The Princess at Blackheath: Caroline of Brunswick

On August 12, 1797, the Prince of Wales turned thirty-five, and his daughter spent the day with the wife he refused to see. Princess Charlotte, nineteen months old and "in her new rig," reached her mother's house at Charlton soon after two o'clock with her two governesses. The Duke and Duchess of Dorset were already there with Lord and Lady Auckland, and the exiled Stadtholder of the Netherlands and his wife arrived soon afterward. The sub-governess, Miss Hayman, described a concert and recalled the child dancing by herself for a full hour in the middle of the company.^[1] The historian Charles Pearce thought the date so pointed that he inferred the visit was paid by "express command," which would mean that the prince, not the princess, chose it.^[2]

The party came near the start of twelve years in which Caroline, Princess of Wales, tried to make a life beyond a failed royal marriage. She had no husband in any useful sense and only limited access to her child. She did keep her title, her income, and the favor of the old king. On the heath southeast of London she built something between a household and a court, and her freedom there delighted her friends and armed her enemies. In 1806 that freedom nearly destroyed her, when a discarded companion swore that she had secretly borne a son. The charge failed, but the inquiry showed how quickly her private life could become a matter of state. By August 1809 she had outlasted the accusation, yet clearing her name had won her little of what she wanted. This is the story of those twelve years.

A Change of Air

The formal separation came in the spring of 1796, within a year of the wedding, and Caroline at first stayed on at Carlton House. Accounts of her departure disagree sharply. Lady Charlotte Bury, who joined her household years later, repeated a story that her rooms had been stripped to "two shabby chairs." According to the same story, the pearl bracelets the prince had given her were taken to decorate the arms of his mistress, Lady Jersey. Miss Hayman, named as the source of this tale, denied it: "I remember no such thing." She recalled instead that Caroline had obtained the prince's permission to move to Charlton "for change of air."^[3] Hayman owed her later post as keeper of the privy purse to the prince, so she was not an impartial witness. Bury, however, was repeating events she had not seen, and neither version can be accepted whole.

The sources also differ on the house. John Ashton's entry in the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography places her at Shrewsbury House, near Shooter's Hill. Pearce says that she took a house at Charlton, near the same hill.^[4] In the summer of 1797 she visited her daughter in the Carlton House nursery on most days. The prince avoided the nursery in order to escape meeting her.^[5]

At the end of June she reminded him of a promise and asked that Charlotte be sent to her at Charlton. No answer came.^[6] Her hopes and her habits did not always match. Hayman claimed that "a month has elapsed without her going to see her child," and she wrote of a daughter "for whom she never showed a fondness."^[7] Lord Minto, the former Sir Gilbert Elliot, was a friendlier observer. At a Blackheath dinner in December 1798, he watched Caroline romp with the child "about the carpet on her knees."^[8] Both accounts may be accurate. Caroline's affection seems to have come in bursts, and those who supervised the nursery were well placed to notice the gaps.

Montague House

Caroline soon moved a short distance to Montague House, at the edge of Greenwich Park and overlooking the common at Blackheath. English Heritage dates her lease to 1797, and the house became her main home. That date fits Minto's letters, which have him breakfasting and dining with her at Blackheath by the summer of 1798, though they do not name the house. Ashton's date of 1801 appears too late, since the Royal Collection places her "alternative court" at Montague House by 1800.^[9]

The early gatherings were respectable. In June 1798 Minto sat at tables laid "in a little strip of garden under a row of trees," and he stayed for music in the house afterward. He found her "very undeserving of such strange neglect and repudiation" and judged her "positively a handsome woman." In July he dined there with Lord Thurlow, the former lord chancellor, whom he called "her principal champion and adviser." Over two games of chess, Minto reported, "she saw I did not play like a courtier."^[10] That December she told him something stranger. The prince, she said, had written to invite her to settle at Carlton House for the winter, and she had declined. Minto resolved to press her not to refuse offers of reconciliation. Pearce found no confirmation of the overture and wondered whether she had invented it.^[11]

