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George and Caroline
by Anwar Shaikh |
April 8, 1795, turned out to be the occasion of
sadness, sorrow and scorn for George IV who contracted the loveless marriage
with his cousin Caroline. She was the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick, and
Augusta, the sister of George III, King of England and Ireland. His marital
union was to be the true manifestation of sexual conflict. By the time he was
seventeen, in his own words, he had become "rather too fond of women and
wine." He loved salacious company: One of his close friends was Charles
James Fox, known for loose- living, and many other Whig politicians, commanding
a similar reputation. George III, though a mad man, was sane enough to detest
such lechers on moral grounds.
George IV, who was born on August 12, 1762, was a
profligate but pretended to possess the morality of a Puritan without knowing
the meaning of purity and probity. He married Caroline, hoping that Parliament
would be pleased to pay his colossal debts, which he had accumulated as bills of
glee, gaiety and games of concupiscence. Their marriage contained no element of
merriment, mutual trust and matrimonial dignity. It was a union of two people
who yearned for making someone miserable through the exercise of malevolence,
malignance and misbehaviour.
If charm were a skin-deep Ingredient of morality, there
would not be many people who could dream of comparing themselves with Gecrge IV.
His manners were adorned with apparent fascination but underneath he was exactly
the opposite. One cannot deny him the glory of aesthetic appreciation. The
development of Regent Street and Regent's Park in London vouch for his virtue.
May be the love of the beautiful became his bane, making his salacious
tendencies unconttollable. He must have thought that beauty was not to be adored
from a distance but to be enjoved with a closer touch. He was always love-sick,
professing, crying and dying for some female, hoping to be rewarded for the
trials, tears and tribulations that he imaginatively suffered. Were he true to
the ladies whose affection kept him awake at night, he would have been a
romantic Saint. But he was nothing of the kind. As long as he was kept on the
string, he danced like a marionette to the tune of the puppeteer but the moment
the lady obliged him with fulfilment, his love vanished the same way as drops of
dew disappear with the touch of sunrays. Munificent in promises but mean in
keeping them, bounteous in expression of love but baneful in sincerity, this
royal Loathario could soften the heart of the most pitiless woman with the
feigned warmth of his passion. Once he spotted a pretty girl, worthy of royal
seduction, the Satanic vocabulary capable of inciting love, flowed through his
pen with the same ease as bullets rush out of a gun-barrel towards its target.
Mrs. Fitzherbert, before she came under his roving
eyes, had been widowed twice. She was a pious woman of twenty- eight when George
at twenty-two, fell in love with her during 1784. It was not her physical
attraction that counted. She was endowed with an air of grace and dignity of
manners; her rather large bosoms, which magnified her sexual appeal, were less
carnal and more spiritual in effect, owing to the modesty of her glances and
probity of character. Being a devout Roman Catholic, she could not disgrace
herself to become his mistress, and George, being a Protestant, could not marry
her because the bigoted and sectarian law of the time would have deprived him of
his right of succession for honouring a Catholic woman to be his wife. George
the shrewd lover, declared that his life would resemble an empty desert if he
could not have this lady, and his breath would rumble in his throat like an
astronaut lost in space. His assertion of committing suicide looked very real
when he indicated that he would rather lose his royal inheritance than be
deprived of his darling. As the lady heard of it, she took fright and decided to
leave for France but this wizard of lewdness posed too big a challenge for her
innocence. A knock at her door from the royal courtiers overturned her plans of
escape when they told her that the fear of her mminent flight had led the Prince
