The Queen Without a Crown

by Catherine Curzon

Caroline of Brunswick lived a life of drama, scandal and excitement. From her sheltered early days in Brunswick to a disastrous marriage to George IV (at the time merely the Prince of Wales) and a fling with an Italian chamberlain, she did nothing by halves. She had already survived George’s attempts to blacken her name, strip her of her titles and even divorce her, and through it all, the doughty lady emerged unscathed. Darling of the people, favourite of the radicals and rallying point for those who loathed her husband, she simply refused to bend, let alone break.

Yet even the strongest bough must eventually fall.

Caroline of Brunswick by Samuel Lane

Having survived a trial in the House of Lords that threatened to end her marriage and leave her in disgrace, without rank, title or privilege, in 1821 Caroline felt unstoppable. So unstoppable, in fact, that she decided to join the estranged husband who hated her at his Westminster Abbey coronation. Here the queen would be crowned, the crowd would cheer and Caroline would once and for all trounce George IV on his biggest of big days.

The whole of Great Britain knew that George was due to be crowned at Westminster Abbey on 19th July 1821, and it was going to be the biggest party the country had ever seen. He was determined that Caroline would not be there; she was determined that she would. Whether he liked it or not, she was set on having her moment in the spotlight.

Caroline, or rather her advisors, had always been masters of judging the public mood. Yet this time, the queen misread the atmosphere in the streets catastrophically. Though the public had always supported her in her battles with George, her victory in the Lords was old news by now. Instead, as the people of Britain weathered the long, cold winter and waited keenly for the summer to come, they were looking forward to the Coronation party, which promised to be the knees up to end all knees ups. As far as they were concerned, she had a home in Italy and with her husband’s efforts to divorce her exhausted, they began to wonder why she simply didn’t just go home and enjoy the £50,000 annuity Parliament had granted her. Could it be, the people wondered, that Caroline liked the limelight a little too much?

As the king’s Carlton House team went on the PR offensive, Caroline’s own advisors began to distance themselves from what was becoming a toxic situation. Lord Brougham, her chief advisor, told Caroline that she must not go to Westminster Abbey at any cost. He warned her that the public didn’t want it, and that, if she wanted to stay in their favour, the best approach was one of humility.

Caroline was having none of it.

Instead, she wrote to George IV to tell him that she would be there for her crowning. She requested that he let her know what he would like her to wear and asked for a retinue of ladies to assist her in preparing for the big day.

“The Queen from circumstances being obliged to remain in England, she requests the King will be pleased to command those Ladies of the first Rank his Majesty may think most proper in this Realms, to attend the Queen on the day of the Coronation, of which her Majesty is informed is now fixed, and also to name such Ladies which will be required to bear her Majesty's Train on that day. 

The Queen being particularly anxious to submit to the good Taste of his Majesty most earnestly entreats the King to inform the Queen in what Dress the King wishes the Queen to appear in, on that day, at the Coronation. Caroline R.”¹

Needless to say, George didn’t reply. Instead, he passed the letter to Lord Liverpool, the prime minster who was no fan of Caroline. He informed the hopeful lady that she wasn't welcome and should keep her distance. With Liverpool’s warning echoing his own, Brougham redoubled his efforts to keep her from the Coronation. Even the press joined in the chorus of disapproval and begged Caroline to heed the words of the politician who had, so far, not failed her. Brougham’s sound guidance in the Lords had saved her from divorce and disgrace, could he now save her from national embarrassment?

Alas, no.

Henry Brougham by Thomas Lawrence

Brougham knew from the start that Caroline wouldn’t be dissuaded from her planned path, it meant so much to her to score a victory over George. Still, Brougham did all he could to dissuade her, yet she refused to accept that “the public feeling would not go along with her”². Still, he wrote with an almost audible sigh, “having an order, she could not be stopt when she insisted upon it”³. So on 19th July 1821, Caroline sallied forth at six o’clock in the morning, determined to get into the Coronation.

