Why Kill the Innocent

by C. S. Harris

  “She was an extraordinary person—steadfast, loving, and brave.”

  “Yes,” said Hero. “Yes, she was.”

  Author’s Note

  T he Frost Fair of 1814 was the last Frost Fair held on the Thames. It came at the culmination of a horrid winter that included what was known as the Great Fog. Smothering London from late December to early January, the fog was followed by days of massive snowfall that buried the entire Kingdom and then weeks more of freezing temperatures and continuing snow. Food and coal in the city became scarce and prohibitively expensive, and many of London’s poorest died. In late January, ice floating down from the upper reaches of the river became caught between London Bridge and Blackfriars; eventually the remaining open water froze, and the people of the city took to the ice for a Frost Fair that lasted until the fifth of February. Then a shift in the wind and warming temperatures led the ice to break up rather suddenly, carrying off booths and people. The exact number killed was never determined since most of the bodies were never recovered. There had been other Frost Fairs on the Thames down through the ages, but with the removal of the old narrow-arched London Bridge in 1831, the Thames has never again frozen so solid.

  The verse on Liam Maxwell’s souvenir is adapted from one actually printed at the fair and reproduced in John Ashton’s Social England Under the Regency. Maxwell’s “free press” sales pitch was also used at the fair.

  The Prince of Wales was every bit as horrid to his wife, Caroline, as portrayed here. He did send his mistress to meet her ship when she landed, had Lady Jersey attend their wedding feast, and took her on their honeymoon (along with a bunch of his male friends who—like the Prince—were constantly falling-down drunk). He also forced Caroline to accept his mistress as her lady-in-waiting. The nasty stories about the furniture and pearl bracelets he took back are likewise true. Through his unsavory personal secretary, Colonel McMahon, he deliberately spread false gossip about his wife and paid newspapers to print ugly rumors about her, and he actually did award a certain Lady Douglas a pension for life after she swore to a tawdry—and easily disproven—pack of lies about the Princess of Wales as part of one of his numerous attempts to secure a divorce. In his preserved letters to friends and family, the Prince comes across as a petty, manipulative, breathtakingly narcissistic pathological liar, and paranoid to the point of being mentally unbalanced. He actually did have a fervent but totally unfounded belief that Caroline was conspiring to destroy the British monarchy.

  Caroline of Brunswick is a fascinating, colorful character, although difficult to research because so many lies were told about her at the time and most of her biographers have been far too credulous. She was twenty-seven when she married. Although I do not believe she was as promiscuous as she is sometimes portrayed, it appears likely that when she was younger she fell in love with a certain Irish officer and might have had a child by him. That child would have been taken away from her, which was probably the cause of the intense hatred she exhibited toward her mother the rest of her life. After the Prince essentially took baby Charlotte away, Caroline then poured her maternal urges and considerable financial resources into fostering a string of poor orphans.

  Although relatively pretty when young, she was always careless in her attire, blunt spoken, and utterly unsophisticated. Yet she was far from stupid; a polyglot and lifelong enthusiastic reader, she was acknowledged even by those who disliked her to be a well-trained and unusually fine pianist. She was also artistic and continued to study painting and sculpture as an adult. She had a very real and oft-expressed fear of being unjustly accused of adultery and executed for treason. Given how hard the Prince tried to convict her of adultery, including hiring men to hide in the bushes and break into her house to search her bedroom, I strongly doubt she violated her vows while in England. After she left England and moved to Italy, however, she does appear to have made up for all those lonely years by indulging in a torrid affair with a handsome young Italian. And yes, Caroline really did make wax effigies of her husband, stick them with pins, and burn them.

  Caroline’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, is best known through the memoirs of her subgoverness Miss Cornelia Knight (on whom I have modeled Miss Ella Kinsworth) and through the Princess’s touching, intimate, and brutally honest letters to her only real friend, Margaret Mercer Elphinstone. When I first began researching this story, I did not expect to like Charlotte, but she soon revealed herself to be an endearing, engaging, and truly tragic figure. In a later age she would have been called a tomboy; her rather mannish stride and ways, her enthusiastic love of horses and dogs, her open, friendly demeanor and habit of shaking hands with men were all roundly criticized. Given her bizarre upbringing, it is truly amazing she turned out to be such a warm, funny, likable person, with a gift for mimicry and a clever wit. A fervent Whig, she was furious when her father allied himself with the High Tories after becoming Regent, and genuinely believed the Irish were totally justified in rebelling for their independence.

  Charlotte was very close to her old grandfather, King George III, and for a time he was able to protect her from the worst nastiness of her father, who used the child to torment his hated wife. Once the old King slipped into madness, however, she was left without a champion. As the crowds in the streets cheered Charlotte more and more, Prinny’s resentment of his daughter and his determination to remove her from the country increased. While it was traditional to mark the eighteenth birthday of the heir presumptive to the throne with widespread celebrations, he used “economy” as an excuse to ignore the occasion and simply left London to visit friends in the north.

