did not have the right to vote, but public opinion could not be ignored.  The press was (largely) free and the judiciary was independent. The building-blocks of democracy had been put in place. 

Local government was in the hands of the aristocracy (200 families) and the country gentry (12, 00-13, 00 families). The nobility sat in the Lords and controlled many Commons seats. The upper gentry were knights of the shire; the middling gentry were JPs. National politics was controlled by the great political families, who filled government posts and had considerable powers of patronage. 

Because the monarch retained the right to appoint ministers, no government could be stable without his approval. Stable ministers required the support of both king and Parliament. Because the Commons controlled finance and taxation, it had an ultimate sanction over ministers and the Crown.