From the start, however, Princess Caroline had the support of the public, which had scant regard for a prince whose reputation was already low. As the veteran politician Lord Melbourne explained years later to a curious young Queen Victoria, ‘whatever she did, had no weight with the people, for, they said, it was all his fault at first … The way in which he treated her immediately after the marriage was beyond everything wrong and foolish. Considering the way he lived himself … he should never have attacked her character.’10
The marriage of the Prince of Wales took place against a background of political upheaval and unrest, and the actions of the prince and princess thus inevitably acquired a political resonance in the country, as Melbourne was aware. Although George sided increasingly with the anti-Jacobin government, and thus with his father’s political stance, he was still castigated in cartoons and the press, while Caroline was taken up as a figurehead for populist anger against a corrupt governing class.
In a larger context also, the discord within the prince’s marriage was mirrored in the instability of the wider world. The long wars with France and its allies formed the background to the drama of his marriage, to George III’s recurring illness and finally to the Regency in 1811. The first round of hostilities was well under way by the time Britain joined the Austrians and Prussians fighting France in 1793, and the wars soon grew into a struggle for supremacy that spread beyond Europe into Africa and the Americas. After ten years of fighting there was a brief pause for breath, but the conflict resumed, and carried on until the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the subsequent dismembering of the Napoleonic empire and the restoration of Europe’s royal families. The wars were a rumbling threat to the stability of the British state and monarchy. It was a threat that came and went, and it was exploited for repressive purposes, especially in the 1790s, by Pitt’s regime; but it was only conclusively ended in 1815.
Apart from triggering this long, draining conflict, the triumph of republicanism in France had its echoes in small republican and anti-monarchical movements in Britain and in demands in Ireland for the establishment of a sovereign, independent republic. In Britain, groups that demanded and debated democratic change, such as the London Corresponding Society and its provincial branches, were targeted by spies and increasingly shut down by legislation that criminalized seditious meetings and publications. In Ireland, the Society of United Irishmen, an ecumenical republican society, was forced underground by 1794. Thereafter it turned away from attempts to reform the relationship between Ireland and Britain and became an armed movement for independence that eventually exploded in the unsuccessful Irish Rebellion of 1798 and had its consequence in the union with Great Britain in 1801.
Despite this febrile political atmosphere, in which monarchists and the Pitt government consolidated their power by legislative and draconian means, the British economy flourished until war really took its toll in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Demands for greater democracy and for other radical and evangelical causes such as the end of the slave trade, universal male suffrage and the rights of women went hand in hand with enormous economic expansion. Growth was particularly evident in London, in port cities such as Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, and in the industrial heartlands of Birmingham, Manchester, Yorkshire and the Potteries. It was fuelled by fast technical innovation, infrastructural investments in road and canal building and huge amounts of money from imperial exploitation and expanding markets. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the populations of Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and the Yorkshire mill towns grew extremely quickly. Wealth from the empire, particularly the Caribbean and India, fuelled a building boom in British cities and on large country estates. The face, the manners, the economy and the temper of the nation were also all changing fast, and would change again in the economic and industrial crisis after Waterloo that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.
In the years between the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1762 and the beginning of his reign as George IV in 1820, the British Empire expanded dramatically. In 1757 the East India Company’s victory at the Battle of Plassey began the violent and lucrative subordination of India. Soon afterwards the French and Dutch were all but run out of the subcontinent, leaving it open to British domination. This triumph was underlined by the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years War and finally delivered France’s North American holdings into British hands. The loss of the American colonies in 1783 was a setback to Britain’s imperial ambition, but this reverse was cancelled out by new gains in India and the Far East. With the exception of China, Britain was by the 1820s the fastest-growing and most commercially successful nation in the world.
This staggering change was surely the concern of the Prince of Wales, and must have repeatedly come into his official business. Yet the prince’s surviving correspondence shows little interest in the commercial or intellectual issues of the day, with the notable exception of Catholic emancipation. In the decade after his marriage, the wars with France, in which several of his brothers were involved, and upon which the survival of the monarchy depended, did of course impinge upon him, as did the possibility of political change. He followed the progress of the wars, and his brothers’ movements, but neither his correspondence nor the recollections of those who knew him suggest that his interests went much beyond the day-to-day. Although his archive is necessarily incomplete and much personal correspondence must be lost or is unavailable, George’s published letters contain little evidence that he read anything much in philosophy, in the growing and fashionable area of political economy, in arguments for or against the slave trade, or in any other subject that commanded intellectual attention.