to stab himself in despair. Possibly, they also shed a few crocodile tears to
fool and snaol her Catholic heart to inject it with Protestant piety. She wept
with feminine elation, realising that the would-be-King of Britain was
determined to die if she rejected him. Did he really make an attempt on his
life? It was a ruse to seduce her; when he was bled by his doctors he made sure
of staining his bandage with the few drops of blood which luckily oozed out! On
the spur of the moment, she accepted the engagement ring but as the sentimental
euphoria gained sobriety, she did not feel sure of the Princely love. Declaring
that his act of wounding himself was a form of duress, she could not abide by
her promise of marrying him, and fled to the continent. The Prince wanted to
follow her, or at least give the impression of indulging in a lovers chase. His
father forbade the intended exercise, and he resorted to his favourite hobby of
writing passtonate letters packed with pretended warmth beyand the ingenuity of
Lord Lucifer. As he assured her of his absolute love and loyalty, and addressed
her as his "beloved wife," he regularly seduced Lady Barfylde at the
same time. Maybe it was his way of expressing sincerity in case he forgot how to
make love. Believing his threats of killing himself, she began to feel guilty of
callousness and realised that if he harmed himself she might lose her peace of
mind as a psychological backlash. She returned home in 1785 and became his wife
It was a secret wedding. Nobody was to know about it, but as it is the way of
things, the more you try to keep them secret, the more rapidly they become
public knowledge. However, he somehow convinced Charles Fox James, one of the
leading politicians of his time, that he was still a bachelor (despite being
married). Fox vehemently denied to the House of Commons that the "rumoured"
marriage had ever taken place, and condenlned the ''gossip-mongers.'' Whereas
George reaped the harvest of his skilful deceit, his wife being branded as a
mistress, felt pained, yet he complained that she did not return his love half
as passionately as he did. Being the daughter af a bishop, she possessed a keen
sense of religious remorse; her understanding suffered an emotional fracture and
she grew cold towards him. George was not the man to sulk about it. He gathered
a number of mistresses around him and did not care what they looked like as long
as they proved fair performers in the bedroom. Lady Jersey, who was one of his
paramours, had the distinction of being the mother to nine children, as well as
a grandmother. George has been admired for his aesthetic sense though his choice
of girl friends betrays his more basic instincts, which he felt obliged to
gratify with excessive merry-making. This is the reason that he was always
destitute and eventually ran into a debt of some half a million pounds! It was a
colossal sum of money at that time. So he married Caroline, hoping that
Parliament would pay off his debts as a matter of political gratitude.
Caroline (Karoline Amalie Elisabeth) was born on May
17, 1768 in Brunswick (Germany). She was no idol of beauty; neither her face
possessed the usual feminine softness nor her figure was endowed with an air of
grace, expected of a royal lady. Her teeth were tolerable; she had fair hair
with matching eyebrows and fine eyes but she was short-statured with a heavy
bust. She was so sexy that some stunning gossip had accreted around her person.
It was said that her own parents would not allow her to move from one room to
another unless she was accompanied by her governess. Her problem seems to have
arisen from the fact that she was sexy but lacked the sex-appeal to lovers of
beautiful looks and good manners. Her difficuity was compounded by several other
factors: she was good humoured but relished vulgar jokes and loved to crack them
without any regard to her royal dignity; her vanity was yet another cause: it
exposed her to flattery, abundantly found in cheap lovers who desperately want
to hit their targets of lasciviousness. She had no real appreciation of morality
and was not quite capable of practising higher values. The way she dressed
herself depicted her personality: coarse petticoats and thread stlackings, were
some of her favourite wear.