Accompanied by the gallant and well-meaning Lord Hood, Caroline strode from door to door at Westminster Abbey attempting to gain admission. At each door she was turned away until, finally, one of the doors was literally slammed shut in her face. It was a humiliation like she had never known before, and as the crowd that had once cheered her now booed and jeered, one can only imagine what must have been going through Caroline’s head. 

Still she persisted until one of the exasperated doorkeepers told her that admission was by ticket only, regardless of who she was, queen or no queen. Trying to make the best of a bad situation Lord Hood offered Caroline his own ticket so that she might at least see the procession, but she declined, unable to bear such a humiliation. When he made the kind offer Lord Hood heard, “some persons within the porch of the Abbey laughed, and uttered some expressions of disrespect.”⁴. He was mortified and Caroline, plunged into despair, had no choice but to flee.

“She flinched,” wrote Brougham, “for the first time in her life”⁵, and it was the beginning of a swift end for Caroline of Brunswick.

From her rooms in Brandenburgh House the crownless queen Caroline continued to stir up trouble, but to no avail. A letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting “to be crowned some days after the King, and before the arrangements were done away with, so that there might be no additional expense”⁶ was met with a polite but firm rebuttal and one by one, her remaining allies deserted her.

George IV by Thomas Lawrence

Caroline fell ill with stomach pains in late July and her doctors diagnosed an obstruction of the bowel. Her attempts to self-medicate with opiates made matters worse and as the days passed, her condition grew ever weaker. She became convinced that her death was drawing near and requested one final meeting with Brougham, at which she told him,“I shall not recover; and I am much better dead, for I be tired of this life”⁷.

Caroline of Brunswick, the uncrowned queen, died just after ten o’clock on the evening of 7th August 1821.

“Yesterday evening, at twenty-five minutes after ten o’clock, the QUEEN departed this life after a short but painful illness, at Brandenburgh House, at Hammersmith.”⁸

Her last wish was to be taken back to her homeland of Brunswick and buried alongside her family. She envisaged a coffin bearing a plate that stated this was the last resting place of the injured queen of England. George IV ordered the minimum period of mourning possible for his late wife, and though he was happy to see her body leave England for Brunswick, her coffin was notably free of the plate she had requested. Enormous crowds turned out to watch her final journey to the coast, mourning the death of the woman who had always provided them with entertainment, if nothing else.

In fact, when the party paused for a rest at Colchester Caroline’s supporters succeeded in fastening the controversial plate to her coffin. The triumph was short lived, and when the procession began again, the official plate was in place once more.

Lord Brougham wrote that the crowds who gathered to watch the procession pass moved him deeply. Though her final weeks had been unhappy, Caroline had not been deserted by her public after all. Mourned, celebrated and notorious, Caroline of Brunswick might be dead, but she would never, ever be forgotten.

Footnotes

1. Melville, Lewis (1912), An Injured Queen, Caroline of Brunswick: Vol I. London: Hutchinson & Co, p.542.

2. Brougham, Henry (1871), The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, Vol II. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, p.422.

3. Ibid.

4. Urban, Sylvanus (1821). The Gentleman's Magazine: 1821, Volume 91, Part 2. London: John Nichols and Son, p.74.

5. Brougham, Henry (1871), The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, Vol II. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, p.422.

6. Nightingale, Joseph (1822). Memoirs of the Last Days of Her Late Most Gracious Majesty Caroline, Queen of Great Britain. London: J Robins & Co, p.516.

7. Brougham, Henry (1871), The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, Vol II. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, p.423.

8. The Morning Post (London, England), Thursday, August 09, 1821; Issue 15725, p.3.

All images courtesy Wikipedia

Further reading

Anonymous. A Brief Account of the Coronation of His Majesty, George IV. London: D Walther, 1821. 

Brougham, Henry. The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Henry Lord Brougham. London: Lea & Blanchard, 1841.

Brougham, Henry. The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, Vol II. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871.

Chapman, Frederic (trans.). A Queen of Indiscretions, The Tragedy of Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of England. London: John Lane, 1897.