The exception was Catholic emancipation. The topic was a litmus test of progressive opinion in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, a cornerstone of Foxite Whig philosophy and a personal issue for the prince, because Maria Fitzherbert was a devout and practising Catholic. In 1797, two months after the French government had managed to send a fleet to Ireland in an abortive invasion attempt, the prince wrote a long memo to William Pitt, proposing that all ‘restriction and disqualification’ be immediately removed from Irish Catholics in order to bind them to the British government and split the Irish republican movement.11
Although such a proposal did not amount to a demand for emancipation for British Catholics, since Ireland was until 1801 a separate, vassal, state, it conceded a principle that might be applied on the other side of the Irish Sea. The prince followed this sensible, if unworkable, suggestion with another one that was far less sensible: a declaration of his own ‘wish and readiness to undertake the Government of Ireland, great and arduous as the task appears under the present circumstances’.12 Pitt prudently declined to engage with this, or with the barrage of documents that followed it, simply passing everything on to the king. He was confident the king would do his job for him, and he was not mistaken. George III gave the proposal short shrift, both as a matter of principle, and because it came from his son. Reporting this to the prince’s envoy, Pitt added with lofty disdain: ‘his Majesty could not help apprehending that his Royal Highness suffering his name to be mixed in any discussions respecting political questions in that country was not likely to be productive of any beneficial effect.’13 At this time of threat to the crown and the government both on the mainland and in Ireland, the prince had no public role to play, and this both his father and the prime minister were happy to point out.
Nine months almost to the day after the Prince and Princess of Wales were married, on 7 January 1796, Caroline gave birth to ‘an immense girl’, as the prince put it.14 She was named Charlotte, and the king and queen were delighted. George III, congratulating his son, added pointedly: ‘You are both young and I trust will have many children, and this newcomer will equally call for the protection of its parents and consequently be a bond of additional union.’15 The prince, though, was far from thinking about additional union: his dynastic duty
accomplished, he had no intention of adding to his family, or spending any time in his wife’s company, let alone ever sleeping with her again.
The prince put this to his wife and at first Caroline agreed with the idea. George wrote to her on 30 April confirming that he would never, ‘even in the event of an accident happening to my daughter … infringe the terms of the restriction by proposing, at any period, a connexion of a more particular nature’.16 But the truce did not last long. Caroline soon became sad, then rebellious. The prince became petty, then vindictive. He demanded a separation. A slanging match broke out that continued for a year.
The king at first refused to grant a separation. He told the prince that his marriage was not a mere private affair, but a ‘public act’, in which Parliament and the country were concerned.17 The public was certainly not on the prince’s side, and Parliament might take money for the princess out of her husband’s Civil List income. While this threat might have delayed the outcome, it did not stop it. In the summer of 1797, Caroline was allowed to remove herself to a villa at Blackheath, and, temporarily at least, take Princess Charlotte with her.
As soon as his daughter was born, the prince’s thoughts turned back to Mrs Fitzherbert. It was Maria who was ‘the beloved & adored wife of my heart & soul’, and he wanted her back.18 Lady Jersey was eventually despatched, and the prince concentrated on bringing Mrs Fitzherbert round in the same way that he had at the beginning of their relationship, bombarding her with letters, emissaries and gifts, including a bracelet engraved with the words ‘Rejoindre ou mourir’.19 By the summer of 1799, Mrs Fitzherbert was so worn down that she agreed to consult the pope on the status of her marriage. The answer was favourable: in the eyes of the Catholic Church she and the prince were man and wife. The prince was delighted, declaring Catholicism the ‘only religion for a gentleman’.20 By the summer of 1800 the two were decisively back together, Mrs Fitzherbert making a public declaration of her reinstatement with a party in the gardens of her house with bands, marquees and entertainment from early afternoon until daylight the next day.21
This new phase of the relationship lasted until 1807, when the prince took up with Lady Hertford, and his long dependence on Maria Fitzherbert began to fray, ending in a final separation two years later. Despite George’s reported dalliances with a dancer, Louise Hillisberg, with the notorious and successful courtesan Harriette Wilson and with two Frenchwomen, the Countess of Massereene and a certain Madame de Meyer, and despite the births of several natural children, his relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert was for the most part tranquil and happy. These years – when his spending continued unabated and domestic happiness took the edge off the prince’s multiple grievances and his lack of anything to give him public purpose – brought out his best qualities: his kindness, charm, generosity and sense of fun.
Much time was spent at Brighton, where the Marine Pavilion, originally designed by Henry Holland, was expanded over the years by Holland’s assistant Peter Frederick Robinson. A grand new house was built for Mrs Fitzherbert close by, rumoured to be connected to the Pavilion by an underground passage. The pace of life when the prince was in Brighton was relaxed, with long, excellent dinners, singing, late rising and sauntering on the Steine, as the seafront was called. The prince drank less during these years, or at least he was not so often blind drunk, though his size grew relentlessly. Mrs Fitzherbert also filled out, though she remained attractive, despite an ill-fitting set of false teeth.
After years of fear for the survival of the European monarchies, and his consequent support of repressive measures and Pitt’s government, the prince’s preference for the lackadaisical and fun-loving over the tense and austere gradually returned. It helped that after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the fortunes of war turned against the French. Old Whig friends, such as the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord and Lady Holland, and young ones such as Thomas Creevey, became social fixtures again. When William Pitt died of alcoholism in 1806 and the so-called Ministry of all the Talents was formed, with Lord Grenville as prime minister, several of the prince’s Whig friends, including Lord Grey, Lord Fitzwilliam and the Earl of Moira, as well as Fox himself, came into office.
