Alice Audrey

By George! He Will Have Her Head.

• June 24, 2009,
• 6 Comments,
• Author: aliceaudrey
• Categories: George IV - The Regency, History, Mr. Al

When Princess Charlotte died, her mother, Princess Caroline, was off toodling around in Europe while being watched by an eager to dislodge husband, George IV.

It’s hard to imagine that Princess Caroline did not know about all the people following her. What is really amazing is that she didn’t seem to care what her behavior was doing to her reputation. Said one historian; “For months past the Regent had been closely following his wife’s wild progress with intentness and disgust. Foreign rulers had been made aware that any favors granted her would cause grave displeasure in London.”

With England the preeminent economic power in Europe, such displeasure carried real consequences. As reports on Caroline continued to pile up, the Prince Regent decided to launch an official inquiry, the Milan Commission, into his wife’s disgraceful behavior. Word from abroad was that Caroline was not just behaving badly, she was behaving like a lunatic.

Three men, attorneys William Cooke and John Allen Powell and Major Thomas Henry Browne, an Italian speaking officer who served under Wellington in Spain, were dispatched to Italy to collect first hand reports on the Princess. In the summer of 1818 these gentlemen traveled wherever Caroline had traveled, taking down the “voluntary answers” of servants, sailors, innkeepers, gamekeepers, fishermen, postilions and gardeners.

Their inquiries were not without danger. Wrote Browne to the Prince; “The Princess is at the moment so completely surrounded by the family of Perigami (her lover and Chamberlain)and they are such a determined set of Ruffianos that they would not scruple at any act, however desperate, against those whom they might suspect of acting to their prejudice.”

The three men carried on regardless. By November of 1818 Browne reported that “no doubt everything had been completely proved.” That they had “collected sufficient evidence to warrant a public inquiry.” By the following July, the men had the sworn statements of eighty-five witnesses. Cooke wrote the Prince that, “We are under the necessity, therefore, of humbly stating that in our opinion this great body of evidence establishes the fact of a continued adulterous intercourse between the Princess and Perigami.”

It was not the Prince’s desire alone to prove this fact that made these men focus on adultery. By mid 1818, the Queen was rapidly approaching the end, many, including the Prince Regent, were sure that the Kings death was also near. It was imperative that Caroline be stripped of her title with a charge that none of her supporters could challenge. The charge of adultery served Henry VIII well enough, it being that such a charge against a Princess of Wales would automatically include a charge of high treason. If it was good enough for Henry, it would be good enough for the Prince Regent.

If Caroline was mostly unconcerned about what people were saying about her, she professed to be very upset about the way English persons were treating her. She claimed the English members of her “establishment” did not leave because they found her conduct distasteful, she got rid of them because they “cheated her outrageously.” Such a charge might have held more water if Caroline had not been lavishing expensive gifts on her lover, Bartolommeo (don’t ask me to pronounce it) Perigami.

“Like what, Mr Al? What did she give him?” I’m glad you asked. Like…Villa Cassielli, which she claimed cost “only” 7,500 pounds. This at a time when a skilled worker in London was clearing 40 shillings a year. What she didn’t add was the fact that she also bought all the furniture for the Villa, outfitted the kitchen, put horses in the stable, carriages, to give the horses something to do, linens for all the bedrooms, drapes and floor coverings, and, of course, paid for all the servants.

And this is only one example. Princess Caroline’s “personal household staff” consisted almost entirely of Pergami family members. It was not for nothing that Mr Browne feared for his life if the Pergami clan got wind of their plan to shut off the money spigot. With the Milan Commission up and running, Caroline’s supporters knew it was only a matter of time before the whole mess became front page news. Henry Brougham, a friend who pleaded with Caroline to remain in England, sent his brother, James, to Italy to meet with her.

The reason was two-fold. First, to get an up-close look at Caroline’s “lifestyle choices” and see how much of what was being said about her was true, and second, to offer the Princess a plan that the Broughams hoped would nip the Milan Commission in the bud. What James discovered confirmed the worst charge that the commission would raise. Princess Caroline and Pergami were indeed living as “husband and wife.”

He found Pergami himself to be a rather likable chap. “Remarkably good sort of man…very active, quite a different man from what I had expected.” Alas, he was shagging the Princess of Wales. A blind deaf-mute could prove that in court before his breakfast got cold. Time to lay out The Plan. Beat the Prince Regent to the punch. Have Caroline ask for a divorce! Or, at the very least, a Parliamentary separation.