Ceorge started insulting her right from the day she
landed on the British shore at 8.00 a.m. on Easter Day, 5th April, 17 1795. He
did not go to Gravesend to greet her in person. Ir stead, Lady Jersey, his
mistress, was one of the receptionists. She spoke to Caroline insolently and
criticised the way she was attired. Lady Jersey insisted that the Princess
should wear the satin dress that she (Lady Jersey) had brought with her. Lady
Jersey obviously had heard about the figure of Caroline and must have known
something about her vital statistics. As she put on the garment, all her
clumsiness stood out with an exaggerated effect to debase her bridal glory. The
seventeen-stone Prince was shocked to see his bride, who was full of vulgarity
and devoid of the least physical charm. Had he realised what he was letting
himself in for, he would have preferred the misery of debts to the mirth of
Caroline's embraces. Having realised what he had done, he picked up his courage,
and a day before his wedding, he rode to the house of Mrs. Fitzherbert for
stealing a glimpse of her freshness which he had befouled regularly with his
impure kisses, impious hugs and immoral marital performances. She was his wife
but he paraded her as his mistress. The grieved woman was in no position to give
him a signal of welcome. He took the cue from her nonchalance and returned in
tears. Maybe once in life-time, he did express his feelings sincerely when he
asked his brother William to convey the message to Mrs. Fitzherbert that she
would always be the centre of his affection. Then arrived the wedding day on 8th
April, 1795, with its full ferocity instead of its usual felicity. Good old
whisky, the saviour of every frustrated lover, came to his rescue by making him
forgetful of all pains and sorrows. So heavily he drank that he would have
jumped into hell thinking it heaven. All day the Duke of Bedford had to hold him
in his arms to keep nim upright. Caroline, on the contrary, enjoyed her
bridegroom's sadness with a sense of satisfaction. She smiled and cracked jokes
which made the listeners laugh with disgust instead of delight or delicacy of
manners.
After all, she was young and fleshy, and George's
appetite for youth and flesh would not be restrained by the lack of pretty
features. Somehow, he brought himself around to perform his marital duties, and
as a result became the father of a girl on 7th January, 1796. The girl was
called Charlotte. He obviously wanted a boy, and thought of the girl as a female
monster. When the fear af death gripped him, he deemed it wise to make his will,
which declared that all his possessions would go to "Maria Fitzherbert who
is my wife in the eyes of God," and left the precious sum of one whole
shilling to Caroline. Though the fear of death vanished. his determination to
live separately from Caraline survived.
Eventually, the marriage which technically did not
exist because of George IV's nuptial tie with Maria Fitzherbert, broke down and
Caroline started a war of attrition against him. In 1801, she moved into
Montague House on Blackheath. She made a habit of throwing large parties.
Discretion, decency and decorum, however, formed no part of these jollities.
Caroline not only loved telling scandalous stories of appalling nature but also
indulged in shameful behaviour. Any man caught by her fancy, was taken into her
bedroom for long sessions of love-making. Her most favourite subject was to talk
about the impotence of her husband to prove him a useless man who would have
been a better monk than a husband. To make her viciousness the source of her
satisfaction, she made sure that the tales of her ill-speech and ill-deeds
reached her husband. George was a competent lover who had seduced several
damsels and planned to deflower as many virgins as he could lay his hands on,
yet the wagging tongue of his frustrated wife, had become more injurious to him
than the cropping of a merciless rider to a refractory horse. The ruffled,
ruthless and remorseless husband instituted an enquiry into her personal life
which came to be known as the Delicate Investigation. George wanted a cause to
divorce her. All her fairweather friends and disloyal servants narrated and
invented stories of her infidelity, vulgarity and promiscuity; some had heard
her bed squeak all night, some saw her hugging a certain captain, some noticed
her play with the testes of a priest and some observed her shower long
passionate kisses on a footman. Even it was alleged that the Princess had given
birth to an illegitimate child who came to be known as William Austin. The
report was finalised on 14th July, 1806, but nothing came of it.
George IV, the Prince of Wales, became the Regent when
his father George III, was declared mad at the end of 1810. Now, he was the
source of honour and power. Harassed, humbled and humiliated, Caroline, though
still as stout, stern and severe as any Brunswick, longed for getting out of the
country. When she heard that the government was willing to grant her £50,000 a
year, she could not resist the temptation though Brougham did his best to
dissuade her. On 9th August, 1814, she set sail from Lancing in search of a new
life. Henry Peter Brougham was a politician who belonged to the Whig Party. He
rose to become Lord Chancellor of Eny land (1830-34). Known for his wit,
inventiveness, oratorial skill and legal accomplishment, he was naturally chosen
by Caroline to defend her in an action of annulment initiated in 1829 by her
husband, King George IV.
