Caroline of Brunswick: England's "Injured Queen"


1804 portrait of Caroline, Princess of Wales


August can be an unlucky month for European royalty, and that was especially true during the Regency. Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena in August of 1815. And in August of 1821 Caroline of Brunswick, the unacknowledged Queen of England, died a lonely death in London just three weeks after her estranged husband, the erstwhile “Prinny” or Prince Regent, was crowned King George lV.

1795 portrait of Caroline

An arranged marriage 

Caroline was unlucky throughout her life. Growing up in the German province of Brunswick, she was kept secluded by her family. They were especially determined to keep her away from the opposite sex. 

Her companions were mostly elderly females and governesses. She was sent to her room when guests came over and usually couldn't go to court functions or balls. And when she was permitted to attend a ball, she wasn't allowed to dance. 

She had even less luck in her married life.

Caroline’s husband, chosen for her, was the Prince of Wales, the future Prince Regent and King George IV of England.

She was by no means his one and only. By the time Prinny was considering marriage, he’d already had several mistresses and had even entered into an illegal marriage with a Catholic woman, Maria Fitzherbert. Though the marriage was never valid, Prinny referred to Maria as his wife for years after his marriage to Caroline.   

The only reason Prinny agreed to legally wed Caroline, or any woman at all, was because he was deeply in debt - millions of dollars in today's money. He regularly exceeded his generous annual allowance, and his lavish spending was taking its toll on the government coffers. 

King George III refused to settle his son's debts unless Prinny married an eligible princess. Prinny reluctantly agreed, on the condition that his allowance was to be doubled in addition to his debts being paid. 

And that’s how Caroline of Brunswick came into the picture. She was the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick and Princess Augusta. Her illustrious mother was the sister of King George III, which made her Prinny’s aunt. Not only was Caroline an eligible, Protestant princess, but the Prince's marriage to her would further strengthen the alliance between England and Brunswick. 

Meeting her prince

Even though Caroline and George were first cousins they’d never met. There were no photographs in those days, so the young couple relied on carefully crafted painted portraits to “see” each other – sort of like the 18th-century version of Tinder. 

1792 miniature of Prinny
But painted portraits, designed to flatter their subjects, can lie. When Caroline and George finally saw each other, right before their wedding, both were disappointed in their future mates. 

When Prinny first met his future bride he was taken aback. Caroline at 27 wasn't bad-looking, and some sources even describe her as pretty at this stage in her life, with golden curls. But she was short and rather heavy, graceless, and loud. She was also careless about her personal hygiene and had to be reminded to bathe more often and change her underclothes. 

You could see why someone as fussy and fastidious as the Prince would be appalled. After meeting Caroline, Prinny reportedly asked for a glass of brandy and retreated to the far corner of the room.

And Caroline later commented that her intended was “very fat and he's nothing like as handsome as his portrait." 

She was also unhappy with the Prince's obvious preference for the company of Lady Jersey, who was his mistress at the time. Prinny had sent Lady Jersey to meet his future bride when Caroline landed in England, and he also made his mistress his future wife's Lady of the Bedchamber. 

But despite these red flags, the royal pair went through with the wedding anyway, on April 8, 1795.

Off to a bad start

However, these bad first impressions congealed into real antipathy on the Prince’s side. He insisted later he only had sexual relations with his wife three times – twice after the wedding and once a week later. In any event, it was enough to conceive their only child, Princess Charlotte. Though they shared a residence (Carlton House) the couple unoffically separated within weeks of their marriage. After Charlotte was born, Caroline moved out, establishing herself in a rented place close to Blackheath.

His dynastic duty done, Prinny proceeded to publicly ignore his wife. As much as he could arrange it, she wasn't part of his life. She wasn't invited to his parties or court functions. He severely restricted her access to her child, insisting that a nurse or governess had to be with her when she visited the baby.

As far as the Prince of Wales was concerned, his legal wife didn't exist. He continued to exceed his allowance, overspending money on his palaces, clothes, mistresses, and entertainment.

