Queen in Tights

"Married luff never lasts," mourned Britain's new Princess of Wales, in her thick German accent, to a lady in waiting. "Dot is not in de nature." But, alas for poor, playful Amelia Elizabeth Caroline, Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbuettel, married love not only failed to last, it never even began. The Prince of Wales, later (1820) to become King George IV, was already secretly married to one woman and deep in the toils of another, his mistress, Lady Jersey, when he sent his emissary to ask Caroline's hand in marriage in 1794.

"Prinney," as fashionable friends like Beau Brummell knew him, had simply no choice but to marry. It was either marriage to a suitable princess by order of his father George III, or something very like debtors' prison. With his elegantly tailored back to the wall, Prinney picked Caroline of Brunswick, his father's niece, sight unseen. He believed her to be the lesser of two evils--the other being any one of his mother's relatives whom he had seen. The Prince's first glance at the buxom Princess revealed his mistake.

Prinney spent his wedding night dead drunk and ended up on the edge of the fireplace, where his bride let him sleep it off undisturbed. After the birth of their child and heir, Princess Charlotte, nine months later, the future King of England sent Caroline formal notification that he would require no further wifely duties of her.

"Bedfellows." All that, however, was not the end, but rather the beginning of the most publicized domestic spat that ever livened the pages of British history. Britons watched with glee the dirty laundry being washed in public at the palace, and happily seized bits and pieces of it to raise on high as gonfalons of party politics.

The new Princess' robust instincts had made themselves known on the boat coming to England, when she spent the night alone on deck with the first mate.

Old King George III (of Revolutionary War fame) was already showing such symptoms of future dottiness as screaming, "View Halloo!" at morning prayers and greeting oak trees as old friends in Windsor Park. Queen Charlotte and her eldest son were already jockeying for power as Regent. Prinney threaded a delicate path between the beckonings of his secret wife and his demanding and increasingly shrewish mistress. Caroline publicly boasted of her taste in "bedfellows," and soon turned up with an "adopted" son called "Willikins" who was widely said to be her own. "Prove it and he shall be your King!" she would shout in gleeful rejoinder to this charge. Restless and roistering by nature, and barred from her husband's court, Caroline at last decided to take her show on the road. Trailing a retinue of doubtful characters through Europe in a refurbished stagecoach, she established her own royal residence in a gleaming white palace on the shores of Lake Como, with a dashing Italian hussar named Bergami as pro tem king of her heart. Caroline's philandering might well have gone unnoticed by Prinney, who was then Prince Regent, except that when she returned to London, vast crowds of the common people, who hated him and his gross excesses, cordially claimed Caroline as their own and vowed: "We'll make the Prince love you before we've done with him!"

"Go Away." Nobody bothered to tell Caroline when at last in 1820 the old King died and Prinney became George IV. But Caroline knew her rights as Queen, and there she was, ready to claim them, in the harbor at Dover shortly before the coronation. A jubilant crowd greeted her in London and pulled her carriage by hand to Carlton House, smashing windows in the houses of the King's ministers all along the way. Furious at his wife's reappearance, the new King postponed his crowning and sent a bill to the House of Lords begging for a divorce. Solemnly the Lords convened to hear the case, while crowds rioted in the street outside and Caroline herself reigned over all, naturally bustled and topped with a black wig and a hat cloudy with ostrich feathers. The evidence of her dalliance with Bergami was all there, neatly brought from Italy in a little green bag, but the noble Lords were too frightened of their people to find her guilty. After three months as the nation's best sideshow, the trial came to an inconclusive end. But people were beginning to tire of Caroline. Wrote a pamphleteer of the day:

Most gracious Queen, we thee implore

To go away and sin no more.

But if that effort be too great,

To go away at any rate.

When the coronation at last took place, no ticket of admission was sent to Caroline. Persistent to the end, she drove to Westminster Abbey anyway, and tried to get in by door after door. At each one a detachment of soldiers barred the way. At last, sobbing and weary, she drove home. Within three weeks she was dead, some say of a broken heart, others of an overdose of magnesia. "Fate," said English Wit Max Beerbohm many years later, "wrote her a most tremendous tragedy, and she played it in tights."

Last week the domestic quarrels of Caroline of Brunswick and her faithless Prinney were once again being aired in Britain's Parliament, along with cries of royal suppression. A TV playwright, anxious to revive their tale, had looked among the public archives for the facts that lay in that famed little green bag. They were gone. An M.P. demanded to know where they were. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury sheepishly admitted that they were removed in 1935 to Windsor Castle, where they are now under lock and key. King George V, namesake and paragon of respectability among Prinney's latter-day relatives, had obviously hoped to lock up the family skeleton--and instead, succeeded only in giving the English press a chance to relive it all last week.

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