Sex with the Queen (53 page)

Caroline went about Europe thirsting to meet the famous, the talented, and the notorious, and few refused her. When traveling to Italy, she needed a courier to ride ahead to the towns she in-tended to visit and make hotel reservations for her entourage.

An Austrian general in Milan recommended his personal assis-tant, the handsome thirty-year-old Bartolomeo Pergami. Mea-2 4 2

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suring a full six feet three inches tall, Pergami had curly black hair and whiskers, flashing dark eyes, a broad chest, and a bold swaggering charm. When Caroline arrived in Naples, she was in-troduced to her new courier and immediately fell in love.

She barely bothered to hide her love affair with Pergami and even tried to look like an Italian. Her greatest physical assets had always been her fine golden hair and white complexion; now she wore a thick black wig and painted on thick dark eyebrows and rouge so heavy that she resembled a painted puppet. Attending dinners and balls in Italy, she grew heavier and danced wildly,

“with a frivolity hardly fitting her age and figure,” according to one witness, her dress often slipping off her shoulders.24

The Prince of Wales, through his network of spies, kept a close watch on her activities, hoping for undeniable proof of her infidelity. If such evidence remained elusive, proof of Caro-line’s increasing eccentricity manifested itself almost daily.

When her cousin the duke of Baden saw her one hot day, she was wearing half a hollowed-out pumpkin shell on her head. It kept her cool, she said.

In Naples, Caroline traveled about in a coach made in the form of a conch shell. It was led through the streets by a small child dressed as Cupid in flesh-colored tights, leading two tiny ponies. In the vehicle sat a rotund, black-wigged, berouged woman in a sheer gown, the skirt of which barely hung past her chubby knees. Next to her sat Willy Austin, now a gangly lad of thirteen whom all Naples believed to be her son and whom she called “the little Prince.”25 Her astonishing carriage was pre-ceded by Pergami on horseback, blazing forth in a military uni-form that made him look like a circus ringmaster.

The princess and her entourage took a ten-month Mediter-ranean voyage to Tunisia, Sicily, Egypt, and Istanbul. She en-tered Jerusalem as Jesus had, astride an ass. After this adventure, she returned to her house in Lake Como with a colorful suite of Turks, Arabs, and Africans, as well as shadowy Italians—friends and family of Pergami. Pergami’s mother worked as the princess’s laundress, perhaps so no one else could testify later about stained sheets.

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In 1816 Princess Charlotte married Prince Leopold of Saxe- Coburg, who later became the king of Belgium. The following year Charlotte died giving birth to a dead son. Caroline was dev-astated; not only had she lost her only child, but her hopes for a brighter future as queen mother, reinstated to her royal status, had died with Charlotte.

The only link between them buried, George saw no reason for delaying his much-longed-for divorce. In 1818 he wrote his lord chancellor, “My whole thoughts (are turned) to the endeavoring to extricate myself from the cruelest as well as the most unjust predicament that even the lowest individual, much more a Prince, ever was placed in, by unshackling myself from a woman who has for the last three and twenty years not alone been the bane and curse of my existence, but who now stands prominent in the eyes of the world characterized by a flagrancy of abandon-ment unparalleled in the history of women, and stamped with disgrace and dishonor.”26

But his ministers explained that the precarious state of the nation, riddled with rebellious factions, ruled out such an unpopular move. The British people would not take to a wom-anizing monarch divorcing the mother of his dead child. Fur-thermore, despite the reams of evidence accumulated over the years, nothing proved inconclusively Caroline’s adultery with Pergami.

George sent a commission of experienced lawyers to Milan to try to dig up
irrefutable
evidence. The Milan Commission, as it came to be known, found cast-off servants willing to talk. Al-though the commissioners high-mindedly declared bribes would not be paid, working-class people demanded at least travel ex-penses and recompense for lost wages.