Chapman, Hester W. Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark, 1751-75. London: Cape, 1971.

David, Saul. Prince of Pleasure. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

Fraser, Flora. The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline. Edinburgh: A&C Black, 2012.

Gossip, Giles. Coronation Anecdotes. London: Robert Jennings, 1828.

Hibbert, Christopher. George IV. London: Penguin, 1998.

Huish, Robert. Memoirs of George the Fourth: Vol I. London: Thomas Kelly, 1830.

Huish, Robert. Memoirs of Her Late Majesty Caroline, Queen of Great Britain. London: T Kelly, 1821.

Melville, Lewis, An Injured Queen, Caroline of Brunswick: Vol I. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1912.

Nightingale, Joseph, Memoirs of Her Late Majesty Queen Caroline. London: J Robins and Company, 1821.

Nightingale, Joseph. Memoirs of the Last Days of Her Late Most Gracious Majesty Caroline, Queen of Great Britain, and Consort of King George the Fourth. London: J Robins and Company, 1822.

Nightingale, Joseph. Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty Caroline, Queen of Great Britain. London: J Robins & Co, 1820.

Richardson, Joanne. The Disastrous Marriage. London: Jonathan Cape, 1960.

Robins, Jane. The Trial of Queen Caroline: The Scandalous Affair that Nearly Ended a Monarchy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Smith, EA. George IV. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Wilkins, William Henry. The Love of an Uncrowned Queen. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1900.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Catherine Curzon is a royal historian. She is the author of Life in the Georgian Court, Kings of Georgian Britain, and Queens of Georgian Britain (October 2017). 

Her work has been featured online by BBC History Magazine and in Explore History, All About History, History of Royals and Jane Austen’s Regency World. She has provided research for An Evening with Jane Austen at the V&A and spoken at venues including the Royal Pavilion, Lichfield Guildhall, Greenwich National Maritime Museum and Dr Johnson’s House. This year she will speak at the Stamford Georgian Festival, the Jane Austen Festival, Kenwood House and Godmersham Park. 

Her novels, The Crown Spire, The Star of Versailles, and The Mistress of Blackstairs, are available now.

Catherine holds a Master’s degree in Film and lives in Yorkshire atop a ludicrously steep hill.

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Literary Genius in the 'Long Eighteenth' Century

By Janet Todd

Over many decades I have been a biographer and literary-historical critic of the long eighteenth century. Some of my earliest work helped to promote women writers who, at that time, were largely obscure, writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays, Frances Sheridan - and indeed Mary Shelley, who was not always known even as the creator of Frankenstein, let alone of her other historical novels.

Happily, times have much changed and these writers are now so appreciated that they form the basis of many university courses devoted to the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But far more obscure are the large number of other women who entered the scribbling marketplace during these years. They came in such a crowd that for a time they even outnumbered their male colleagues.

Some of these women wrote short moralising tales for the poor or for children, but the majority fed the taste for Gothic and sensational fiction which had been so brilliantly accelerated by Mrs Radcliffe with The Romance of the Forest (1791)and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). They were jobbing writers supplying the cheaper circulating libraries. These had sprung up in the late eighteenth century to feed a public desire for inexpensive fiction that needed to be read only once and at speed, then passed on or discarded. The works were published by presses such as the notorious Minerva Press that were unperturbed about quality, not even worrying about repetition or the use of identical material across books with only different titles to differentiate them.

I read a lot of these novels and enjoyed the lurid woodcuts that often accompanied them. In the process I became especially fascinated by the women who wrote them. On the whole their lives are hidden from us but those whom we can hear across the centuries - from a few extant letters and some prefatory material - are keen to stress that they were not presumptuous, were not encroaching on the male business of public writing, and did not regard themselves as ‘authors’. They never expected to be valued by the literary world or reviewed in respectable journals. Often they declared they wrote for money because there was no male breadwinner to support them and their children, either through the death of a husband or by his desertion of his family.

