Chapter XII: A Crown Lost, and a Grave Won (1)

The Queen’s agitation--Her illness--Her sufferings--Desires
her diary may be destroyed--Her death--Sketch of her life--
Her mother a foolish woman--Every sense of justice outraged by
the King--Inconsistency of the Whigs--The Queen persecuted
even after death--Disrespect shown to her remains by the
Government--Protest against a disgraceful haste to remove
her remains--Course of the funeral procession interrupted by
the people--Collision between the military and the populace
--Effort to force a way through the people ineffectual--The
procession compelled to pass through the City--The plate on
the Queen’s coffin removed--The funeral reaches Harwich--The
Queen’s remains taken to Brunswick--Funeral oration--Tombs of
the illustrious dead there.

The coronation-day killed the Queen. The agitations and sufferings of that eventful day called into deadly action the germs of the disease under which she ultimately succumbed. Once only, between that day and her death, did she appear in public, at Drury Lane Theatre, and even then she may be said to have been dying.

On August the 2nd, the first bulletin issued from Brandenburgh House, by ‘W. G. Maten, P. Warren, and H. Holland,’ announced that her Majesty was suffering from internal inflammation and obstruction. Her sufferings were considerable, but they were borne with resignation; and she even expressed a cheerful readiness to be gone from a world in which she had endured more than she had enjoyed. Her own conviction, from the first, was that her malady would prove fatal. No whisper of hope appeared to deceive or to cheer her. She was determined, as it were, that she must die, and she prepared for the worst. Her feelings were natural to a woman of her disposition and character. She felt that, despite all solemn protestation, notwithstanding all as solemn assertion, she had failed in re-establishing the reputation which she enjoyed during the early years of her residence in this country. The abandonment of the Bill of Pains and Penalties had not rescued her from degradation; and the people, who were ready to offer her consolation as a woman who had been most deeply wronged and outraged, were by no means so ready to espouse her cause further than this. She had herself confessed to indiscretions, and when the confession applies to constant repetition of the offence, the public judgment, even with nothing more to warrant its exercise, will never be slow to hold her who acknowledges so much as being guilty of more. In her position, with a reputation so soiled, and torn, and trodden upon; which could not be made bright by any declaration (poor indeed) that she was not so debased as she was declared to be by her adversaries; for a woman so placed, to die is the sole joy left her, if she has made the peace with God which can never again exist between her and man. Her few friends were accustomed to say that in after years her good fame would be substantiated. After years--alas! Of what use to the drowned sailor is the favourable wind _after_ shipwreck? Assuredly, her own character perished more by her own suicidal acts than by the assaults made upon it by those who were interested in damning it; just as ‘Tom Paine’ himself has said that a writer may destroy his own reputation, which cannot be affected by the pens of other writers.

To die then was now in the very fitness of things, and death made but brief work with his new victim. Between the second and the seventh of August the suffering never ceased sufficiently to warrant serious hope of amelioration. During the intervening time she continued to express her willingness to depart. She signed her will, gave with calmness all necessary orders which she wished to be observed, spoke charitably of all, and little of herself. Among her last acts was one of sacrifice, and perhaps posterity will regret it. She ordered the diary, which she had long kept, and in which she had entered the characters of the most prominent persons with whom she had come in contact, to be burned. This is said to have been done in her presence; but so many things only seem to be done in a dying presence that our successors may not despair, hereafter, of becoming more intimate with Caroline, her thoughts and feelings, than she ever permitted her contemporaries to be. The great chance against posterity being allowed to read the scandalous chronicle or the justifying confessions of Caroline lies in the fact that the series of journals were burned by a foreign female servant, who knew nothing of their value. Such, at least, was the accredited report.

After nearly five days of intense suffering, the Queen sank into a stupor from which she never awoke. At half-past ten o’clock on the morning of the seventh of August, 1821, ‘after an entire absence of sense and faculty for more than two hours,’ Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick, Queen Consort of George IV., expired almost without a struggle. In her supreme hour only her faithful friends, Lord and Lady Hood and Lady Anne Hamilton, were with her. Her legal and medical advisers, with Alderman Wood and one of his sons, were also near her person. She had completed fifty-three years and three months; of these she passed by far the happier and the more innocent half--happier because the more innocent--in Brunswick. Of the following nineteen years spent in England, eighteen of them were passed in separation from, and most of them in quarrelling with, her husband. For the first nine or ten years of this period she lived without offence and free from suspicion; during the remainder she was struggling to re-establish a fame which had been wrongfully assailed; but this was accompanied by such eccentricity and indiscretion that she seemed almost to justify the suspicion under which she had suffered. Then came the half-dozen years of her residence abroad, when she too often shaped her conduct as though she had alacrity in furnishing matter condemnatory against herself to the spies by whom she was surrounded. To say that they exaggerated her offences does not, unfortunately, prove her guiltless of great crime. Her return to England was a bold step, but it was one she was compelled to take. It failed, however, in its great purpose. She did not triumph. Justice, indeed, was not rendered her, for she was condemned before she was tried; and though the trial was not carried to its intended conclusion, he who would now stand forth as the champion of Caroline of Brunswick would be necessarily accounted of as possessing more generosity than judgment.