The happy political situation was very short-lived, however. Fox died in September the same year. The ministry managed to pass the bill for the abolition of the slave trade that Fox had proposed to the House, which became law in 1807, but further reform proved impossible. George III refused to sanction a proposal to allow Roman Catholics to serve in the militia, a precursor for the looming debate on Catholic emancipation, and the prince did nothing to stop the government’s subsequent collapse and fall, despite the presence of his friends. He told Lord Moira that he had ‘ceased to be a party man’ with Fox’s death, but the truth was that, though he might continue to see Whigs as friends, he had been spooked by the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI.22 By 1807 he had little left politically in common with his Whig friends, and would progressively abandon even his formerly staunch support for Catholic emancipation.
In Brighton, and at times in Carlton House, the prince forgot all this. He delighted in sociable visitors and particularly in children. In the autumn of 1800, Mrs Fitzherbert began to take care of a toddler, Mary Seymour, whose ailing mother, Lady Horatia Seymour, had been advised to leave Britain for the warmth of Madeira, where she died in July 1801. Her husband died a few weeks afterwards, leaving Mary, or Minny as she was always called, an orphan in Mrs Fitzherbert’s care.
Minny was a lively and charming child and quickly became the daughter that Mrs Fitzherbert had never had. The prince was also devoted to her, and not only showered her with presents, but loved having her about, sitting her on his knee and chatting cheerfully to her. Everything continued harmoniously until 1804, when Minny’s Seymour relatives began to object to the arrangement and demanded that she be returned to their care, as her father’s will had implicitly stipulated. Mrs Fitzherbert was distraught. The prince declared that Minny’s dying mother had asked him to be ‘the father and protector through life, of this dear child’.23 Her relatives denied any knowledge of this.
The case soon went to court, and Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, found in the family’s favour. Thomas Erskine, Mrs Fitzherbert’s lawyer, advocated an appeal to the House of Lords, and, handily, had himself become Lord Chancellor by the time the appeal was heard. The prince and Mrs Fitzherbert also had the support of Minny’s uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Hertford, who proposed to take on the guardianship of their niece provided that they were allowed to do as they felt best for her. George canvassed the Lords energetically and a large majority found against the Seymours and in the Hertfords’ favour. Not surprisingly, Lord and Lady Hertford immediately asked Mrs Fitzherbert to continue to care for their niece, an outcome that may have been rigged but ensured that Minny stayed happily where she was.
The commitment the Prince of Wales showed towards Minny Seymour was in growing contrast to his thinning relationship with his own daughter, Princess Charlotte, which was never free from shadows cast by the quarrels with his wife and his father. From the age of nine, Princess Charlotte lived at Warwick House, an unpretentious London townhouse across a narrow lane from Carlton House, going to Blackheath to see her mother, Windsor to see her grandparents and Weymouth with the royal party in the summer. She was an intelligent and chatty girl, surrounded by the adults who looked after and taught her, but bereft of company her own age. She spoke and read early. At eighteen months, she exclaimed cheerfully after her hair was cut, ‘it all gone.’ Each night at bedtime she declared, ‘Bless papa, mama, Charlotte & friends’, and a year later had mastered ‘God Save the King’ and the patriotic song ‘Hearts of Oak’.24
Princess Charlotte’s education turned out to be patchy, despite a rigorous programme drawn up for it. She developed a good knowledge of British history and liked novels, music, fun and pranks. She was an excellent linguist, although her German was poor, which distressed her grandmother, who would hav
e liked to continue the family tradition of speaking German in private. Despite her physical proximity to her father, she saw little of him, and he rarely invited her to Carlton House, especially if, as happened increasingly as the years went on, he considered that she was showing a preference for her mother. Indeed, Princess Charlotte’s childhood was dominated by the quarrel between the Prince and Princess of Wales, and when she began to show signs of independence, anger and unpredictable moods, the prince became convinced that she had inherited these characteristics from his wife, and neglected her because of it.
The king, however, doted on his granddaughter, and, as part of his own quarrel with his son, often invited her to visit him and the queen, sometimes pointedly extending the invitation to the Princess of Wales. Thus the maelstrom of family disunity and dislike whirled ever faster. The Princess of Wales tried to shore up her position by staying close to the king. The king, delighted by babies and seeking a role in the upbringing of the future queen, pointedly met the Princess of Wales and Princess Charlotte when the Prince of Wales wasn’t there. The queen inevitably sided with the king, though she disliked the Princess of Wales and tried to remain on some sort of terms with her son. The Prince of Wales felt isolated by his parents, enraged with his wife and increasingly detached from his daughter.
After Princess Charlotte was removed from her care in August 1797, Princess Caroline adopted several foundlings and orphans from around Blackheath and placed them with local women who brought them in the daytime to her home at Montague House. ‘[I]t is my only amusement,’ she said, ‘and [they are] the only little creature[s] to which I can really attach myself.’ She frankly admitted her loneliness, saying that she adopted the children because ‘every Body must love something in this world’.25
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