  Charlotte did indeed have a brief, innocent romance with a Captain Charles Hesse. His position as an illegitimate son of the Duke of York is disputed by some, but the fact that Charlotte herself accepted the relationship and was very close to her uncle York makes it more probable. As difficult as it is to believe, the story about her mother locking the young couple in her bedroom at Kensington Palace is true. The possible explanations Hero and Sebastian discuss have all been suggested, but no one knows exactly why Caroline did it. Charlotte did send Hesse letters and trinkets she then desperately tried to get back, and those letters did refer to the bedroom incident. Hesse did leave the letters in a trunk with a friend when he sailed for Spain. But the “Hesse letters” were never stolen, and Charlotte was eventually able to retrieve and destroy them.

  Captain Hesse’s future exploits are interesting, for he joined up with Caroline and traveled with her for a time after she left England. He later became the lover of the Queen of Naples (a daughter of King Carlos IV of Spain) and was ultimately killed in the Bois de Vincennes in a duel with Count Leon, an illegitimate son of Napoléon. What are the odds?

  The story of the circumstances surrounding Charlotte’s betrothal to Orange as told by Caroline to Sebastian is based on the accounts left by the various people involved. The Regent did pressure his daughter into promising that she would give him a yes or no answer after her first meeting with Orange at a dinner at Carlton House. Then, when the Prince asked her opinion of the young man and she tried to prevaricate, Wales pretended to misunderstand and immediately announced to both Liverpool and Orange that she had given her consent. Charlotte was appalled, and when she discovered the next day that Orange intended to require her to leave the country—and that her father had known of this—she was furious. Although the betrothal was arranged in December 1813, the announcement was indeed delayed for months while Orange solidified his position in the Netherlands.

  Negotiations on the marriage contracts dragged out when Charlotte—who knew her father well—refused to accept vague promises and kept insisting that everything be put in writing. She became convinced that her father planned to push through a divorce from Caroline once his daughter was out of the country. Along with Charlotte’s concerns for her mother was the very real fear that her father might then remarry and produce a son who would take her place in the line of
succession. Eventually, in the summer of 1814, Charlotte broke off the betrothal. Her father reacted by firing everyone in her household in a truly hideous scene that ended with Charlotte running out of the house.

  While various reasons are given for Charlotte’s decision to break the betrothal, I suspect from the subtle things she said in various letters that at some point the Princess discovered the truth about Orange’s sexual preferences. But because her friend Mercer was in London at the time when Charlotte’s attitude toward Orange shifted suddenly from a determination to make the best of things into an intense, bitter loathing, we do not know for certain. But we do know that because of her experiences with her father, honesty was very important to Charlotte, and she felt betrayed.

  The Dutch Republic dated back to the sixteenth-century Union of Utrecht and lasted until overrun by the French in 1795. After the defeat of Napoléon, the Allies decided to turn the stadtholder—who had been an elected head of state—into a king and joined Holland to the largely French-speaking Austrian Netherlands (today’s Belgium). The resultant Kingdom of the United Netherlands lasted until the Belgian Revolution of 1830, after which the Belgians were allowed to recover their separate identity, but only as the Kingdom of Belgium under Leopold I (yes, the same Leopold who was by then Princess Charlotte’s widower).

  The Regent did suffer a well-publicized attack of gout in January of 1814, and he really did hate dogs. Charlotte did have a white greyhound named Toby that had belonged to Napoléon’s wife before being seized aboard a French ship and sent to the Prince.

  Charlotte Jones (I have called her “Lottie” to avoid the confusion of two characters with the same name) was Princess Charlotte’s miniature portrait painter. The daughter of a Norwich merchant, she moved to London after the death of her father to study under Richard Cosway. Appointed Princess Charlotte’s official miniature portrait painter in 1808, she also received commissions from numerous other members of the Royal family and the likes of Lady Caroline Lamb. She was dismissed by the Regent along with the rest of Charlotte’s household in the summer of 1814.

  While Jane Ambrose is fictional, Princess Charlotte did have a piano instructor named Jane Mary Guest, who had a minor reputation as a composer. A pupil of Johann Christian Bach and Thomas Linley, Guest also taught Charlotte’s youngest aunt, the Princess Amelia. The Regent fired her along with the rest of Charlotte’s staff in the summer of 1814.

  The limitations placed on the fictional Jane Ambrose as a female musician were real. Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny and Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, were both acknowledged as being at least as talented as their famous brothers. Like the fictional Jane, they were allowed to perform with their brothers while young but forced to retire from the public eye when they reached marriageable age. Maria Anna Mozart did compose music, but it is not known if her brother published any of it as his own; Felix Mendelssohn did publish some of his sister Fanny’s works, but since that occurred after the date of this story, neither Hero nor Miss Kinsworth is able to reference it.