Nevertheless, for this poor woman there is something to be said. She was ill-educated; religiously educated, not at all; and never had religious principles as expounded by any particular church. Her mother was a foolish, frivolous woman, and her father, whom she ardently loved, a brave, handsome, vicious man, who made his wife and daughters sit down in company with his mistresses. With such an example before her, what could be expected from an ardent, spirited, idle, and careless girl? Much--if she had been blessed with a husband of principle, a man who would have tempered the ardour to useful ends, guided the spirit to profitable purpose, and taught the careless girl to learn and love the cares, or duties, rather, which belonged to her position. But by whom, and what, was that Princess encountered in England, whither she had come to marry a Prince who had condescended to have her inflicted on him, and bringing with her the memories of pleasant communings with more courteous wooers in Brunswick? She met a husband who consigned her to companionship with women more infamous than ever she herself became, and whose interest and business it was to render the wife disgusting to the husband. They speedily accomplished the end they had in view, and when they had driven the wife from the palace they endeavoured to prove her to be guilty of vices which she had not then, in common with themselves and her husband. If he ever justly complained of wrong, he at least took infinite pains to merit all that was inflicted on him. He outraged every sense of justice when, steeped to the very lips in uncleanness, he demanded that his consort should be rendered for ever infamous, for the alleged commission of acts for which he claimed impunity on his own account. She was not, perhaps, betrayed by the Whigs, but these rather took up her cause for the reason that it served them politically than put credence in its righteousness. They were, however, the voluntary champions of her virtue. Lord Holland was among the first of them, and yet in his contemporary Diary he says of her, ‘She was at best a strange woman, and a very sorry and uninteresting heroine. She had, they say, some talent, some pleasantry, some good-humour, and great spirit and courage. But she was utterly destitute of all female delicacy, and exhibited, in the whole course of the transactions relating to herself, very little feeling for anybody, and very little regard for honour and truth, or even for the interests of those who were devoted to her, whether the people in the aggregate, or the individuals who enthusiastically espoused her cause. She avowed her dislike for many, _scarcely concealed her contempt for all_’ (no wonder); ‘in short, to speak plainly, if not mad, she was a very worthless woman.’ So wrote one who had asserted directly the contrary.

But it was the lot of this unhappy Queen to be persecuted even after death. Her will, in which she bequeathed the little she had to leave to William Austin, the protégé, who did not long survive her, contained a clause to this effect: ‘I desire and direct that my body be not opened, and that three days after my death it be carried to Brunswick for interment, and that the inscription on my coffin be, “Here lies Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England.”’

The government, acting under alleged orders from the King, but influenced, no doubt, by a wish not to mar the festivities attendant upon the visit of George IV. to Ireland, by allowing the Queen’s body to remain longer than needful in England, announced their intention to pay every sort of respect to the orders and wishes of her late Majesty, and to despatch the body to Harwich at once, for embarkation. The personal friends of Caroline protested against this unseemly readiness, on the part of the ministers, to obey the wishes of one who, when alive, never had a wish that was not thwarted. Lady Hood addressed a letter to Lord Liverpool, not so much, indeed, as she said to _him_, as to his heart. The letter pleaded for delay, on the ground of the Queen’s ladies being unprepared; and it expressly protested against the intended military escort, as being an honour never allowed to the Queen when living, and one not certainly desired by her, who was sufficiently guarded by the people’s love. Reply was made that the arrangements already resolved upon were irrevocable, and that, if the ladies were not provided with the necessary mourning, there would be nothing disrespectful in waiting behind till they had been furnished with what was necessary, and then joining in the procession anywhere on its route. There was a singular want of courtesy in all the communications made by the ministry to the friends of the Queen. The latter could not even learn by what route the body would be conveyed to Harwich. The most direct road was through the City of London, and the mayor and corporation had announced their intention to attend on the royal remains on the passage through the City. The government curtly intimated that the funeral _cortège_ would not be allowed to pass through the City at all. From the same source it was subsequently learned that the coffin would be carried by the circuitous route of the New Road to Romford, and then by the direct road to Harwich. The popular disgust was justifiably great. Lord Liverpool asserted that he and his colleagues were influenced only by feelings which prompted them to show full respect to the wishes of the deceased Queen. How very little the noble lord was really influenced by the feelings in question may be seen in Dean Pellew’s Life of Lord Sidmouth. In that work there is a letter from Lord Liverpool, in which the writer says that he would have despatched the body the whole way by water to Harwich, had he not been afraid of the passage at London Bridge! In other words, he would have paid it as much disrespect as was in his power, only that he feared a popular demonstration of unwelcome character at the bridge.

On the 14th of August, the government authorised the persons employed by them to remove the body from Hammersmith. There had been very scant ceremony displayed in a ‘lying in state,’ and the preparations now were but of a meagre description. A few tawdry escutcheons, a tinsel coronet, heralds in private dresses, and a military escort, looking mournful rather because of the rain, which fell in torrents, than for any other reason.

When Sir George Naylor, in his official tabard, and Mr. Bailey, the undertaker, authorised by government to carry out the prescribed arrangements, entered the room where the body lay, in order to remove it, they were met by Dr. Lushington, who stood at the head of a small group of her Majesty’s friends, and protested against the intended removal, on account of over-haste, and also against the attendance of the soldiery. ‘I enter my solemn protest,’ said the doctor, ‘in right of the legal power which is vested in me by her late Majesty, as executor. I command that the body be not removed till the arrangements suitable to the rank and dignity of the deceased are made.’ Mr. Bailey declared that, with the authority he held, the body must be removed. ‘Touch it not, at your peril,’ exclaimed Dr. Lushington. Mr. Bailey asked if he intended to use or to recommend violence. The legal executor answered that he would neither assist in nor recommend violence. Whereupon the government officer declared that he should discharge his duty firmly and, he hoped, properly.

