LORA FRASER, the heiress apparent of the Pakenham dynasty of historians after industrious research, with access to the Royal Archives at Windsor, has written an enthrallingly intimate, drily witty biography of Caroline of Brunswick.
At a time when almost every week brings further embarrassment to the incumbent Prince and Princess of Wales, further exacerbating the republican cynicism of an increasing number of his putative future subjects, this account of past royal scandals resonates with present relevance.
Caroline's loveless arranged marriage to the Prince of Wales/Prince Regent/King George IV was unhappy from the start. Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick Wolfenbuttle, born in Brunswick in Northern Germany in 1768, was "a true Hanoverian", Fraser writes, "with protuberant eyes, loose mouth and long face". Hanoverian genes are persistently influential on the appearance of some members of the House of Windsor to this day. Women with horsy faces cannot be described accurately as pretty, even before middle age. Furthermore, contemporaries of Princess Caroline observed that her hair was straw coloured, she had white eyelashes, her neck was short and her figure was dumpy.
Her biographer fairly cites a favourably dissenting view expressed by one Comte Mirabeau. When "politicking between Berlin and Brunswick", he described Caroline at the age of eighteen as "most amiable, lively, playful, witty and handsome". However, a sample of her table talk gives an impression of the uncouthness which offended many who encountered her later.
The count, evidently not always diplomatic, "records the Princess interrupting his conversation with her father, who was asking for a definition of time and space. `Time' observed the Princess, looking round at an elderly lady of the Court, `is in Madame de Bode's face, and space in her mouth'."
Lord Malmesbury was sent to Germany to escort Caroline to England. During a two month delay in Hanover, he "felt himself impelled to give the Princess some very frank instructions about her washing habits. He confessed himself amazed how much on this point her education had been neglected
George, Prince of Wales, six years Caroline's senior, was 32 when his bride to be, was first presented to him. According to Fraser, he was "blessed with a fine intelligence, abundant fair hair, florid good looks although he was inclined to fat and great charm of manner".
His charm was in abeyance on the occasion of that first encounter. As Malmesbury had advised her, she attempted to kneel to the Prince. "He raised her (gracefully enough)," Malmesbury later recalled, "and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and calling me to him, said, `Harris I am not well pray get me a glass of brandy.'"
When Malmesbury recommended water instead, the Prince said he was going to see the Queen. Thus so quickly abandoned for the first time, Caroline said to Malmesbury, in French "My God is the Prince always like that? I find him very gross, and nothing like as handsome as his portrait." The Prince complained to his mother that the Princess smelled bad. Royal relationships, like plebeian ones, can founder on shortcomings of personal hygiene and courtesy.
Observing the ill starred couple on their wedding day, the Duke of Leeds said there was little conversation between them in the procession from the Chapel Royal to the reception in St James's Palace. He noted "coolness and indifference apparent in the manner of the Prince to his amiable bride". The Princess confided to a lady in waiting that the Prince was drunk on the day and night of the wedding, and "she was also to hint most indelicately to the politician and diplomat (sic) Lord Minto that the Prince was impotent". Minto in turn wrote to his wife "I take it that the ground of his antipathy was his own incapacity, and the distaste which a man feels for a woman who knows his defects and humiliations."
There was an almost immediate separation. The Prince reverted to Mrs Maria Fitzherbert, with whom he was still connected by a famously unsecret secret Anglican marriage. At the same time he also "continued in thrall to Lady Jersey", one of a series of mistresses.
Barred from the Regent's court, Caroline went into exile and recruited her own entourage of changing personnel, including an Italian lover, as she wandered from country to country on the Continent. Partly as a result of her banishment, she tended towards Whiggish radicalism (is it true that Princess Diana is veering towards Tony Blair?). She gained popularity with the Whigs' parliamentary and public supporters.
The journalists and cartoonists of the period exposed royal misbehaviour in articles and cartoons that would make the present editors of London's most scurrilous tabloids blush. Not even Rupert Murdoch's anti royalist newspapers would dare publish cartoons like some of those by Cruiksbank, Gill ray and Rowland son. Fraser publishes some lurid examples of their work, in colour, in her wickedly entertaining book.
The Prince Regent acceded to the throne in 1820. He cruelly kept Caroline from attending her own coronation. She died the next year.
The Royal family's self indulgence was notoriously extravagant at the beginning of the 19th century. George and Caroline each received a Civil List annual income equivalent in purchasing power to £1,500,000 now, for which they evidently did nothing to contribute to the well being of the nation. The survival of the British monarchy at that time seems miraculous. Nobody then could say, well, it brings in the tourists.