Far from these jobbing writers is of course Jane Austen, who very much regarded herself as an ‘Author’ and a highly skilful one.

She was not in the position of these women writers for, although she was never well off, she was never close to destitution. She always had a supportive family. So, although she was very eager to earn as much money as possible from her writings, she was not dependent on this income for a living.

During my last years in academics I have been studying Austen’s life and novels - I am the general editor of the Cambridge edition of all her works and I have written and edited four volumes dealing with her fiction. It is from this close involvement that I can assert that Austen well knew her worth: she was tart in her comments on other less skilled but popular writers and very careful in the revision of her own novels. She is quite different from the Gothic and sensational authors mentioned above: for a start, they would never have been allowed to publish with the prestigious press of John Murray. In Jane Austen’s lifetime Murray brought out Emma and the second edition of Mansfield Park.

Because of her superior talents and powers, we now couple Austen with Lord Byron, Murray’s most famous author, and in college courses put the pair together because they are from the same era. Yet at the time there were profound differences in public response. Despite the enormous fame Jane Austen now has, when she was alive she was very little known and any personal praise was usually directed at her as a home-loving and pious spinster. Byron, however, was part of the new cult of the natural and creative genius, a lone individual who had a link to the divine and whose art came more from inspiration than from craft. Although we know from surviving manuscripts that it was often not the case, Romantic poets such as Byron and his contemporary and friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley, claimed sudden inspiration for their writing. By contrast, Jane Austen admitted to spending 15 or so years intermittently polishing and revising Pride and Prejudice.

The idea of the ‘genius’ as a separate and distinctive being took hold in the culture just as the communal ideas of the Enlightenment were being dashed by the bloody failure of the French Revolution. The ‘genius’ was almost invariably male. He was different from other people, and he lived by different rules: he was uninhibited by the morality that constrained the rest of ordinary humanity. But there was always a threatening shadow about him. For the man of genius had a demon within that could spur him on to great art or to his destruction. To sustain himself he required both enormous self-belief and enormous belief in himself from others.

Byron and Shelley both at times held this belief, Shelley rather more than Byron, and both men, as is well known, played havoc with the lives of the women who loved them or cared for them. My most recent biography, Death and the Maidens, described the effect of Shelley on my main subject, Mary Wollstonecraft’s eldest daughter, Fanny. It also showed his impact on her half sister Mary Shelley, whom he later married, and on his first wife Harriet. Byron and Shelley were indeed great poets, worthy of some of the adulation they received. What happens to the ‘genius’ if the adulation is there but the substance is not? What happens to the worshipper or lover when she realises the idol is hollow?

I have described a little of my past work and interests to suggest where some of my material came from when at last - in my mid 70s - I retired from full time academic and administrative work to become what I'd always wanted to be: a novelist. A Man of Genius has as a protagonist Ann, who resembles one of those many hack writers who produced the ‘horrid’ novels that so entranced Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Her writing of Gothic novels provides her with a reasonable living and above all makes her independent of family. She can avoid the usual role of the poor but ladylike young woman: as governess, teacher or companion. She turns to Gothic writing because in her lonely childhood she had already become enthralled by this kind of fiction, stories of fear, entrapment, illicit passion and desperate pursuit.

In the centre of my novel is a fatal attraction of a woman for a man admired by himself and his followers as a ‘genius’. My story does not follow the trajectory of my biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny, both of whose passions led to suicide or attempted suicide. At the same time my reading of these star-crossed lives did, I think, inform my creation of Ann and her demanding lover Robert.

The historical background of my novel is the period I have long loved and studied: the Regency in England. In 1815 at the battle of Waterloo the English Duke of Wellington defeated the French Emperor Napoleon and brought to a close more than two decades of European war. A few years earlier, the intermittently mad George III had been declared irreparably insane and his debauched, dissolute and very extravagant son had become Prince Regent. Five years after Waterloo George III died and ended the Regency. This period between 1815 and the accession of George IV is a time associated with glamorous style, excess, and an unprecedented flowering of Romantic poetry. It is also associated with political repression, a clamping down on home-grown political and social dissent.