But he had to encounter a second duel of words with the other executor, Mr. Wilde, who protested as Dr. Lushington had done, and to as little purpose. Mr. Bailey said that his orders were imperative, and he would take upon himself the responsibility and peril of removing the body.

The procession then set out, and never had Queen a funeral of such strange ceremony and circumstance. The mourners comprised those friends and legal advisers who have been so often named: some of them were not in the mourning coaches, but in their own private carriages. It was a strictly government funeral (the King, it was said, paid all the expenses); but there was a multitude who descended into the streets on that day. There were many among them who deemed that the funeral charges would, after all, be defrayed out of the public pocket. They were accordingly determined that their own programme should be followed, and that the body of the Queen should be carried through the City of London. The ministers, unwisely, were as obstinately bent in dragging the dead Queen through the outskirts, and getting her to Harwich in as unceremonious a manner as possible. They professed great respect, but it is certain that they meant none, and it was because the people were convinced of this that they occupied the highways on that stormy morning, resolute to bear the inanimate Caroline, as it were, and as she had desired, on the popular shoulders, through the very centre of the great metropolis.

It was between seven and eight o’clock when the funeral procession, escorted by or rather partly made up of, cavalry, passed through Hammersmith. It met with no obstruction until it reached Kensington Church. At this point the first attempt to turn out of the direct road leading to the City, by conducting the _cortège_ up Church Street into the Bayswater Road, was met by a hoarse cry of execration on the part of the people. They went further than protest. In a brief space of time the road was dug up, rendered impassable, and obstructed by a barricade that would have won the approval of a Parisian professor of tumults. The military escort kept their places and their tempers; but the Life Guards, with the chief magistrate of Bow Street, Sir Richard Baker, speedily appeared. They saw the uselessness of attempting to force a passage; and when the order was given to proceed in the direct route to London, there broke forth a thundering shout of victory about the hearse of the unconscious Queen, as though expressly raised to give her assurance that the people had compelled respect to her will.

In the Park the multitude had spent many of the morning hours in rushing from the south to the north side, from the north to the south; and again and again repeating the same movement, according as report reached them that the funeral would pass by one or the other line. The issue of the struggle at Kensington having been announced in the Park, the great body of the people there had now moved once more to the south side, and were pouring into the Knightsbridge Road. Meanwhile, orders had been received from ministers, by Sir Richard Baker and the commander of the Life Guards, to lead the procession through the Kensington Gate of Hyde Park into the Edgeware Road. But at the gate the scene which had been enacted at Church Street was replayed with some additions. The people forcibly held the gates closed, placed every impediment in the way which they could collect, and were so fiercely demonstrative with their cry of ‘The City! the City!’ that magistrate and military again yielded to the popular will, and the body, which had halted amid the tumult, was once again carried forward amid shouts of triumph.

The delay had afforded time to Sir Richard Baker to apply to ministers for fresh instructions. These were forwarded to him in a peremptory order to see that the procession was conducted into the Edgeware Road, either by the east side of the Park or through Park Lane. At both points the suspicious and exasperated populace were ready for the expected contest. It was here that the matter assumed a more serious aspect than it had yet worn. The soldiery began to grow chafed at an opposition which, in its turn, began to be emphasised by the employment of missiles. The attempt to pass up the Park was made in vain; that to force Park Lane was equally ineffectual. But while the struggle was raging at the latter point the line of procession was broken, and that part of it near the gate turned into the Park, carrying the hearse with it. The military at Park Lane turned back, followed the successful Mr. Bailey and his followers, and closing the gates upon the public, the body of the Queen was borne, at an unseemly pace, onwards to Cumberland Gate. But the increasingly-excited people were light of foot, and when the head of the funeral line reached Cumberland Gate, with the intention to proceed, not down Oxford Street to the City, but up the Edgeware and, subsequently, the New Road, there was a compact mass resolved to give no passage, and determined to carry the royal corpse through the metropolis. It was here that Sir Robert Wilson endeavoured to mediate between the multitude and the military. The commander of the latter had no discretionary power, and could only obey his orders. His men, hitherto, had exhibited great forbearance, but their patience was overcome when they found themselves fairly attacked by the populace at this point. Neither mob nor soldiers were really culpable. The blame rested entirely with the ministry, whose folly and obstinacy had provoked the conflict, and made victims on both sides. The military (by which is to be understood the Life Guards, and not the ‘Blues,’ who formed part of the procession, and were quiescent throughout the day) at last fired a volley, by which several persons were severely injured, and two men, Francis and Honey, were slain. Not a few of the military were seriously wounded by the missiles flung at them in return, but the hitherto victors were vanquished. They gave way, and across the blood that had been spilt, and among the wounded lying around, the people’s Queen, as they called her, was once more carried on the way which the respectful feelings of the ministry taught them it was best for her to go.