All the time that Caroline was enjoying the sunshine
and sexual prowess of Pergami, she was being watched closely by the British
agents. As a reward for his intimacy, Pergami, who was initially emoloyed as an
ordinary domestic servant, vvas quickly promoted to manage the household.
Because of his efficiency in the things that mattered most to Caroline, she
required him to occupy the room next to her bedchamber. This Italian, whose
physique had been reinforced with sexual abundance by sunshine and spaghetti,
was no fool. He knew that the seduction of a British Princess carried the
punishment of death. Though he iiked what Caroline offered, he was not keen on
the gallows. During the voyage, he told Dr. O'Ryan, the ship's surgeon, that in
the Russian campaign he met with an accident which affected the competence of
his loins. Declaring that he felt his genitalia permanently enclosed in a sheet
of ice, he could no longer perform in bed and therefore had no desire for women.
What a tale it was! It was invented to fool the British spies, out it did not
work.
As she heard that King George III had died on l9th
January, 1829, making her the Queen of Britain, she decided to come home.
Sharing the crown with her husband, though a lot less lascivious than
participating in Pergami's bed, was a good deal more luxurious in terms of
grace, grandeur, and glory.
She returned to pounce on her husband who had ordered
the expurgation of her name from the list of royalty that appeared in the
liturgy of the Church of England. In the meantime, the Milan Commission, had
sent their evidence about Caroline's relationship with Pergami who would not
dare accompany her to England. The House of Lords vetted the Commission's report
and found it a genuine basis for divorcing "Mr. Pergami's mistress."
Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, announced in the House of Lords a Bill of
Pains and Penalties seeking to prove Caroline's adultery, depriving her of the
royal title as the Queen and effecting her divorce from the King.
17th August, 1820, was a unique day in the history of
the House of Lords, one of the most pious and elevated political institutions of
the World. This is the day when Caroline took her seat amongst the noble Lords,
to hear how they were about to decide her fate. Having been a sparring partner
instead of a loving spouse, she appeared dauntless, daring and dignified. All
the dirt that political trials usually involve, was thrown at her with complete
diligence, deviation and devilishness. The evidence against her consisted of
some strange articles; amongst them were the squeaking boards, and two
chamber-pots which they kept under their bed! The filthy gossip which the
learned lawyers and noble Lords indulged in as options, arguments and
postulates, included 1400 pages of close print to describe the whole affair!
George's luck, despite his royal authority, ran out
when a vote was taken on the third reading of the Bill. It had a majority of
only 9, that is, 108 to 99. In fact, it was not a majority in the true
democratic sense because the number of votes cast by the cabinet ministers and
government placements amounted to over twenty. The Prime Minister wisely decided
to withdraw the Bill.
What went on between George and Caroline was not a
bickering but a sexual battle. On 19th April, she wrote to the Prime Minister
that she intended to attend the King's coronation which was to take place on
19th July, and also asked the King to appoint noble ladies, for bearing her
train! Of course, Coronation Day for any woman counts as the climax of her
career, and thus Caroline's request must have included an element of sincerity
yet it was not free from a barb. It meant that, despite his royal authority, he
had to accept her as a partner and if he did not like it, he would have to lump
it. Contrary to her desire, the Prime Minister conveyed her the King's message
which advised her to stay away from the ceremony. Caroline, a fearless
Brunswick, was not fabricated out of soft materials. Even Brougham, whose
splendid oratory and superb legal skill had saved her from the abyss of
divorcement, could not persuade her to resist the temptation. Marching in the
opposite direction. she wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury that she had been
inspired by a vision to demand a separate coronation of her own, and asked nim
to proceed as such.
The stubborn spouse, somehow, secured a ticket and
appeared at the door of Westminster Abbey to surprise the organisers. As thev
resisted, she thundered, " Let me pass; 1 am your Queen; I am the Queen of
Britain." But at the command of her equally obstinate husband, she was
refused admission. In fact, the door was banged in her face! This was too great
an insult to bear. She died of a broken heart cn 7th August, 1821.
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