Sex with the Queen (52 page)

Fitzherbert, who had refused him sex outside of matrimony. The marriage was secret; if the heir to the British throne was known to have wed a Catholic, he would have lost his inheritance.

Pushed into a corner by his debts, George decided to commit bigamy.

Taking in the princess at a glance, Malmesbury was alarmed.

Though pretty in a frowzy-blonde way, Caroline didn’t care about her attire. She prided herself on dressing quickly, throw-ing on any old garments that were soiled, ripped, and didn’t match. Her stockings, Malmesbury reported sadly, were “never well washed, or changed often enough.”4 He was forced to intro-duce her to a bar of soap and a toothbrush. Malmesbury shud-dered when he thought of the fastidious, fashionable prince who awaited her, the prince who spent hours each morning on his toilette, carefully bathing, shaving, and coiffing himself, then sometimes spending another hour fastening his starched white cravat
just so
.

Malmesbury was further alarmed when the duke of Brunswick confessed his concern at his daughter becoming Princess of Wales. The duke begged Malmesbury to instruct her “not to ask questions, and, above all, not to be free in giving opinions of persons and things aloud.”5 Both men were worried by “the ap-parent facility of Princess Caroline’s character—her want of re-flection and substance—(we) agree that with a steady man she would do vastly well, but with one of a different description, there are great risks.”6 Both knew that George, Prince of Wales, was a far cry from steady.

On April 3, 1795, Prince George stood apprehensively in a drawing room of St. James’s Palace, waiting to be introduced to his bride. When he first saw her, he was so traumatized by her looks and demeanor that he wiped his brow, whispered “I am not well,” and called for a stiff drink. Malmesbury suggested that perhaps a glass of water would be more helpful.7

But the prince said with an oath, “No; I will go directly to the queen,” and stumbled away.8 When Malmesbury returned to the princess, she asked, “Is the prince always like that? I find him very fat and not nearly so handsome as his portrait.”9

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Indeed George, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, would have been devastatingly handsome if he had been able to control his ap-petite. But the spoiled prince was unable to deny himself anything—a glass of wine, a pork chop, a woman, an expensive mansion. His excesses had spoiled his finances and were already spoiling his looks.

Given George’s revulsion for the bride, the wedding could easily have been called off; they had not been married by proxy.

But there were, after all, pressing debts to pay. As the prince walked up the aisle, Lord Peniston Melbourne wrote, he “was like a man doing a thing in desperation,” as if he were “going to execution, and he was quite drunk.” Other wedding guests no-ticed that the groom had “manifestly had recourse to wine or spirits.”10

George managed to rise to the occasion with his wife three times during the first two nights of marriage. He wrote a friend,

“She showed . . . such marks of filth both in the fore and
hind
part of her . . . that she turned my stomach and from that mo-ment I made a vow never to touch her again.”11 For her part, the princess later told a friend, “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.”12

Fortunately for George, he had already made Caroline preg-nant during his halfhearted efforts. Caroline was dumbfounded to learn of her condition; she expressed profound surprise that such a speedy and insignificant coupling would produce a child.

As for George, he was delighted that an heir was on the way, and he never did touch Caroline again.

George exulted in torturing his pregnant wife; he locked her in her rooms while he went all over town socializing with his mis-tress Lady Jersey. He gave Caroline no money for expenses and insisted that Lady Jersey, who went out of her way to be obnox-ious to his wife, eat dinner with her every night. Finding that Caroline delighted in spending time with her newborn, Princess Charlotte, George had the child taken away from her.

When Caroline complained, George called her “the vilest t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y

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wretch this world was ever cursed with, who I cannot feel more disgust for from her personal nastiness than I do from her entire want of principle,” and further described her as “a very monster of iniquity.”13

When the king, fearing the rising scandal, suggested a recon-ciliation, and Caroline seemed willing, George declared that he must have a separation, adding that he would “rather see toads and vipers crawling over his victuals than sit at the same table with her!!!”14

The couple separated and Caroline went to live in a large home at Blackheath near London. She and the prince saw each other a few times a year at palace events and rarely spoke. By 1799

the princess, giving up all pretenses of loyalty to the husband who had so publicly abandoned her, was flirting openly with ministers and courtiers who visited her there. She had an affair with a junior minister, George Canning, the famous artist Sir Thomas Lawrence, the naval hero Sir Sidney Smith, and another naval officer, Captain Thomas Manby.