The defeat and the victory seemed respectively accepted by the different parties. The individuals having the body in charge, and the escort, pushed hurriedly forward with the hearse towards the New Road. But several of the mourners here left a procession to form part of which was attended with peril to life. The multitude looked moodily on; but suddenly, as if by common impulse, perhaps at suggestion of some shout, they, too, rushed forward, determined to make one more attempt at achieving a victory for themselves and the unconscious Queen.

They who were conducting the body along the New Road towards Romford did not dream of further opposition, and their astonishment was great when, on arriving at Tottenham Court Road, they found all progress, east or northward, completely obstructed, and no way open for them but southward, towards the City. In this direction they were compelled to turn, hailed by the popular exultation, and met with shouts of execration and menace, as they sought, but vainly, at each outlet down the east side of Tottenham Court Road, to find a passage back into the suburban line. In the same way the procession was forced down Drury Lane, into the Strand. Sir Richard Baker did not yield to anything but compulsion, yet he lost his office, as Sir Robert Wilson did his commission, for endeavouring to do his duty under most trying and difficult circumstances. Once in the Strand, the people felt that their victory had been fairly and irrevocably achieved. When the royal body was carried under Temple Bar, its advent there was hailed with such a wild ‘hurrah’ as had never met the ears of living sovereign. For seven hours that body had been dragged through wind, and rain, and mud--the King’s will drawing it in one direction, the people in another. How much or how little the latter were influenced by earnest attachment to her for whom, dead, they made their demonstration, even to the shedding of blood, it is not easy to say. There is less difficulty in coming to the decision that they who professed to be carrying out the King’s commands served him ill, and even perilled his crown on that day. The King himself, however, is known to have been exceedingly wroth against the government for not having employed more stringent measures in order to fulfil his commands. The triumph of a dead wife embittered more than one joyous banquet in the Irish capital.

The civil authorities of the City, hurriedly collected for the occasion, accompanied the royal remains as far as the eastern limit of the City’s ‘liberty,’ Whitechapel. Thence to Romford the funeral train proceeded at a very varied pace, sometimes as slowly as became the solemnity of a funeral, at others the pace would have been counted lively enough for a wedding. At Romford, the mourners who had rejoined the _cortège_ passed the night, but the royal corpse was carried on to Colchester, where it rested for the night, in St. Peter’s Church.

It was during this night that the silver plate announcing the occupant of the coffin as ‘the injured,’ or, according to some, ‘the murdered, Queen of England,’ was affixed to the lid. Whenever this was done the plate was not allowed to remain. It was removed and replaced by another, inscribed simply with the deceased’s name and titles and dates, in the usual form. They who have visited the vaults beneath the Church of St. Blaize, the patron of Brunswick, may remember that the marks of the nails which fastened the original plate are still visible.

The journey to Harwich was unmarked by any particular incident, save that everywhere along the route the feeling of curiosity to see the remains of Caroline pass to their last resting-place was accompanied by manifest evidences of respect. Off Harwich were awaiting the _Glasgow_ frigate, two sloops of war, three brigs, and the _Pioneer_ schooner. The coffin was conveyed to the latter, after being unceremoniously swung into a barge, and from the schooner it was transferred to the _Glasgow_. The little group of mourners followed. They consisted of Lord and Lady Hood, Lady Anne Hamilton, Mr. Austin, Dr. and Mrs. Lushington, and Count Vassali. Her Majesty’s remains were now in charge of Captain Doyle, who, when a midshipman, more than a quarter of a century before, had handed the rope to the royal bride, whereby to help her on board the _Jupiter_. The squadron set sail, under a salute from Languard fort, and at two o’clock p.m., on Sunday, the 19th, it anchored in the harbour of Cuxhaven.

The _Gannet_ sloop of war conveyed the body up the Elbe to the mouth of the Schwinde, and up the latter it was carried, with a guard of marines and the mourners, by the boats belonging to the _Wye_ sloop, as far as Stade. From this place to Brunswick the body of the unhappy Caroline was borne, by slow journeys, and amid profuse respectful demonstrations on the part of the people. One of its resting-places by the way was at Zell, in the church of which place the body lay for a night upon the tomb of the unfortunate sister of George III., Caroline Matilda Queen of Denmark.

At midnight on Friday, August 24, the last rites were performed over the deceased consort of George IV. The body had been removed from the hearse to a funeral car, which was drawn by some hundred Brunswickers to the cathedral gates. No extraordinary service was allowed to be celebrated at the side of the vault. The Duke of Brunswick was then a minor and an absentee, and the government of the country was administered by the King of England. But though the service was of the most ordinary character, the sexagenarian pastor, Woolf, pronounced an oration above the remains of the Queen. He thanked God for adorning her with high advantages of mind and body, for bestowing upon her a heart full of clemency and benignity, and for placing her where she could, and was resolved to, accomplish much good. But ‘unsearchable, O Eternal, are thy ways!’ was the perplexed pastor’s cry as he adverted to her subsequent career--for terminating which the wisdom of the Almighty was again to be revered.

Among the range of coffins in the vault beneath the cathedral of St. Blaize, at Brunswick, Caroline rests between two which contain two heroic but far from faultless men--her father, who fell at Jena, and her brother, who, at the head of his Black Brunswickers, also fell in avenging him at Waterloo. Speaking of the latter, ‘two small black flags,’ says Russell, ‘the one an offering from the matrons, the other from the maidens of Brunswick, are suspended above his coffin, and its gaudy gold and crimson are still mixed with the brown and withering leaves of the garlands which the love of his people scattered on his bier, when at midnight he was laid among so many of his race who had fought and fell like himself.’ Between the coffins of these two lies that of Caroline of Brunswick, between father and brother slain. Her mother died in exile, yet in her own land; and the grave of her murdered sister Charlotte, the first wife of the Prince of Wurtemburg, would be sought for in vain. Surely here was a household sternly dealt with.