The tone loosened in 1799. Dinners ran into suppers, suppers ran into the small hours, and her closest friends began to worry. One account of a Sunday dinner in August 1799, whose writer has not been confirmed, shows how far matters could go even in distinguished company. The guests included the lord chancellor, William Pitt, Henry Dundas, and George Canning, and they played a parlor game called musical magic. Dundas went down on his knees to kiss a young woman's hand. Pitt was made to kiss a bust of the Queen of Prussia. Two other guests were tied together and told to nurse bolsters as babies. When someone proposed blindman's buff, the prime minister replied, "I will endeavour to shut my eyes" as far as he could, though he could not answer for the rest of the world.^[12]

Such evenings would have meant little in a private house, but Caroline was not a private person. In 1800 Thomas Lawrence began a portrait of her with Charlotte, dated 1801, that stands about ten feet high. The commission came from the Marchioness Townshend, her mistress of the robes, and was introduced by Lawrence's friend John Julius Angerstein, her neighbor at Blackheath.^[13] Lawrence's name later appeared among the men in the accusations against her.^[14] George III, meanwhile, remained fond of her. By September 1805 he had made her ranger of Greenwich Park, an honorary position that put the park beneath her windows at her disposal.^[15]

A Daughter by Appointment

The king's kindness sharpened the prince's hostility. Charlotte stood next in line after her father, and from 1804 the question of who should raise her became an open conflict between the two men. The prince offered the girl to the king's care and then drew back, implying that his father's mental illness made him unfit for the charge. The prince denied having consented to a plan for her education at Windsor, and the dispute ran into 1805, when the king insisted that he must have the whole superintendence of her education or none at all.^[16] Negotiations had resumed in December 1804 through the lord chancellor, and it was arranged to place her under the care of Lady de Clifford and the Bishop of Exeter. She moved to Lower Lodge at Windsor in 1805 and also spent time at Warwick House. The prince treated that residence as part of Carlton House and barred his wife from visiting there.^[17]

The king made his own view clear. In a letter to Lord Eldon that he knew the prince would see, he described the sight of mother and daughter together as charming.^[18] He also went to Blackheath in person. Ashton, who places these visits after the inquiry, wrote that he "often passed a whole day" there with Caroline and his granddaughter, which widened the breach with his son.^[19]

Denied steady company from her own child, Caroline collected other people's. She took in several children of the poor at Blackheath and paid for their upkeep, and she told her ladies, to their amusement, that she had nine children.^[20] One of them stayed with her. William Austin, known in the household as Willikin, was brought to the house as a baby in November 1802, the son of a Deptford dockyard worker who had lost his job during the peace of 1802. He grew up at her side.^[21] Her affection for him was open, and it proved dangerous.

The Lady in the Lilac Pelisse

The danger came from the neighborhood. Sir John Douglas, a marine officer who had served with Sir Sidney Smith at Acre, lived at Blackheath with his wife, Charlotte. Lady Douglas later described how the acquaintance began. Sitting by her window on a snowy day, she saw the Princess of Wales pacing outside the railings in a lilac satin pelisse and primrose half boots. Caroline nodded to her, walked in, asked to see her child, and stayed an hour.^[22] The story comes from a hostile pen and may have been shaped to show a princess forcing herself on a reluctant neighbor. Ashton names the Douglases, Smith, and Captain Thomas Manby, a naval officer, among the friends she entertained at Montague House.^[23]

The friendship with the Douglases broke in 1804. According to a later newspaper summary, Caroline ended it over a drawing that suggested an improper relationship between Lady Douglas and Smith.^[24] By Pearce's account, rumors had also reached the princess that Lady Douglas was saying she had given birth. A formal note asked Lady Douglas to stop calling, and her letter of denial came back unopened. Caroline had handed her the material. By Ashton's account, she had "foolishly talked some nonsense" about expecting a child that she would explain away as adopted.^[25]

