Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  The royal match, made first in haste and then in Hanover, might just as well have begun in hell.

  First cousin to the Prince of Wales, Caroline was the second daughter of the unhappy marriage between Karl II, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and George III’s favorite sister, Augusta. Her education had been minimal, and her knowledge of English merely rudimentary, owing to her mother’s understanding that King George disapproved of marriages between first cousins. She was also brought up without any religion, as her parents figured she’d end up adopting whichever one her future husband practiced.

  More crucially, Caroline seemed, even by her parents’ admission, to be lacking the most basic elements of tact and discretion. She frequently lied, because she thought it made her conversation more entertaining. Her easygoing, lighthearted banter would have seemed impertinent in a dairy maid. She also had the unfortunate habit of blurting out whatever popped into her head and an indelicate curiosity to know everyone’s business, especially as it concerned the particulars of their love lives.

  Was it any wonder then that by the age of twenty-six she was still unmarried? Given Caroline’s lusty streak and the inability of her parents to control her behavior, it was likely, however, that she had premarital affairs. It was assumed that her trips to the countryside to distribute food and alms to the poor provided a convenient cover for romantic assignations.

  George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales had not planned to take a wife—beyond Maria Fitzherbert. It was only the sheer magnitude of his debts—which by 1794 had topped £600,000 (nearly $80 million today)—and his father’s promise to pay them on his wedding day that spurred his decision to find a suitable bride. That August, George told his father that he had “broken all connections with Mrs. Fitzherbert” and was ready to begin “a more creditable line of life” by marrying the Princess of Brunswick. His choice of words is telling.

  However, Queen Charlotte had heard enough anecdotes about Caroline’s indiscreet conduct to have formed the opinion that the young lady was a bona fide nymphomaniac, and British diplomats were also convinced that the princess was no virgin. Arthur Paget, the royal envoy in Berlin, prophetically remarked, “Such a marriage might well draw with it calamities which are unknown, or at least forgotten in England.” Another diplomat, Lord St. Helens, referred to the “stain” on Caroline’s character, stating, “We must endeavor to make the best of it, and to hush up all bad stories.”

  A popular rhyme lampooned the royal house of Hanover and the entire scheme: The King he said unto his son, You know you’re deep in

  debt, sir,

  So you must have a wife, ’tis vain to pounce and fret, sir.

  I’ll have you send to Germany to fetch a pretty cousin. . . .

  But the king was not the only person urging the prince to marry Caroline. According to the Duke of Wellington, “Lady Jersey made the marriage simply because she wished to put Mrs. Fitzherbert on the same footing with herself, and deprive her of the claim to the title of lawful wife.” So she chose a wife for her royal lover with “indelicate manners, indifferent character, and not very inviting appearance, from the hope that disgust for the wife would secure constancy for the mistress.”

  Eager to get hold of as much money as possible, and the sooner the better, George circumvented the standard diplomatic channels and sent his own emissary, Major Hislop, to Brunswick with a letter for Caroline and the request that her parents send her to England ASAP. After Hislop returned to London on November 19, 1794, with Caroline’s portrait and a packet of correspondence from the Brunswick royals, the prince informed his mother that Caroline was “in hourly and anxious expectation of being immediately sent for . . . so much so that she said if the carriage was ready at the door she would not wait for anybody to hand her into it.”

  The Earl of Malmesbury, James Harris, had already been dispatched to Brunswick that autumn, charged with bringing the princess back to England for a royal marriage. His diary entry describes her “pretty face—not expressive of softness—her figure not graceful—fine eyes—tolerable teeth, but going—fair hair and light eyebrows, good bust—short, with what the French call ‘épaules impertinentes’ [broad shoulders]. Vastly happy with her future expectations . . .”

  On December 3, the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick formally consented to the match. The marriage treaty was drawn up in English and Latin and duly executed. George’s portrait finally arrived in Brunswick and right after the marriage ceremony, with Malmesbury standing in for the groom, Caroline affixed the miniature to a ribbon, which she immediately began to wear about her neck. Her mother wrote to George, “Caroline is so happy with your picture,” adding that the young lady’s delight at their impending marriage soothed any regrets she harbored at losing a daughter.