The Prince of Wales, who had set spies on his wife, was well aware of Caroline’s love affairs. Moreover, among the several poor children she looked after was an infant named Willy Austin whom she had adopted in 1802 and whom some believed was, in fact, her own. In 1805 Caroline was informed that she was being investigated for a “charge of high treason, committed in the in-famous crime of adultery.”15 Her household staff was led away to be questioned.

On the witness stand, one of Caroline’s servants asserted that he had found Sir Sidney Smith wandering around the house at three or four a.m. On another occasion the servant was sur-prised to find Sir Sidney in the house at ten a.m., though no one had let him in that morning. But surely the worst testimony came from Caroline’s former footman, Samuel Roberts, who solemnly asserted, “The Princess is very fond of fucking.”16

One witness, Lord Francis Moira, spoke of a box that a friend of Captain Manby’s had opened at the captain’s lodging. Inside he saw a portrait of the Princess of Wales “with many souvenirs hanging to it,” including a leather bag holding “hair of a partic-2 4 0

s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

ular description and such as his friend said he had been married too long not to know that it came from no woman’s head.”17 One of the commissioners suggested good-naturedly that the hair in the bag be compared with the suspected source of the hair, and only then could it be admitted as evidence. Naturally, this did not take place.

Caroline’s former friend and neighbor Lady Charlotte Dou-glas, who had since become her adversary in a property case, re-ported that the princess had confessed to being pregnant by a lover. She would hide her pregnancy, Caroline supposedly said, by tying a cushion behind her, under her high-waisted gown, to balance out the increasing girth in front, and make it seem that she was gaining weight all over. When Lady Douglas visited Car-oline in January 1803, she saw the princess with “an infant sleeping on a sofa.” “Here is the little boy,” the princess said. “I had him two days after I saw you last; is it not a nice little child?”18

It is likely that despite her enmity toward the princess, Lady Douglas’s statements were true. Caroline had probably been playing one of her bizarre jokes, taking great delight in shocking her prudish neighbor Lady Douglas with stories of a pregnancy and showing her one of the orphans she cared for. Caroline was, after all, the same woman who a decade later, after a private au-dience with the pope, told an inquiring friend that her interview had gone very well indeed and “You will see evident symptoms of it in nine months’ time.”19

Other servants, however, denied that their mistress had been pregnant or had committed adultery. They testified that little Willy Austin was visited frequently by his mother, the same woman who had originally arrived with the infant in her arms.

The commissioners soon had Mrs. Austin herself on the witness stand, and she swore that Willy was her child. They then found a birth record of Willy Austin, born to Samuel and Sophia Austin on July 11, 1802.

The entire sordid affair contained rumor and innuendo, shrieking accusations and outraged denials, and the testimony of fired servants who bore their former mistress a grudge. On July t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y

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14, 1806, the lord commissioners stated, “There is no founda-tion for believing that the child now with the Princess is the child of her Royal Highness, or that she was delivered of any child in the year 1802; nor has anything appeared to us which would war-rant the belief that she was pregnant in that year, or at any other period within the compass of our inquiries.”20

But it was clear that Caroline had been indiscreet in her flir-tations and had allowed men to visit her regularly, not always in the presence of virtuous ladies. The princess was issued stern in-structions to be more discreet in the future.

But this recommendation was not likely to win Caroline’s fa-vor. Shortly after she was cleared of adultery, she began an affair with the elegant fifty-seven-year-old Lord George Rivers, a relic of the eighteenth century who still powdered his hair. A maid later declared that one afternoon she had seen “the pillows of the sofa on the floor, the floor covered with hair powder.”21 By 1809

Caroline was having an affair with a politician, Lord Henry Fitzgerald.

As she ate, and drank, and made love to fill up the emptiness where a devoted husband should have been, her looks took a turn for the worse, as did her taste in clothes. One gentleman re-marked “that the Princess is grown very coarse, and that she dresses very ill, showing too much of her naked person. . . .”22

In 1814 Caroline, bored to tears with her life in London, de-cided to travel across the continent. She shook the dust of En-gland from her sandals, joyfully leaving the scene of so many years of bitter humiliation. As she left Britain, Caroline said wistfully that she hoped her eighteen-year-old daughter, Char-lotte, as “great and powerful as she may be, will not tyrannize over anyone, because they have not the good fortune to please her.”23