Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr #13)(97)

Caroline of Brunswick is a fascinating, colorful character, although difficult to research because so many lies were told about her at the time and most of her biographers have been far too credulous. She was twenty-seven when she married. Although I do not believe she was as promiscuous as she is sometimes portrayed, it appears likely that when she was younger she fell in love with a certain Irish officer and might have had a child by him. That child would have been taken away from her, which was probably the cause of the intense hatred she exhibited toward her mother the rest of her life. After the Prince essentially took baby Charlotte away, Caroline then poured her maternal urges and considerable financial resources into fostering a string of poor orphans.

Although relatively pretty when young, she was always careless in her attire, blunt spoken, and utterly unsophisticated. Yet she was far from stupid; a polyglot and lifelong enthusiastic reader, she was acknowledged even by those who disliked her to be a well-trained and unusually fine pianist. She was also artistic and continued to study painting and sculpture as an adult. She had a very real and oft-expressed fear of being unjustly accused of adultery and executed for treason. Given how hard the Prince tried to convict her of adultery, including hiring men to hide in the bushes and break into her house to search her bedroom, I strongly doubt she violated her vows while in England. After she left England and moved to Italy, however, she does appear to have made up for all those lonely years by indulging in a torrid affair with a handsome young Italian. And yes, Caroline really did make wax effigies of her husband, stick them with pins, and burn them.

Caroline’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, is best known through the memoirs of her subgoverness Miss Cornelia Knight (on whom I have modeled Miss Ella Kinsworth) and through the Princess’s touching, intimate, and brutally honest letters to her only real friend, Margaret Mercer Elphinstone. When I first began researching this story, I did not expect to like Charlotte, but she soon revealed herself to be an endearing, engaging, and truly tragic figure. In a later age she would have been called a tomboy; her rather mannish stride and ways, her enthusiastic love of horses and dogs, her open, friendly demeanor and habit of shaking hands with men were all roundly criticized. Given her bizarre upbringing, it is truly amazing she turned out to be such a warm, funny, likable person, with a gift for mimicry and a clever wit. A fervent Whig, she was furious when her father allied himself with the High Tories after becoming Regent, and genuinely believed the Irish were totally justified in rebelling for their independence.

Charlotte was very close to her old grandfather, King George III, and for a time he was able to protect her from the worst nastiness of her father, who used the child to torment his hated wife. Once the old King slipped into madness, however, she was left without a champion. As the crowds in the streets cheered Charlotte more and more, Prinny’s resentment of his daughter and his determination to remove her from the country increased. While it was traditional to mark the eighteenth birthday of the heir presumptive to the throne with widespread celebrations, he used “economy” as an excuse to ignore the occasion and simply left London to visit friends in the north.

Charlotte did indeed have a brief, innocent romance with a Captain Charles Hesse. His position as an illegitimate son of the Duke of York is disputed by some, but the fact that Charlotte herself accepted the relationship and was very close to her uncle York makes it more probable. As difficult as it is to believe, the story about her mother locking the young couple in her bedroom at Kensington Palace is true. The possible explanations Hero and Sebastian discuss have all been suggested, but no one knows exactly why Caroline did it. Charlotte did send Hesse letters and trinkets she then desperately tried to get back, and those letters did refer to the bedroom incident. Hesse did leave the letters in a trunk with a friend when he sailed for Spain. But the “Hesse letters” were never stolen, and Charlotte was eventually able to retrieve and destroy them.

Captain Hesse’s future exploits are interesting, for he joined up with Caroline and traveled with her for a time after she left England. He later became the lover of the Queen of Naples (a daughter of King Carlos IV of Spain) and was ultimately killed in the Bois de Vincennes in a duel with Count Leon, an illegitimate son of Napoléon. What are the odds?

The story of the circumstances surrounding Charlotte’s betrothal to Orange as told by Caroline to Sebastian is based on the accounts left by the various people involved. The Regent did pressure his daughter into promising that she would give him a yes or no answer after her first meeting with Orange at a dinner at Carlton House. Then, when the Prince asked her opinion of the young man and she tried to prevaricate, Wales pretended to misunderstand and immediately announced to both Liverpool and Orange that she had given her consent. Charlotte was appalled, and when she discovered the next day that Orange intended to require her to leave the country—and that her father had known of this—she was furious. Although the betrothal was arranged in December 1813, the announcement was indeed delayed for months while Orange solidified his position in the Netherlands.

Negotiations on the marriage contracts dragged out when Charlotte—who knew her father well—refused to accept vague promises and kept insisting that everything be put in writing. She became convinced that her father planned to push through a divorce from Caroline once his daughter was out of the country. Along with Charlotte’s concerns for her mother was the very real fear that her father might then remarry and produce a son who would take her place in the line of succession. Eventually, in the summer of 1814, Charlotte broke off the betrothal. Her father reacted by firing everyone in her household in a truly hideous scene that ended with Charlotte running out of the house.