  But the “delight” Caroline’s mother ascribed to her was tempered by a strong dose of pragmatism and self-awareness. Shortly after Malmesbury’s arrival in Brunswick, Caroline confided to an unnamed correspondent: You are aware, my friend, of my destiny. I am entering into a matrimonial alliance with my first cousin, George, Prince of Wales. His generosity I regard, and his letters bespeak a mind well-cultured and refined. Estranged from my connections, my associations, my friends, all that I hold dear and valuable, I am about to enter a permanent connection. I esteem and respect my intended husband and I hope for great kindness and attention. But, ah me! I say sometimes I cannot now love him with ardor. I am indifferent to my marriage, but not averse to it; I think I shall be happy, but I feel my joy will not be enthusiastic. . . .

  Malmesbury remained in Brunswick for several weeks, endeavoring to instill the most rudimentary basics of decorum and discretion in the twenty-six-year-old German hoyden. But tutoring the future Queen of England even on the simplest matters of attending to her toilette was rough sledding.

  In an era when nearly everyone had bad teeth, hers were worse, and Malmesbury had to introduce her to a brush and tooth powder, as well as the joys of soap and water. The earl also discovered that Caroline’s undergarments—her “coarse petticoats and shifts and thread stockings”—were not only shabby but were filthy and smelled rank, “never well washed or changed often enough.” The earl was astonished that the princess made no apology for their condition, or for her own appalling personal hygiene. And she evinced no hurry to remedy the situation until Malmesbury made a point of telling her that the prince was “very delicate” and expected “a long and very careful toilette de propreté.”

  As Malmesbury continued to lay the groundwork for the necessary taming of the shrew, he instructed Caroline “never to talk politics or allow them to be talked to her.” When she asked the earl, point-blank, about George’s purported mistress, Lady Jersey, Malmesbury advised her not to display any jealousy of her husband. If she suspected him of an infidelity, she was to feign ignorance, pretending not to notice it.

  “I am determined never to appear jealous,” Caroline assured the earl, adding, “I know the Prince is léger [light, as in, inconstant], and am prepared on this point.”

  By December 16, Malmesbury had formed the impression that Caroline “had no fond [depth], no fixed character, a light and flighty mind, but means well and well disposed; and my eternal theme to her is to think before she speaks, to recollect herself.”

  Caroline’s departure from Brunswick was scheduled for December 21. On the twentieth, the duchess received an anonymous letter, warning her that Lady Jersey would be a bad influence on Caroline and encourage her to take lovers. The duchess unwisely showed Caroline the letter. But Augusta’s bad judgment gave Malmesbury the cue he needed to instruct Caroline on the issue of adultery and how it applied to the future Queen of England. The earl warned Caroline that “anybody who presumed to love her was guilty of high treason and punished with death, if she was weak enough to listen to him; so also was she. This startled her.”

  On December 29, 1794, Caroline finally set out from her father’s palace. “How can I be otherwise than happy?” she rhetoricall
y asked Malmesbury. “Am I not going to be married to the finest and handsomest prince in the world and live in the most desirable country in Europe?”

  Meanwhile, in that “most desirable country,” the wedding plans were proceeding apace as George’s debts continued to mount. Four bridesmaids were selected, since that had been the number of attendants at the last wedding of a Prince of Wales. But their gowns couldn’t be made up until the bride’s garments were chosen. George declared a preference for royal robes over court dress, but his mind wasn’t on the ceremony. Before Caroline’s arrival he expressed the fervent desire to serve in the army, begging his father to make him a general. After ignoring his son’s requests, the king politely told his heir that he would be “most happy” to see him seriously turning his thoughts to a martial career, but steered him toward a marital one instead, adding, “May the Princess Caroline’s character prove so pleasing to you that your mind may be engrossed with domestic felicity . . . and that a numerous progeny may be the result of this union, which will be a comfort to me in the decline of my years.”