On the Sunday following the funeral the venerable pastor, Woolf, preached a sermon appropriate to the event, and which ended in a panegyric on the character of the Queen. The old man, with singular tenacity, clung to the assertion, that in early life ‘her quick understanding eagerly received every ray of divine truth, and her warm heart and lively feelings were excited and elevated by piety.’ He declared that her sense of religion increased to a confirmed faith, and that pious occupations were dear to her heart. ‘I knew her,’ said the aged advocate, ‘as an enlightened Christian, before she left the country of her birth. She first received from my hands, with pious emotion, the holy Supper of our Lord, and the solemnity of her manner was like her precious devotions, an unsuspected proof of her sincere faith and pious feeling.’ The panegyric would have been, like most articles of the kind, far above the merit of the subject, were it not for the strong qualifying sentence in which the preacher acknowledged that ‘the sense of religion, it was true, did not always preserve her from infirmities and errors;’ but, as he asked after the admission, ‘Where is the mortal, where has there been a saint, who has been always perfect? And,’ said he, aptly and truly enough, whether addressed to the friends or the foes of the poor, ill-used, and erring Caroline of Brunswick--‘And he who erred less may conscientiously ask himself whether he owes that to himself or to his more fortunate situation and the undeserved grace of God?’ It is a query which we are all bound to make when viewing a brother or a sister of the human family who is reputed guilty of offence towards God or man. The latter is ever ready to condemn his neighbour, but never ready to pass sentence on himself. Happy for all that with God there is not only judgment but mercy.

There has been some discussion as to whether Caroline of Brunswick was legally married to the Prince of Wales. There is no doubt, however, to be entertained on the matter. Her husband had, unquestionably, previously married a Roman Catholic lady, and that lady was living when the Prince married Caroline of Brunswick.

By the well-known statute of William and Mary, marrying a Roman Catholic entails exclusion from, and incapability ever to inherit, the crown of this realm.

The Prince clearly forfeited his right to the Crown by his marriage with a Papist.

But he married the lady (with the King’s connivance, he said) without the King’s consent; and, wanting that consent, the marriage (according to the 12th of George III.) was null and void.

This would set aside the marriage, but it would not release the Prince from the consequence of having entered into such a marriage. Horne Tooke was not justified in sneering at the 12th of George III., nor in writing ‘legally, really, worthily, and happily for the country, Mrs. Fitzherbert is Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.’

The Roman See, it is said, satisfied Mrs. Fitzherbert’s scruples by considering the marriage legal. That See never considered any other marriage between such (religious) parties, so celebrated, legal. Had there been issue of such an union, grave peril might have arisen. There was, indeed, a claimant to such honour, but he disappeared. He lacked the power of lying since manifested by Orton and some of the Orton gang. The monument to Mrs. Fitzherbert’s memory at Brighton asserts the legality of her marriage with the Prince by the three rings on her finger. That she was as much respected as if her last marriage was as legal as the preceding two there is no shadow of doubt. As little doubt is there that the Prince of Wales was never legally married except to his wayward and unhappy cousin--Caroline of Brunswick.

_ADELAIDE OF SAXE-MEINENGEN_,

WIFE OF WILLIAM IV.

The pocket Duchy--Old customs--Early training--The Father
of the Princess Adelaide--Social life at the ducal court--
Training of the Princess Adelaide--Marriage Preliminaries--
English parliament--The Duke of Clarence--Arrival in London
of the Princess--Quaint royal weddings--At home and abroad
--Duke and Duchess of Clarence at Bushey--‘State and Dirt’ at
St. James’s--William IV. and Queen Adelaide--Course of life
of the new Queen Consort--King’s gallantry to an old love--
Royal simplicity--The Sovereigns and the Sovereign people--
Court anecdotes--Drawing-rooms--Princess Victoria--The
coronation--Incidents of the day--Coronation finery of George
IV.--Princess Victoria not present--Revolutionary period--
Reform question--Unpopularity of the Queen--Attacks against
her on the part of the press--Violence of party-spirit--
Friends and foes--Bearing of the King and Queen--Duchess
of Angoulême--King a republican--His indiscretion--Want
of temper--Continental press adverse to the Queen--King’s
declining health--Conduct of Queen Adelaide--King William’s
death--Declining health of the Queen--Her travels in search
of health--Her last illness--Her will--Death--And funeral.

The little Duchy of Saxe-Meinengen was once a portion of the inheritance of the princely Franconian house of Henneberg. The failure of the male line transferred it in 1583 to the family of reigning Saxon princes. In 1680 it fell to the third son of the Saxon Duke, Ernest the Pious. The name of this son was Bernard. This Duke is looked upon as the founder of the House of Meinengen. He was much devoted to the study of Alchemy, and was of a pious turn, like his father, as far as may be judged by the volumes of manuscript notes he left behind him--which he had made on the sermons of his various court-preachers.