And in the years that followed, stories began to circulate that the neglected Caroline had taken lovers – rumors that led to a "delicate invesitgation" into her conduct in 1806. During the investigation Caroline was not allowed to see her daughter at all, and even after the charges of infidelity were proved groundless Caroline's vists with Charlotte were further restricted to once a week, and only in the presence of her mother, the Dowager Duchess of Brunswick. 

Is it any wonder that Caroline fled England and into a self-imposed exile? In 1814 she went to Italy, but soon tales of her eccentric and scandalous behavior on the Continent reached England. One persistent rumor, which may very well have been true, claimed she was having an affair with her married Italian secretary, Bartolomeo Pergami. There were also unsubstantiated rumors of an illegitimate child. 

1792 caricature of Prinny 
Meanwhile, the Prince continued his extravagant lifestyle. He kept his wife ignorant of what was going on with their daughter, who got married in 1817. 

Even when Charlotte died in childbirth in 1819, Caroline wasn't informed of the tragic news directly by her husband. She had to find out from a stranger.  

Charlotte's death and the death of her stillborn son made Caroline's position in the royal family even more tenuous. As Prinny's estranged wife, she had much less clout than she would have had as the mother and grandmother of heirs to the throne.

So when mad old King George III died in 1820 and it was Prinny’s turn to become King, Caroline decided it was time to return to England. She was determined to claim her rightful role as Queen Consort. 

The new King, however, was equally determined that she would never sit beside him on the throne. 

A determined divorce attempt

1821 cartoon of Pergami and Caroline in Genoa
In August of 1820 Prinny tried to divorce Caroline through the mechanism of a special “Bill of Pains and Penalties" in Parliament. If passed, the bill would have denied Caroline her title as well as nullify her marriage to the King. 

With great solemnity Caroline was put on trial, accused of infidelity and grossly improper conduct while she was living in Italy. 

Italian servants who had witnessed her interactions with Pergami were called to testify against her, while character witnesses spoke in favor of the queen. 

That autumn the trial was the topic of gossip and conversation in every London drawing room and country cottage. For three months it consumed the public's attention, eclipsing any other news.

But in the end, Prinny's scheme failed. Caroline was simply too popular with the people of Great Britain. Despite her wayward behavior, the general public sympathized with her. 

The British people detested their prince for his years of immoral living and lavish spending while they endured economic hardships due to the expensive wars waged against Napoleon. They also blamed him for his harsh treatment of the woman he was joined to by the sanctity of marriage. 

So the new king's subjects rallied to the defense of their queen with petitions and a million signatures. In November the bill was withdrawn. 

Prinny was frustrated. The elaborate July 19, 1821, coronation he'd planned for himself was fast approaching, and he was adamant that he wasn't going to share his special day with his unwanted wife. 

An uncrowned queen

When coronation day came, Prinny not only didn't invite Caroline, he gave orders that she was not to be admitted to Westminster Abbey for the ceremony. She showed up anyway and banged on the doors, demanding to be let in. She was turned away.

Defeated, the unacknowledged Queen went back to her lodgings at Brandenburg House in Hammersmith. On July 30 she fell ill, and she died about a week later at the age of 53. The date was August 7, 1821- coincidentally six years to the day that Napoleon was forced to leave English shores for exile on St. Helena.  

Prinny may have been able to command his guards to bar Caroline from his coronation, but he couldn’t command his people to forsake their uncrowned Queen. Caroline’s funeral cortège was mobbed as it made its way through London to the port at Harwich. 

Initially, officials decided to have the procession avoid the city on its way to the coast, but throngs of mourners blocked the intended route and forced a rerouting through London and Westminster. Guards who tried to control the unruly crowd with drawn sabers had rocks and bricks thrown at them. 

At Harwich, Caroline's remains were put on a ship destined for Germany. At her request, Caroline was buried in Brunswick Cathedral. She’d left instructions for her casket plate to read "Here lies Caroline, the Injured Queen of England." 