  Thomas Linley was a famous tenor, music teacher, and composer whose numerous musical children were legendary. The family seems to have had a fatal weakness for tuberculosis, or consumption as it was then called, and most died quite young. One of his daughters, Elisabeth, was the first wife of playwright Richard Sheridan. A noted soprano, she had to give up performing at the time of her marriage.

  Princess Charlotte’s governess in January of 1814 was the Duchess of Leeds, who was much as I have described her here. The young Lady Arabella is modeled on the Duchess’s daughter, Lady Catherine Osborne, who was introduced into Charlotte’s household to spy on the Princess. Lady Catherine actually did learn German when Charlotte and Miss Knight began speaking that language to keep her from eavesdropping on their conversations. When the Princess and her subgoverness switched to Italian, Lady Catherine then began taking Italian lessons from Charlotte’s harp instructor. And yes, at one point Princess Charlotte did lock the annoying duke’s daughter in a water closet (toilet) for fifteen minutes.

  William Godwin was a real historical figure, famous at the time as a political philosopher but better known today as the widower of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. He was also the father of Mary Godwin Shelley, author of Frankenstein and wife of the poet Shelley. Godwin did live in Clerkenwell, on Skinner Street, and in later life he did write, publish, and sell children’s books.

  Publishers, printers, and bookstores worked differently in the early nineteenth century than they do today. Printers typically sold their books in plain paper wrappers with temporary sewing; the books were permanently bound by either bookstores or their purchasers, who would have them bound to match their libraries. Many printers had their own bookstores and binderies.

  The character of Liam Maxwell is a composite of several radical journalists including Leigh and John Hunt, William Cobbett, Thomas Jonathan Wooler, Richard Carlile, and others. It was not uncommon for journalists to be imprisoned for publishing unflattering truths about the Prince of Wales or simply criticizing practices such as the pillory or impressment.

  The large size of the Royal Navy combined with the brutal discipline, hideous living conditions, and low pay for which it was infamous meant Britain’s warships could be kept crewed only by the use of impressment. Armed press gangs roamed ports and nearby villages to carry off able-bodied boys and men; men were also seized off merchant ships, both British and foreign, and from foreign naval ships (the latter played a major role in the United States’ declaration of the War of 1812). It is said that at the time of Trafalgar more than half the Royal Navy’s 120,000 sailors were pressed men. These men’s wives and families were often left destitute.

  While I have altered her name and some details, a seventeen-year-old wife of an impressed sailor was hanged at Newgate for theft after walking up to London from Cornwall in search of her husband; her newborn baby was taken from her arms on the scaffold. The description of Amy Hatcher’s hanging is an amalgamation of several contemporary accounts of hangings from the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Murderers were typically (but not always) hanged on a Monday morning; prisoners guilty of any of the period’s two hundred other capital crimes could be hanged any day of the week. Hangings were usually multiple; the record is believed to be twenty at one time.

  Napoléon really did set up a “ville des smoglers.” One of the best sources for this strange chapter in history and the role played by Rothschild is Gavin Daly’s 2007 article in The Historical Journal, “Napoleon and the ‘City of Smugglers,’ 1810–1814.” The claim that Rothschild’s January 1814 gold shipments to Paris were then sent on to Wellington is disputed by some; attempts by certain later apologists to further claim that all of Rothschild’s well-documented gold smuggling ventures had for years been going to Wellington are patently ridiculous. As Hero notes, the Royal Navy had control of the Channel and had no need for such costly and dangerous subterfuge.

  Rothschild was only one of many London financiers engaged in activities that aided France. Apart from arranging the loan that enabled the United States to buy Louisiana from Napoléon, London bankers also gave Napoléon the five million pounds he needed to raise an army after he escaped from Elba. Napoléon was what some have called a “bullionist”; he really did distrust paper money and hated bankers and credit. Despite his constant wars, he is said to have left France a credit balance in 1814. (Of course, looting Switzerland and the Vatican helped make that possible.)

  Lord Wallace is a fictional character modeled largely on Lord Grey (of Earl Grey tea fame), although I have given him the more abrasive and opportunistic personality of Henry Brougham, one of Caroline’s best-known supporters.

  Famous for his plays The Rivals and The School for Scandal, Richard Sheridan was also a Whig MP for more than thirty years. His marriage to Elizabeth Linley (of the musical Linley family) was colorful. He did live on Savile Row, although at the time it was called Savile Street.
He lost his seat in Parliament after the Prince moved against him and, ruined by the burning of Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters, he died in great poverty.

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