This is what James suggested to his brother; “I should propose that she write a letter to the Prince stating her reasons for wishing a divorce or Parliamentary separation…You must give me the style of this letter, because she will ask me to write it for her, and it must be well done, as there is no saying what may be made of it hereafter. She should begin by asserting innocence…hightoned in the style of Mary Queen of Scots…accusing the Regent of plaguing her by these inquisitions, and by concluding by saying as her daughter is dead, and there is no hopes of her having any pleasure in England she thinks it better for both to separate. I am quite convinced that it is the very best thing that can be done on every account, and the sooner the better, before she loses more character, or in fact before England knows more of the matter.”
A good plan. Unfortunately for Caroline, her husband had other ideas.

-Mr. Al

By George! What a Ride.

• June 16, 2009,
• 5 Comments,
• Author: aliceaudrey
• Categories: George IV - The Regency, History, Mr. Al

While George IV’s daughter, Charlotte, struggled with her father over whom to marry, her mother was off gallivanting around Europe. But how much trouble could a wayward princess get into?

And what of Princess Caroline? When we last saw her she was skipping the country, much to Charlotte’s annoyance, while Charlotte was the unwilling guest at Cranborne Lodge. It was this act that convinced Charlotte that she had been truly abandoned to her fate. It also gave Charlotte the plan to obtain her freedom by blaming all her naughtiness on mum’s malign influence.

It isn’t that Charlotte believed all the bad things people were saying about Caroline, she didn’t, but mom taking off like that without lifting a finger to help cheesed off Charlotte sufficiently that she was willing to tell dad what she knew dad wanted to hear. Mom’s a flaming bitch who was trying to drag her only child into the gutter.

An easy thing to believe when we look at Caroline’s behavior after returning to the Continent. If Princess Caroline had not quite descended to the gutter, she had certainly reached new lows in bad taste. She attended a ball in conservative Geneva “dressed en Venus, or rather not dressed further than the waist.”

In Baden, according to Lord Redesdale, “When a partie de chasse had been made for her, she appeared with half a pumpkin on her head, explaining to the astonished Grand Duke that it was the “coolest sort of coiffure.” In Genoa she traveled about in a gilt and mother of pearl inlay phaeton “dressed in pink and white, like a little girl, though exhibiting a large expanse of middle aged bosom and showing two stout legs in pink top boots.”

If sartorial atrocities were her only crime, she would have gotten off lightly. What the Princess seemed unaware of, or perhaps indifferent to, was that she was being watched like a hawk. Not only did the Prince Regent have every British embassy keep close tabs on her, but Count Munster, the Minister of Hanover had agents following her and reporting on everyone close to her. The Queen used her unofficial lines of communication with European Royal families to gather her own reports.

Among the tidbits they uncovered, in Athens she “Dressed almost naked and danced with her servants.” I have no idea how one dresses naked, but there it is. Walter Landor reported on “orgiastic balls” and the walls of her villa in Italy covered with “indecent paintings.” So unpleasant had her behavior become that the English members of her entourage fell away and returned home one by one.

“I cannot tell you how sorry and ashamed I felt as an Englishwoman,” wrote Lady Bessborough to her lover, Granville Leveson Gower about seeing the Princess at a ball; “In the room, dancing, was a short, very fat, elderly woman, (Caroline was forty-seven at the time.) with an extremely red face, owing, I suppose, to the heat, in a girls white frock-looking dress, but with shoulder, back and neck, quite low, disgustingly so, down to the middle of her stomach; very black hair, (a wig) and eyebrows which gave her a very fierce look, and a wreath of light pink roses on her head…I stared at the oddity of her appearance. When suddenly she nodded and smiled at me, and not recollecting her, I was convinced she was mad; till William Bentink (the British envoy) pushed me and said, “Do you not see the Princess of Wales nodding to you?”…I could not bear the sort of whispering and talking all around about the Principessa d’Inghilterra.”

The Princess was becoming quite the seasoned traveler not only around Europe, but the Middle East as well. As her English friends abandoned her, their places were taken by “an extraordinary collection of retainers including French chambermaids and French cooks, Arab foot boys, Austrian postilions and Italian footmen who’s overbearing insolence was beyond description.”The entrance of Princess Caroline’s traveling circus into any country was “as much dreaded as the incursion of freebooters.” Be that as it may, the Princess decided she had to make a trip to the Holy Land, then firmly under Ottoman control.

After sailing to Constantinople and inspecting the defenses of Acre, her little entourage, now numbering two hundred persons, descended on Jerusalem. The Princess herself rode into town on an ass. I wonder where she got that idea? After a visit to Jericho, she returned to Italy, moving into a villa on Lake Como; “which she greatly enlarged and named Villa d’Este after the distinguished family from which she was descended.”

From there she moved into Villa Cassielli, on the Adriatic, near Pesaro. It was there that she received the news of Charlotte’s death. With that bit of news she realized her days as Princess of Wales, and her allowance from the good taxpayers of England, were numbered.

– Mr. Al