Jane Austen weighs in 

Like most of the British public, Jane Austen had an opinion on the squabbles between the royal couple. She was firmly on what today we’d call “Team Caroline.”  

Here’s what she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1813 about Caroline, who was then the Princess of Wales:

“Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband  . . . but if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first.”



Charles and Diana at their wedding on July 19, 1981


A modern parallel

In our time there was another Prince and Princess of Wales who had an unhappy marriage, and that marriage has often been compared to Prinny and Caroline’s unfortunate union. Like Caroline, Diana was much more popular than her husband, and Diana had to endure the humiliation of her husband’s very public extramarital affair. And like Caroline, Diana also died in August, although Diana died violently in a horrific car crash as she was being chased through the streets and tunnels of Paris by camera-wielding paparazzi. 

But I don’t think the comparison between the two royal marriages holds up. Charles is no George IV, a man who was silly, vain, and frequently cruel to his wife and daughter. 

And the problems in Charles and Diana’s troubled marriage were intensified by the relentless pursuit of shocking headlines by an insatiable media. George and Caroline may have been lampooned by the press of their day, but their experience was nothing like their 20th-century counterparts had to endure.

In the end, the factors and personalities involved in the breakdown of these two royal marriages are unique to each case. As Tolstoy observed in his novel Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 

Caroline of Brunswick undoubtedly felt unloved and unwanted by her husband. And that’s an injury no royal title can’t heal.   




Sources include:

  • The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency 1811-20, by J.B. Priestley, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1969.
  • Our Tempestuous Day, by Carolly Erickson, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1986.
  • An Elegant Madness, High Society in Regency England, by Venetia Murray, Viking (Penguin Putnam, Inc.) New York, 1999.
  • The Regency Companion, by Sharon Laudermilk and Teresa L. Hamlin, Garland Publishing Inc., New York and London, 1989.


Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Napoleon's last cruise

 

On deck looking towards St. Helena (photo by Andrew Neaum, CC BY-SA 3.0)


In this strange pandemic year, most summer cruises have been canceled. But during another summer 205 years ago it was a different story for at least one man. 

That August the former Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, set out unwillingly on a special cruise, designed just for him. His ship was no luxury liner; it was more like a prison transport, taking him to his final place of exile.  

Consequences of Waterloo

I doubt Napoleon knew he’d wind up in St. Helena after the British coalition of armies led by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian army commanded by Field Marshal von Blücher decisively defeated the French forces at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. But Napoleon probably suspected that his glorious career as a general and an emperor had run its course.

St. Helena, circled in red, on a map


Napoleon’s first stop after his defeat was Paris. There he methodically prepared for the next phase of his life. After all, it wasn’t the first time he’d lost a battle and been forced into exile. 

However, Napoleon’s exile to Elba in 1814 following the Treaty of Fontainebleau was upended when the emperor managed to escape to France and assemble another army. 

Napoleon must have realized that the British were determined not to let history repeat itself. This time, the consequences of defeat would have to mean permanent exile. However, Napoleon wanted to exert some control over where he would spend the rest of his life. 

But first, he had business to attend to. In Paris, he abdicated his throne in favor of his son. Which incidentally didn’t work – the French throne went to Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, the unfortunate monarch who was guillotined during the French Revolution.

The next step in Napoleon’s retirement plan was to escape France and go to the United States. He was even promised a passport to the U.S. by the French provisional government.

But the promised passport never materialized. So Napoleon decided to take matters into his own hands. He went to Rochefort, a port on the southwestern coast of France. Still determined to go to the U.S., he hoped to slip past the Royal Navy blockade.  

On the Bellerophon in Plymouth, 1815
 

A thwarted escape 

But Napoleon’s dreams of escape evaporated when he saw the tall ships of the Royal Navy blocking every conceivable exit. So, on July 15, 1815, Napoleon accepted the inevitable and surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland aboard the HMS Bellerophon, a British man-of-war anchored off the small island of Aix near Rochefort. 