While George was eagerly digging up evidence of his wife’s adultery, he had never ceased committing adultery himself. His mistress Lady Jersey, who had so offended Caroline upon her ar-rival in England, had given way to Lady Hertford, who by 1820

had been replaced by Lady Conyngham. Along the way there had been adventures with actresses, singers, and dancers. The virtu-2 4 4

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ous Mrs. Fitzherbert, George’s secret Catholic wife, had made a dignified retreat from the field in 1811.

As the investigation into Caroline’s conduct inched forward, in January 1820 old mad King George III finally died. Caroline, whether her husband liked it or not, was now queen of England.

King George IV, who had been planning his coronation for more than forty years, was horror-stricken at the thought that this nightmare of a wife could claim to be crowned beside him.

Indeed, whenever the new king went forth he heard, to his grinding chagrin, cheers for good Queen Caroline.

According to British tradition, each Sunday ministers asked their flock to pray for members of the royal family by name. Car-oline had always been mentioned as Princess of Wales. But the new king positively forbade any church prayers for Caroline as queen. Though George was head of the Church of England, he was not head of the Kirk of Scotland, and the Scots prayed twice as fervently for her, a fact which irked George mightily. Often the king couldn’t sleep at night as he lay in bed imagining Scottish prayers for his detested wife winging their way heavenward.

Caroline, by nature easygoing and forgiving, was furious that her name had been removed from the liturgy. Moreover, while she visited Rome, the Vatican, which had always given her royal honors, stopped doing so at the request of the British govern-ment. She vowed to fly to England like a Fury and take revenge on her errant husband. Wisely leaving Pergami and her Italian suite in Italy, she landed at Dover in June 1820. At her arrival guns fired off a royal salute, and the streets were crowded with supporters, some of whom, seeing young Willy Austin, called three cheers for “Mr. Austin, her majesty’s son!”27

Thousands had waited since early morning to welcome her, dressed in their Sunday best, crying “God save the Queen!” Ar-riving in Canterbury, she found the town illuminated with torches and ten thousand eager citizens cheering her. Cannons were fired and bonfires lit. This fulsome welcome, however, cer-tainly had more to do with their loathing of the king than their love for the queen. She had become an icon of oppression at the t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y

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hands of a tyrant king, just as the people felt oppressed at his hands. The cheers followed her all the way to London.

In the face of such broad support, Caroline generously of-fered to live abroad in return for a reasonable allowance and the restoration of her name to the liturgy. But George would not budge. No prayers for her. Moreover, he wanted a divorce. He brought forward the Milan Commission documents to both houses of Parliament to consider a bill of pains and penalties to exile Caroline, take away her titles, and dissolve her marriage with the king due to her adultery with Pergami.

Both the king and queen had very dirty laundry, and it was a catastrophic idea to wash it before the British public, advertising all its stains, stench, and filth by means of an eager British press.

As one member of the House of Commons said of this messy case, either the king was betrayed, or the queen insulted. Either way, no good would come of it.

The British public remained firmly on Caroline’s side. When a boatload of Italian witnesses for the prosecution landed in Dover, they were attacked by furious fishwives who beat them with sticks and scratched their faces until they could retreat to safety. Hearing the news, other boats bearing witnesses turned back.

As queen, Caroline had found decorum with lightning speed.

No more pumpkins on her head or dresses cut so low that her breasts dangled out of them. She looked the picture of middle-aged respectability in her high-necked gowns of black or white satin, her long dark cloaks trimmed with ermine, and her mod-est bonnets. On August 17 the queen rode in triumph to her trial at the House of Lords. Among the 258 peers judging her were two of her former lovers, the husband of the king’s current mis-tress, and the son of his former one.

The first days of opening statements, legal wrangling, orator-ical effusions, and political grandstanding passed tediously in the sticky August heat. One day the queen was observed to be sleeping deeply during a speech. Lord Henry Holland promptly wrote an epigram:

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Her conduct at present no censure affords
She sins not with courtiers but sleeps with the Lords.
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Interest picked up when Caroline’s former servants took the stand. Several testified to having seen Pergami creeping about cor-ridors at night half naked holding a candle, holding the princess on his lap, or sitting next to her in bed. Hotel maids described stained sheets and Pergami’s slippers in the princess’s bedroom.