The law of primogeniture was not yet in force when Duke Bernard died, in 1706. One consequence was, that Bernard’s three sons, with Bernard’s brother, ruled the little domain in common. In 1746 the sole surviving brother, Antony Ulrich, the luckiest of this ducal Tontine, was monarch of all he surveyed within a limited space. The conglomerate ducal sovereigns were plain men, formal, much given to ceremony, and not much embarrassed by intellect. There was one man, however, who had enough for them all: namely, George Spanginburg, brother of the Moravian bishop of the latter name, and who was for some time _the_ Secretary of State at the court of Saxe-Meinengen.

Antony Ulrich reigned alone from 1746 to 1763. He was of a more enlightened character than any of the preceding princes, had a taste for the arts when he could procure pictures cheaply, and strong inclination towards pretty living pictures, which led to lively rather than pleasant controversies at court. His own marriage with Madame Scharmann disgusted the young ladies of princely houses in Germany, and especially exasperated the aristocracy of Meinengen. They were scarcely pacified by the fact that the issue of the marriage was declared incapable of succeeding to the inheritance.

The latter fell in 1763 to two young brothers, kinsfolk of Antony, and sons of the late Duke of Gotha, who reigned for some years together. The elder, Charles, died in 1782. From that period till 1803 the other brother, George, reigned alone. He had no sooner become sole sovereign than he married the Princess Louisa of Hohenlohe Langenburg. At the end of ten years the first child of this marriage was born, namely Adelaide, the future Queen of England.

Eight years later, in the last year of the last century, A.D. 1800, a male heir to the pocket-duchy was born, and then was introduced into Meinengen the law which fixed the succession in the eldest male heir only. Saxe-Meinengen was the last country in Europe in which this law was established.

The father of the Princess Adelaide, like his brother Charles, was a man of no mean powers. Both were condescending enough to visit even the burgher families of Saxe-Meinengen; and Charles had so little respect for vice in high places that when a German prince acted contrary to the rights of his people the offender found himself soundly lashed in paper and pamphlet, the pseudonymous signature to which could not conceal the person of the writer--the hasty Duke Charles. If this sometimes made him unpopular over the frontier, he was beloved within it. How could the people but love a sovereign Duke who, when a child was born to him, asked citizens of good repute rather than of high rank to come and be gossips?

In the revolutionary war Duke George fought like a hero. At home he afforded refuge to bold but honest writers driven from more mighty states. He beautified his city, improved the country; and, without being of great mental cultivation himself, he loved to collect around him scholars, philosophers, artists, authors, gentlemen. With these he lived on the most familiar terms, and when I say that Schiller and John Paul Richter were of the number, I afford some idea of the society which Duke George cared chiefly to cultivate. He buried his own mother in the common churchyard, because she was worthy, he said, of lying among her own subjects. The majority of these were country folk, but George esteemed the country folk, and at rustic festivals he was not unwilling to share a jug of beer with any of them. Perhaps the rustics loved him more truly than the sages, to whom he proved, occasionally, something wearisome. But these were often hard to please. All, however, felt a honest grief when, on the Christmas night of 1803, Duke George died, after a brief illness, caused, it is said, by a neglected cold, and by rage at an urgent demand from the Kaiser of 60,000 florins, fine-money for knightly orders ducally declined.

The Duke left a young family, Adelaide, Ida, and his son and successor, Bernard, then only three years of age. The mother of these fatherless children took upon herself the office of guardian, with that of Regent of the duchy. The duties of both were performed with rare judgment and firmness, during a time of much trouble and peril, especially when the French armies were overrunning and devastating Germany.

On the young ladies, gently and wisely reared in this little court, Queen Charlotte had begun to look with the foresight of a mother who had elderly and wayward sons to marry. When the death of the Princess Charlotte of Wales threatened to interrupt the direct succession of the crown, the unmatched brothers of the Regent thought of taking unto themselves wives. Cumberland had married according to his, but to no other person’s, liking, hardly even that of his wife. The Dukes of Kent and Cambridge made better choice, and there then remained but the sailor-prince to be converted into a Benedick. The Queen selected his bride for him, and he approved or acquiesced in the selection. He might, as far as age goes, have been her father, but that was of small account; and when Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen was spoken of, men conversant with contemporary history knew her to be the good daughter of an accomplished and an exemplary mother.

The preliminaries of the marriage were carried out amid so much opposition that at one moment the accomplishment of the marriage itself wore a very doubtful aspect. The difficulty was of a pecuniary nature. The Dukes of Kent and Cambridge were content, on the occasion of their respective marriages, to accept an addition to their income of 6,000_l._ The Duke of Cumberland was compelled to rest content, or otherwise, without any addition at all--save the expenses of a wife. With the Duke of Clarence it was different. He already possessed 18,000_l._ per annum, and ministers resolved, after a private meeting with their supporters, to request the Parliament to allow him an increase of 10,000_l._ On the 13th of April, 1818, a message from the Prince Regent to that effect was submitted to either House by Lord Castlereagh and the Earl of Liverpool. In the Commons the first-named Lord hinted at the dependence of our Princes on the liberality of Parliament since the time when the crown had surrendered its long uncontrolled disposal of revenues. But the House was not to be ‘suggested’ into a generosity which might be beyond justice. Tierney, the gadfly of his period, complained of the previous meeting of the friends of ministers, and the communication to them, before it was made to the House, of the amount to be applied for. Methuen insisted that before the Commons would grant a farthing they must be made acquainted with all the sources from which the King’s sons derived their present revenue, as well as the amount of the revenue itself. Finally, Holme Sumner met the proposal of an additional 10,000_l._ by a counter-proposal of 6,000_l._ This was carried by a narrow majority of one hundred and ninety-three to one hundred and eighty-four, and when this sum was offered to the Duke he peremptorily declined to accept it.