“I have come to put myself under the protection of your prince [that would be the Prince Regent] and your laws,” said the man who was once a feared British foe.

Next, the Bellerophon carried the former Emperor of the French (now known simply as General Bonaparte) to Plymouth and Torquay Harbour on the north shore of Tor Bay. At Torquay Napoleon stayed on the ship, becoming a tourist attraction for the curious who clustered onto small boats and rowed out into the English Channel hoping to catch a glimpse of the defeated emperor. 

If Napoleon thought he’d ever get off a Royal Navy ship while in England he was sadly mistaken. British officials vowed they wouldn’t make the same blunder they’d made in 1814. So they decided to exile their old enemy to a remote location far away from Europe and any chance of a comeback. On July 31 Napoleon was told that he was headed for St. Helena, an island off the coast of Africa.

Concerned that the aging Bellerophon couldn’t make the voyage, the Navy transferred Napoleon to another ship, the HMS Northumberland, which set sail for St. Helena on August 7, finally leaving British waters on August 9. 

Napoleon left the British Isles without ever having set foot on British soil. 

St. Helena in 1815

Napoleon on board the Northumberland


The trip down the African coast took about two months, and the ship didn’t reach St. Helena until October 15. According to contemporary accounts, Napoleon grew silent on the deck of the Northumberland when he first spotted his future home.

I don’t think he was struck dumb with admiration. I imagine his heart sank when he saw the island’s forbidding cliffs rising out of the ocean.

On the globe St. Helena looks like an isolated speck in the middle of the vast South Atlantic Ocean. It’s basically a rock, 1,200 miles west of Angola on the African continent, and 2,500 miles east of Rio de Janeiro. 

It is a volcanic island, 47 square miles in area, attached to the ocean floor with only the tip visible above sea level. St. Helena’s nearest neighbor is Ascension Island, another volcanic island and British possession, about 800 miles northwest of St. Helena. 

And on the uninhabited Ascension Island, as yet another precaution, a garrison of British soldiers under the command of Sir Edward Nicolls of the Royal Marines was stationed. 

During his stay on St. Helena, Napoleon was guarded by 3,000 troops, and four ships constantly patrolled the coastline to prevent any escape attempts. The man in charge of the famous prisoner, Sir Hudson Lowe, was a harsh and ruthless jailor. Napoleon was not going to escape on his watch. 

Longwood House (photo by David Stanley, CC BY 2.0)



Death of the emperor

Napoleon only lasted less than six years in exile. He spent most of his time in Longwood House, built especially for him. But the house and general location were described by Napoleon and his fellow exiles as humid, damp, and unhealthy - conditions which may have contributed to his death.  

Napoleon had many health complaints, including liver problems, towards the end of his life, and he died May 5, 1821, at the age of 51. His doctor listed his cause of death as stomach cancer, but for years there was speculation that he was poisoned by arsenic, either deliberately or accidentally. Lately, though, the death-by-poison theory has been discredited. 

The former emperor was buried on St. Helena, but in 1840 the French King Louis-Philippe arranged for Napoleon’s remains to be returned to Paris, where they were buried in splendor under the Dome of Les Invalides. 

Napoleon spent much of his time on St. Helena dictating his memoirs. Of his contribution to France during the French Revolution, he said: “I have unscrambled Chaos. I have cleansed the Revolution, ennobled the common people, and restored the authority of kings.”  

Following Napoleon's death, the last of his 20 companions in exile left St. Helena. They departed at the end of May in 1821 and arrived back in Europe on August 2 – another summer cruise courtesy of the Royal Navy.  

St. Helena today

Although it’s still remote (the internet didn’t reach the island until 2015) today St. Helena is becoming a tourist magnet for history buffs, hardy hikers, rock climbers, bird watchers, and anyone who enjoys an adventure.

The “Saints,” as the residents are called, encourage the tourist trade with charming restaurants and hotels. I’m sure the cuisine and the accommodations are a decided improvement over what Napoleon experienced 200 years ago. 