  War and weather prevented a speedy journey, and Caroline didn’t reach England until Easter Sunday—April 5, 1795. Later that day, in the Duke of Cumberland’s rooms at St. James’s Palace, the prince and princess met for the first time. Neither one made a good first impression on the other. Caroline had just arrived from Greenwich, where Lady Jersey—who was to be Caroline’s Lady of the Bedchamber—had deliberately delayed the arrival of the welcome party by dallying with her toilette. Then she sabotaged the naïve German princess by telling her that her attractive blue and white ensemble wasn’t sufficiently fashionable, urging Caroline to don a white satin frock and green mantle festooned with gold trim that made her look dumpier. Telling her she looked too pale, Lady Jersey also persuaded the princess to apply more rouge, thereby obscuring her delicately formed features and clear complexion. Satisfied that Caroline looked sufficiently fat and coarse, Lady Jersey assured her she was ready to meet her future husband.

  At St. James’s, in accordance with the protocol she had struggled to absorb, Caroline curtsied deeply to George, a florid-faced, heavy-set dandy with powdered ringlets. According to Malmesbury, “He raised her (gracefully enough) and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round [and] returned to a distant part of the apartment.”

  This retreat was followed by the now-famous request for brandy.

  Was it Caroline’s looks—her plump, squat, no-necked figure and oversized head—or her body odor that had repulsed the Prince of Wales? Malmesbury had cautioned the princess to wash herself thoroughly all over.

  That night, Caroline’s first in London, was an unmitigated disaster. She was hurt that Lady Jersey was present at their dinner table—seated right between her and George—and aimed a few pointed barbs at her, implying that she knew perfectly well that her ladyship was the prince’s mistress. She then began asking impertinent questions about the prince’s other long-standing inamorata, Maria Fitzherbert.

  Years later, Caroline told Lady Charlotte Campbell, “The first moment I saw my futur and Lady Jersey together, I know how it all was, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, very well!’ I could be the slave of a man I love; but one whom I love not, and who did not love me, impossible—c’est autre chose.”

  Over the next few days, as the wedding approached, the monarchs subtly offered their heir an “out.” Her Majesty drew the prince aside and told him, “You know, George, it is for you to say whether you can marry the Princess or not.”

  The king (whose erratic and often bizarre behavior had led to the diagnosis of “madness” during the 1780s) grew uneasy as well. He admitted to his wife, in what may have been his most lucid moment of the decade, that he would accept the responsibility for breaking off what might be a disastrous match. Although his second thoughts were short-lived, he deputized one of George’s younger brothers, the Duke of Clarence, to watch the Prince of Wales at all hours in case he did something stupid or ill-advised.

  At the London gentlemen’s clubs, the betting books were full of wagers as to whether the royal wedding would actually take place.

  But His Royal Highness was dreaming of a clean credit report; as distasteful as things were, he was not about to back out. Caroline, too, was ever the pugnacious Brunswicker. She didn’t care for the thirty-two-year-old prince any more than he did for her, but she was duty- and honor-bound to hold her head high and see it through. She knew the prize was not George—it was the Queen of England’s crown.

  Caroline and George—who had started drinking steadily three days earlier—were married in the hot, stuffy, and remarkably ill-illumined Chapel Royal on the evening of April 8, 1795. Clad in silver tissue lace festooned with ribbons and bows and a robe of ermine-lined velvet, the dumpy flaxen-haired bride glittered with diamonds and grinned from ear to ear, almost bursting with happiness. In contrast, the podgy, piss-drunk groom, who had made it down the aisle literally supported by two unmarried dukes, wept through the ceremony when he wasn’t ogling Lady Jersey. At one point, the prince rose to his feet in the middle of the service, looking as though he was about to bolt.

  But the most potentially embarrassing hitch came when the archbishop set down the book after asking whether “any person” knew “of a lawful impediment.” The air was thick with tension. Would someone mention Mrs. Fitzherbert? The archbishop looked long and hard from the prince to the king and back again. The chapel remained silent and the ceremony continued.