My male protagonist grew up under the shadow of the French Revolution when universal radical change seemed possible and when heroic men thought they might bring it about in Britain and Ireland with inspiring words and daring acts - as initially seemed to be happening in France. But they were adults in a time when these hopes had been much dashed by the Reign of Terror and the imperialistic conquests of Napoleon. Some men and women still held to beliefs and hopes, and on them the government kept a firm eye. From time to time they were questioned and imprisoned for sedition and plotting. Byron and Shelley were both disillusioned with the political mood in an increasingly conservative England and both left for continental Europe and remained there. In this respect alone, my character Robert resembles these Romantic poets.

As in most periods when there is a flourishing press and great cartoonists, the royal family provided much entertainment. To ensure an easy succession to the British throne and despite his private marriage to a Catholic- a forbidden union in this Protestant country - the Prince had been persuaded to marry a German princess, Caroline of Brunswick in 1795. He took an instant and deep dislike to her. Over the next years he persecuted this unwanted and rather foolish lady who took to travelling with a motley entourage around Europe. Her husband sent emissaries to find enough suitable evidence of imropriety to allow him a divorce. The 'Delicate Investigation', as the late phase of the investigation was called, much concerned the Princess’s time in Venice and her relationship with the Italian Bartolomeo Pergami. The fat, squat Princess and the tall be-whiskered Pergami do not feature in my novel as characters but, as they amuse all of Europe, so they intermittently amuse my heroine!

With the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 victorious England became the most powerful country in Europe and London, its bustling and commercial centre, flourished and grew richer. By contrast, Venice was in a sorry state. By the time Ann and Robert travel there, its glamour has been tarnished and its political hopes defeated.

It had been a great maritime and commercial power with a thousand-year-old history of independence as a republic, boasting an idiosyncratic system of government and laws, and a robust sense of itself as superior politically and culturally to other states. It had both opposed popes and created them, and it had bred and nurtured amazing sculptors and architects, as well as the most celebrated painters of the Renaissance, Tintoretto, Veronese and Titian. Its richness was legendary. But, by the end of the eighteenth century, it had suffered a long decline and Napoleon had an easy time of it when he chose to conquer it and make it part of his Italian empire in 1797. It was a dismal and shameful end to a great military and cultural history.

The following year Napoleon gave Venice to his ally, Austria, but by 1805 it was back in French hands. It stayed there until the battle of Waterloo crushed French imperial power. In the distribution of spoils that followed his defeat Venice was ceded once more to Austria and made part of its kingdom of Lombardy and Venetia. Some Venetians appreciated the changes the Austrians made to their city and some collaborated with them in bringing these about, while others preferred the French as conquering master for, although even more radical in the changes they wrought on the city - they tore down churches and convents and carted off many artistic treasures to Paris - they appeared more compatible to the Venetians in temperament. Still others mourned the loss of control and plotted for an independence that Venice would never see again: in 1866 it would become part of the independent kingdom of Italy.

The dilapidated - but still glamorous - city of A Man of Genius is not far from that described by John Ruskin thirty years later in his monumental study, The Stones of Venice. He likened the city’s decay to that of a wearied and aged human being. Although Venice had always been on the aristocratic grand tour and continued to be so after 1815, very soon it attracted as well more modest middle class tourists from northern Europe, armed with an increasing array of guidebooks. The era of mass tourism was, however, still in the future.

I end with a photograph I have just taken of the southern lagoon of Venice on a cold February day. My characters first sees the place in cold and dreary weather and never quite gets over the experience! But Ann in particular also succumbs to Venice’s special magic.

Janet Todd has just retired from teaching, mainly in the US and the UK. Her last positions were as Professor of English in the University of Aberdeen and President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her most recent published works have been introductions to the novels of Jane Austen and biographies of women writers from Aphra Behn to Mary Wollstonecraft. A Man of Genius is her first original novel.