Things did not progress more in tune with marriage-bells in the House of Lords. There, when Lord Liverpool stated what his royal client would be contented to receive, Lord King started to his legs and exclaimed, ‘That the question was not what it might please the Duke of Clarence to take, but what it might please the people to give him!’ They were not willing to give what he expected, and for a time it seemed as if there would consequently be no marriage with the Princess of Saxe-Meinengen. But only for a time.

‘The Duke of Clarence is going to be married, after all,’ was a common phrase launched by the newspapers, and taken up by the people, in 1818. If the phrase had but one meaning, it had a double application. In the former sense it had reference to the disinclination of Parliament to increase his income, without which he had expressed his determination not to marry. It was further applied, however, to the old course of his old loves. There were the years spent with Dora Bland, then ‘Mrs. Jordan,’ the actress--years of an intercourse which had much of the quiet, happy character of a modest English home--the breaking-up of which brought such great grief to the mother in that home that even every service subsequently rendered to her seemed to partake of the quality of offence. It has been registered as such by those who heard more of the wailing of the Ariadne than they knew of the groundlessness of it, when vented in reproaches for leaving her unprovided for as well as deserted.

Then the public remembered how this light-of-heart Duke had been a suitor to other ladies. He was the rival of Wellesley Pole for the favour and the fortune of the great heiress, Miss Tilney Long. That ill-fated lady conferred on this wooer of humbler degree the office of slaying her happiness, sapping her life, and ruining her estate. The other lady, who declined the Duke’s offer of his hand or petition for her own, was Miss Sophia Wykeham, of Thame Park, daughter and _sole heiress_ of an Oxfordshire ’squire. Each lady had merits of her own, and other attractions besides those which lay in the _beaux yeux de sa cassette_; but perhaps each remembered the clauses of the Royal Marriage Act; however this may have been, Miss Tilney chose between her two suitors, while Miss Wykeham, after turning from the prayer of the Duke, never stooped to listen to a lowlier wooer.

These were the ‘antecedents’ of the lover who, in mature age, took rather than asked for the hand of Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen. Of all the actions of his life it was the one which brought him the most happiness; and with that true woman he had better fortune than is altogether merited by a man who, after a long bachelorship of no great repute, settles down in middle-life to respectability and content, under the influences of a virtuous woman, gifted with an excellent degree of common-sense.

In the dusk of a July evening, in the year 1818, this unwooed bride quietly arrived, with her mother, at Grillon’s Hotel, Albemarle Street. She had but cool reception for a lady on such mission as her own. There was no one to bid her welcome; the Regent was at Carlton House at dinner, and the Duke of Clarence was out of town on a visit. Except the worthy Mr. Grillon himself, no person seemed the gladder for her coming. In the course of the evening, however, the Regent drove down to Albemarle Street; and at a later hour the more tardy future husband was carried up to the door in a carriage drawn by four horses with as much rapidity as became a presumed lover of his age, in whom a certain show of zeal was becoming.

The strangers became at once acquainted, and acquaintance is said to have developed itself speedily into friendship. The family-party remained together till near upon the ‘wee sma’ hours; there was much indulgence there, we are told, of good, honest, informal hilarity; and when the illustrious and joyous circle broke up, the easy grace, frankness, and courtesy of the Regent, and the freedom and light-heartedness of the Duke, are said to have left favourable impressions on both the mother and the daughter.

Quaintest of royal weddings was that which now took place in old Kew Palace. Indeed, there were two, for the Duke of Kent, who had gallantly fetched his wife from abroad, where he had married her according to Lutheran rites, was now re-married to his bride according to the forms of the Church of England. Early in the day there was a dinner, at which the most important personages in that day’s proceedings were present. The old house at Kew seemed blushing in its reddest of bricks, out of pure enjoyment. The Regent gave the bride away; and, the ceremony concluded, the wedded couples paid a visit to the old Queen in her private apartment. She was too ill then to do more than congratulate her sons, and wish happiness to the married. The Duke and Duchess of Kent thereupon departed, but the Duke and Duchess of Clarence remained--guests at a joyous tea party at which the Regent presided, and which was prepared _al fresco_ in the vicinity of the Pagoda. It must have been a thousand times a merrier matter than wedding state-dinners of the olden times, at which brides were wearied into suffering and sulkiness. A more joyous party of noble men and women never met in mirthful greenwood; and when the princely pair took their leave for St. James’s, the Regent led the hilarious cheer, and sped them on their way with a ‘hurrah!’ worthy of his bright and younger days.

The Regent, undoubtedly, manifested a clearer sense of the fitness of things on this occasion than either of the managers of the theatres honoured by the presence of the newly-married couple soon after the union.

At Drury Lane was given the ‘Marriage of Figaro,’ and Covent Garden complimented the Duke and Duchess with the ‘Provoked Husband.’