There is also much natural beauty on the island to enjoy, as well as boat tours that showcase the large pods of frolicking dolphins and scores of whale sharks in the surrounding sea. You can even visit a resident group of tortoises, one of which is almost 200 years old. And of course, there are many memorials to the island's famous former resident. 

St. Helena airport (photo by Paul Tyson, CC BY 3.0)


The once-arduous trip has been made a little easier with the construction of an airport, although you may want to think twice about taking that route. Flights to the island are notoriously rough due to high winds and the dangerous effects of wind shear. 

Before the airport began to offer regular flights in 2017, to get to the island a traveler had to fly to Cape Town, usually by way of Johannesburg, and then be prepared to embark on a 5-6 day boat trip aboard the cargo liner RMS St. Helena. Bad weather or other complications could make the trip even longer.   

That puts Napoleon’s 2-month voyage from England to St. Helena into perspective.

Traces of Napoleon 

Napoleon’s exile on St. Helena seems an inglorious end for someone who had a spectacular career, especially considering his meteoric rise from the lowly ranks of an artillery officer to Emperor of France. But even in 1802, over a decade before his final exile, Napoleon seemed aware of the risk that was inherent in an ambition like his, and he accepted it.

As he put it, “It would be better never to have lived at all than to leave behind no trace of one’s existence.”

Napoleon would no doubt be relieved to know that in St. Helena, Europe, and across the world, there are plenty of traces that attest to the existence of Monsieur Bonaparte. 


"Napoleon on St. Helena," Franz Josef Sandmann, 1820


Sources:

“From Waterloo to the island of St. Helena,” by Joanna Benazet and Irène Delage,  October 2015 (translation Rebecca Young); Napoleon.org, the history website of the Fondation Napoleon 

The Wars of Napoleon: The History of the Strategies, Tactics, and Leadership of the Napoleonic Era, by Albert Sidney Britt III, The West Point Military History Series, Thomas E. Greiss, Series Editor, Department of History, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, Avery Publishing Group Inc., Wayne, New Jersey, 1985. 

"Why You Should Visit St. Helena, home to the ‘worlds’ most useless airport’," by Julia Buckley, Independent.co.us, Thursday, 28 December 2017 




Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Party at Pemberley

 

The exterior of Lyme Park doubled as Pemberley in the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice.
(Wikimedia Commons; photo by Mike Peel, CC-BY-SA-4.0)


I’ve noticed that Jane Austen doesn’t go into a lot of details about food in her novels. But there’s one meal in Pride and Prejudice that’s described in some detail: the refreshments Mr. Darcy serves Elizabeth Bennet and her aunt when they pay a social visit to Pemberley. 

By this point in the story, Elizabeth has roundly rejected Darcy’s awkward and rather insulting proposal of marriage. But Elizabeth’s hard feelings towards Darcy begin to melt when she sees him in his natural surroundings at Pemberley, his impressive country home. 

Austen describes the informal meal like this:

“The next variation which their visit afforded was produced by the entrance of servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in season; but this did not take place till after many a significant look and smile from Mrs. Annesley to Miss Darcy had been given, to remind her of her post. There was now employment for the whole party; for though they could not all talk, they could all eat; and the beautiful pyramids of grapes, nectarines and peaches soon collected them around the table.”

“For though they could not all talk, they could all eat” – if that isn’t a romantic description of the shyness of awakening love, I don’t know what is! 

Though this meal is set during the Regency era, it seems like something easily put together today. In fact, here is my attempt at recreating Darcy’s spread, although on a much smaller scale:

My recreation of the refreshment table at Pemberley

My version of cold meats is deli-sliced turkey breast. I did my best to construct mini-pyramids of peaches and nectarines and grapes. And my cake is store-bought lemon poppy-seed muffins. Since Jane Austen didn’t mention what beverages were served, I took a guess and added a cup of tea.