  At the Drawing Room that the monarchs hosted for guests who were not invited to the wedding ceremony, Lady Maria Stuart thought “the Prince looked like death and full of confusion, as if he wished to hide himself from the looks of the whole world. I think he is much to be pitied. . . .” Caroline, however, whom the guests thought had a pretty face, “though with too much rouge,” was in high spirits. And even if the groom wanted nothing to do with her, she did have a few champions within the royal family. George’s sister Elizabeth found Caroline to have an “open character” and “perfect good temper,” telling him, “I flatter myself that you will have her turn out a very comfortable little wife.”

  On their wedding night, through a haze of brandy, the prince must have gritted his teeth and thought of £600,000, fantasizing about all the improvements he could now make to Carlton House. Caroline was mortified, humiliated, and disgusted by his behavior. She confided to Lady Charlotte Campbell, “Judge what it was to have a drunken husband on one’s wedding day, and one who passed the greatest part of his bridal night under the grate, where he fell, and where I left him.”

  Both of the newlyweds were miserable. According to Lord Minto, “It appears that they lived together two or three weeks at first, but not at all afterwards as man and wife.”

  Lord Albemarle wrote in his memoirs, “From the day that this poor princess landed in England she became fully aware that she was beset by persons of her own sex who looked upon her as a rival, and who endeavored to make her an object of disgust to her husband.” George’s intimates would play tricks on Caroline, informing her that such a thing was all the fashion in England, or that George particularly admired it. In a rush to please him, she accepted their chicanery as gospel, and ended up appalling her husband instead of enticing him.

  Caroline’s gaucheries and jarring sense of humor were a perpetual embarrassment to the prince. And he could not disguise his physical revulsion, telling Lord Minto in March 1796, “Finding that I had suspicions of her not being new, she the next night mixed up some tooth powder and water, colored her shift with it and . . . in showing these she showed at the same time such marks of filth both in the fore and hind part of her . . . that she turned my stomach and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again. I had known her three times—twice the first and once the second night—it required no small [effort] to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person.”

  Miraculously, however, during one of George’s three drunken and disappointing performances in the bedroom
, he had gotten Caroline pregnant. No one was more surprised than she was, given the brief and unhappy saga of their sex life. The princess confided as much to Lady Charlotte Bury, indicating that she hadn’t thought her husband capable of it. George never forgave her for that insult.

  On January 17, 1796, after a terrible labor lasting more than twelve hours, Caroline gave birth (to George’s disgust and disappointment) to “an immense girl,” Princess Charlotte. The succession now secured, the kingdom rejoiced. Fortunately for George, times had changed since the Renaissance. Although there was nothing in English law that prevented a female from inheriting the throne, the fact that the kingdom had metamorphosed from a near autocracy to a constitutional monarchy mooted the preference for a male heir who could lead his troops into battle and bully any rebellious subjects into submission.

  With the possible exception of Caroline, who adored children, the Prince of Wales was more thrilled than anyone by the birth of his heir. His duty done, he assured Malmesbury that “the child just born . . . certainly will be the last as I declare I can never approach her again, for she never washes or wipes any part of her body.” A few days later, after being seized with one of his dramatic panic attacks, George made out his will, bequeathing everything, including Carlton House and the Pavilion at Brighton, to Maria Fitzherbert. He left the care of his infant daughter “to the king, my father,” adding that “the mother of this child” was to have no hand whatsoever in Charlotte’s upbringing, “For though I forgive the falsehood and treachery of her conduct towards me, still the convincing and repeated proofs I have received of her entire want of judgment and of feeling, make me deem it incumbent upon me . . . to prevent by all means possible the child’s falling into such improper and bad hands as hers.”

  Although he displayed no intention of being a decent husband, there were some aspects of fatherhood that brought George joy. It gave him pleasure to draw up the rules for the nursery. Staff were required to exercise the utmost discretion, never repeating to anyone what went on inside Carlton House; and Caroline was permitted to see her baby for only a brief time every day.