It cannot be said that the public looked with much enthusiasm on any of the royal marriages. Such unions, with rare exceptions, are unpleasantly free from sentiment or romance; and in the present instances there was such a matter-of-fact air of mere ‘business’ about these contracts and ceremonies, such an absence of youth and the impulses and the dignity of youth, that the indifferent public, even remembering the importance of securing a lineal succession to the throne, was slow to offer either congratulation or sympathy. The caricaturists, on the other hand, were busy with a heavy and not very delicate wit; and fashionable papers, uniting implied censure with faint praise, observed that ‘the Duchesses of Kent, Clarence, and Cambridge are very deficient in the English language. They can scarcely speak a sentence. They possess most amiable dispositions.’ They also possessed true womanly qualities, which won for them the esteem of their husbands.

After a brief residence at St. James’s, and as brief a sojourn at the Duke’s residence in Bushey Park, the Duke and Duchess of Clarence repaired to Hanover, and remained there about a year--no incident marking the time is worthy of observation. The issue of this marriage scarcely survived the birth. In March 1819, a daughter was born, but to survive only a few hours. In December 1820, another princess gladdened the hearts of her parents, only to quench the newly-raised joy by her death in March of the following year. The loss was the keener felt because of the hopes that had been raised; and the grief experienced by the Duke and Duchess was tenderly nourished, rather than relieved, by the exquisite art of Chantrey, which, at the command of the parents, reproduced the lost child in marble--sleeping for ever where it lay.

The household at Bushey was admirably regulated by the Duchess, who had been taught the duties as well as the privileges of greatness. The fixed rule was, never to allow expenditure to exceed income. It is a golden rule which, when observed, renders men, in good truth, as rich as Crœsus. It is a rule which, if universally observed, would render the world prosperous and pauperism a legend. It was a rule the more required to be honoured in this case as the Duke had large calls upon his income. When those were provided for, old liabilities effaced, and current expenses defrayed, the surplus was surrendered to charity. There was no saving for the sake of increase of income--economy was practised for justice-sake, and the Duke and Duchess were so just that they found themselves able to be largely generous. With the increased means placed at their disposal by the death of the Duke of York, there was but trifling increase of expenditure. If something was added to their comforts, _they_ benefitted who were employed to procure them; and, if there was some little additional luxury in the rural palace of Bushey, the neighbouring poor were never forgotten in a selfish enjoyment of it.

In 1824, the Duke and Duchess of Clarence had apartments in St. James’s Palace, where, however, they seem to have been as roughly accommodated, considering their condition, as any mediæval Prince and Princess in the days of stone walls thinly tapestried and stone floors scantily strewn with rushes. The Duke cared little about the matter himself, but he gallantly supported the claims of his wife. In a letter addressed to Sir William Knighton, the King’s privy purse, in 1824, he thus expresses himself--from St. James’s Palace:--

‘His Majesty having so graciously pleased to listen to my suggestion respecting the alteration for the Hanoverian office at the palace, I venture once more to trouble you on the point of the building intended for that purpose. To the accommodation of the Duchess this additional slip at the back of the present apartments would be most to be wished and desired, and never can make a complete Hanoverian office without our kitchen, which the King has so kindly allowed us to keep. Under this perfect conviction, I venture to apply for this slip of building which was intended for the Hanoverian office. I am confident his Majesty is fully aware of the inconvenience and unfitness of our present apartments here. They were arranged for me in 1809, when I was a bachelor, and without an idea at that time of my ever being married, since which, now fifteen years, nothing has been done to them, and you well know the dirt and unfitness for the Duchess of our present abode. Under these circumstances, I earnestly request, for the sake of the amiable and excellent Duchess, you will, when the King is quite recovered, represent the wretched state and dirt of our apartments, and the infinite advantage this slip would produce to the convenience and comfort of the Duchess.... God bless the King and yourself, and ever believe me, &c.--WILLIAM.’

Though often as ungrammatical and inelegant, it was seldom the Duke was so explicit in his correspondence as he is in the above letter. Generally, he wrote in ambiguous phrases, very puzzling to the uninitiated; but when his Duchess Adelaide was in question, and her comfort was concerned, he became quite graphic on the ‘state and dirt’ in which they passed their London days, in the old, dingy, leper-house palace of St. James’s.

With the exception of the period during which the Duke held the office of Lord High Admiral, 1827–28--an office which may be said to have been conferred on him by Canning, and of which he was deprived by the Duke of Wellington--with the exception above noted, this royal couple lived in comparative retirement till the 26th of June, 1830, on which day the demise of George IV. summoned them to ascend the throne. During his fatal illness, Mrs. Fitzherbert addressed a letter of sympathy to her old lover, if not husband. She affectionately tendered any service which might be of use to him in his extreme necessity. To this letter no reply ever reached her; but some vestige of human affection was nevertheless evinced by the King on his death-bed. ‘He more than once expressed his anxiety,’ the ‘Memoirs’ tell us, ‘that a particular picture should be hung round his neck, and deposited with him in the grave.’ It seemed to be the opinion of the Duke of Wellington that this portrait was one which had been taken of Mrs. Fitzherbert in early life, and was set round with brilliants. It appeared the more likely, as this portrait was afterwards missing when the others were returned to her. Mrs. Fitzherbert was possessed of an annuity of 6,000_l._, settled on her by George the Fourth, which she enjoyed to the year of her death, 1833.