By George! What Is Caroline Up To?

From what Mr. Al said last week, I get the feeling Princess Caroline was… what did they call it then? A light skirt.

In 1801, Princess Caroline moved to Montague House, in London. Even at 4,000 pounds a year, she managed to maintain a full staff and entertain on a regular basis. The Princess had her own ideas about entertaining, however. For example, after dinner, when guests would retire to the drawing room for musical entertainments, Princess Caroline would take a young man down to the Blue Room, lock the door and remain there for several hours.

German ways may not have been English ways, but it was not likely that she could have gotten away with that even in Brunswick. When told that such actions were, to put it mildly, improper, Her Highness “received this hint very ill and was not in the least improved by it.” This disdain of advice would come back to haunt the Princess in the very near future.

Besides, in Caroline’s view, she was a grownup wasn’t she? It was no one else’s business if she enjoyed the company of young men. Or that she liked to dish the dirt on other ladies with her servants. Or that she liked raw onions. Or that she liked to wash the onions down with a glass or two, or six, of ale. Or that she loved to flirt with “any presentable young man who came to the house.”

While she certainly considered her personal life to be no one else’s business, she had completely lost sight of a fact that her husband also could not accept. Her life was not her own. She was the Princess of Wales. One day, her husband would be King of England and she would be queen. As her uncle tried, in vain, to get his son to understand, their marriage was more a matter of state than a union of two people.

While the Prince was fully capable of understanding this intellectually, emotionally he was unable to grasp it at all. The depth of responsibility he would have to assume upon ascending the throne terrified him. His response was to behave as though it were someone else’s problem. A foreshadowing of this mindset revealed itself during the drawn out confrontation with the King over his promotion to general.
He had admitted to several friends that he knew, in his heart, that he would never make a great general. In fact, in a very rare display of candor, he admitted that he wouldn’t even make a mediocre one. The bone that stuck in his throat was that he was being passed over in favor of his social inferiors. He believed that he should be made a general because he was the Prince of Wales. Once he became a general, he would surround himself with solid, professional military men and take their advice.

That was his plan upon becoming King George the Fourth. What it reveals is a profound lack of understanding of the nature of leadership. To be fair, that was his fathers failing as well. George the Third was utterly dependent on his advisers in the earlier part of his reign. He was a much more effective king in the latter portion not because he outgrew the dependence, but because he was so bad at picking the advisors he needed to run the kingdom that he ended up doing their jobs and his.

George the Third was an abysmal judge of talent. After a couple of decades of having to run the show, he developed a very clear idea of what it meant, and what it took, to be a king. His son had a leg up on him in that he was much better educated, and he seemed to know the right people to turn to for advice. The Prince’s problem was that he seldom took that advice. Nor could he understand that he wasn’t simply having problems with his wife, he was having problems with the future Queen of England.

Princess Caroline was no better. No doubt many people tried to get her to understand that she would one day be queen. It was a wasted effort. She looked at her wastrel of a hubby and thought; “What’s good for the goose…” The behavior of these two people, with the help of “Sailor Billy” King William the IV, would bring the institution of the English monarchy to the very brink. It would take the very long reign of the hyper-responsible Queen Victoria to restore it. And even she had an uphill battle for the first twenty years.

Interestingly enough, the more Caroline behaved like her husband, the more people thought she was insane. Bishop Herd said that he was a “perfect convert” to the idea that Caroline was a nutter. The Prince believed it, or so he told anyone willing to listen. Lord Holland stated that “if not mad, she was a very worthless woman.”

Stories of her bad behavior come to a head in the summer of 1805. While the Prince certainly had no objection to nasty stories about his wife circulating in private, indeed, he started more than his fair share of them, publicly he had no comment. He was forced to take public action, however, when Lady Douglas, wife of Sir John Douglas, accused the Princess of trying to destroy her marriage.

– Mr. Al