Not bad, if I do say so myself. About the only thing missing from my set-up, besides an ample quantity of food, is the servants. I can almost imagine Mr. Darcy standing stiffly by the table, watching with yearning eyes as Elizabeth selects a delicate morsel or two. 

But what kind of cake would we see at Pemberley at this time in history? One thing is certain: the kitchen staff wouldn’t have been able to pop down to the supermarket and buy a pack of muffins.

No, more than likely the Pemberley cook would have chosen a recipe from her trusty cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind yet published, written by “a Lady.”  

The “Lady” behind this project was Hannah Glasse, an English housewife, who wrote her cookbook primarily as an instruction manual for servants. She published it herself in 1747, and it was a hit with the public for at least a hundred years, going through 40 editions. 

Along with her contemporaries, Jane Austen would have certainly been familiar with Hannah Glasse’s recipes. This book was an indispensable reference in households across Great Britain. 

And the topics covered in the book went far beyond food. They included recipes for ridding a home of pests, cleaning fabric, cures for the bite of a rabid dog, and even a powder to treat heartburn, which could be necessary if you overindulged in Hannah’s culinary creations. 

Hannah’s book was also popular in America, both before and after the Revolutionary War. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington all owned copies. 

The Art of Cookery made Hannah Glasse famous, and her fame as a cookbook author is even more noteworthy because of the prejudice she had to surmount as a female. Rumors abounded that her book must have been written by a man because it was too well-organized and thorough—basically too good— to have been written by a woman. 

Even Samuel Johnson, one of the most influential literary critics of the 18th century, held that opinion. According to his biographer James Boswell, Johnson said that “Women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of cookery.”  

It’s a shame Glasse didn’t include a recipe for crow in her book – it would have been a good dish to serve Johnson and other critics as The Art of Cookery became a bona fide bestseller.  

Title page of the 1777 edition (Wikimedia Commons)

But what prompted Hannah to write her groundbreaking book? The main reason was that she needed the money. However, in her introductory note to the reader, Glasse explains her other motivation: she wanted to improve the cooking skills of servants, which was a novel idea at the time:

"I believe I have attempted a branch of Cookery, which nobody has yet thought to be worth their while to write upon: but as I have both seen, and found, by experience, that the generality of servants are greatly wanting in that point, therefore I have taken it upon me to instruct them in the best manner I am capable; and I dare say, that every servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good cook, and those who have the least notion of Cookery cannot miss of being very good ones.”

So, back to that summer afternoon at Pemberley: I wonder what kind of cake our fictional cook might have made to serve Darcy’s guests?

If she had consulted Chapter 15 of The Art of Cookery, “Of making Cakes, &c.” she would have been presented with a lot of choices. 

For example, she might have decided to make a "rich cake" for the occasion. All she would have needed is four pounds of flour, seven pounds of currants, six pounds of butter, two pounds of Jordan almonds, four pounds of eggs,  three pounds of sugar, a bunch of spices (including cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger), wine, brandy and “sweet-meats to your liking,” – as long as you like orange, lemon, and citron.  Now that’s a rich cake indeed!

Or, if the cook had a supply of caraway seeds she might settle on a seed cake. Hannah’s "rich seed cake, called the nun's cake" also calls for lots of butter (four pounds) along with 35 eggs (16 of which have to be separated, yolks from whites). However, for this cake, the cook had better be prepared to beat the batter (by hand, of course) for “two hours together.” 

Two hours! You’ve got to admit, that’s true devotion to baking. It also sounds like quite a workout —you could really build up strong arm muscles that way.

My seed cakes are made with poppy seeds instead of caraway seeds, and they didn’t take me any time at all, just a trip to the market. But I’m sure Hannah’s cakes would have tasted better – or at least a lot richer. 

And who knows? It could be that a bite of a delicious buttery cake laced with brandy and wine was what turned the tide of Elizabeth’s affections toward Mr. Darcy. 

It certainly couldn’t have hurt!

Photo from Pixabay

Note: If you'd like to read The Art of Cookery, you can get the whole text on Google Books.  


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