The accusation traveled upward through the royal family. In November 1805 the prince, on Lord Thurlow's advice, consulted the lawyer Samuel Romilly and directed that the information be put into writing. The Douglases' written declaration is dated December 3, and a narrative by the Duke of Kent is dated December 27.^[26] Inquiries among Caroline's present and former servants followed. Declarations from William Cole, Robert Bidgood, Sarah Bidgood, and Frances Lloyd were gathered between January and May 1806.^[27] In 1813 Henry Brougham, then advising Caroline, told Samuel Whitbread that Bidgood, Lloyd, and Cole had been in the prince's pay.^[28]

Four Lords

The accusation went far beyond embarrassment. It said that the princess had become pregnant in 1802, had secretly given birth to a boy, and was raising him in her own house. Speaking in the Commons in 1813, her defender Andrew Cochrane Johnstone called this a charge of high treason and said it endangered the succession. Lord Castlereagh denied that the succession had ever been in real doubt.^[29] Thurlow told Romilly that the information was "too important to remain without any step being taken on it."^[30] On May 29, 1806, the king issued a warrant directing four privy counselors to inquire: Lord Grenville, the prime minister; Lord Erskine, the lord chancellor; Earl Spencer, the home secretary; and Lord Ellenborough, the lord chief justice. Romilly, by then solicitor general, wrote down the testimony.

Lady Douglas and Sir John swore their depositions on June 1. Caroline heard nothing official until Saturday, June 7, when the Duke of Kent came to announce "the near approach of two attornies," who were to take away half her household for examination. She asked only that he remain with her until her servants had gone, so that no one could say she had spoken to them.^[31] That evening she kept a dinner engagement at Lady Carnarvon's, and in the middle of the circle she quietly told Minto what had happened. The next day, Sunday, she entertained the French princes at Blackheath as though nothing were amiss. Minto was astonished by her composure.^[32]

The boy's history settled the central charge. Sophia Austin deposed on June 7, and the commissioners' papers came to include extracts from the register of the Brownlow Street hospital. Their report of July 14 stated their "perfect conviction that there is no foundation whatever for believing" that the child was Caroline's. They also found nothing to warrant the belief that she had been pregnant in 1802. He had been "beyond all doubt born" in that hospital on July 11, 1802, "of the body of Sophia Austin," and had first come to the princess's house that November.^[33]

The commissioners did not stop there. They wrote that other statements, "particularly those stated to have passed between her Royal Highness and Captain Manby, must be credited until they shall receive some decisive contradiction."^[34] The commissioners had examined many witnesses, but Caroline had not been heard. By one later newspaper account, neither had the men named. Romilly later called the proceeding "entirely an ex-parte proceeding," meaning that only one side had been heard, and said that no one could be convicted on it alone. He defended it as the kind of inquiry the privy council had always made before any judicial step. The damage to her reputation remained.^[35]

She received the papers on August 11 and turned to lawyers then in opposition. Spencer Perceval, Lord Eldon, and Sir Thomas Plumer advised her, and a long protest went to the king under her name that October. It objected that the warrant was "not countersigned, nor under Seal," and it called the witnesses "confederates in foul conspiracy with my false accusers."^[36] The king's reply disappointed her. He was glad that the chief charge had failed, but he noted "circumstances of conduct" that he could view only with serious concern. She asked to see him, and he seemed ready to agree. The prince then announced that he had placed the documents with his own lawyers and asked his father to wait, and the king did so.^[37]

The Book

Perceval answered by preparing the strongest weapon available to her. He assembled the report, depositions, and correspondence into a book, and the threat of publication alarmed the government and the royal family alike. Lady Malmesbury, driving back to town with him from Blackheath, joked that they might be sent to the Tower. Perceval replied, according to Minto's editor, that he would go to the Tower or the scaffold in such a cause.^[38]

Politics intervened in March 1807. Grenville's ministry fell over Catholic relief, and Perceval and Eldon entered the Duke of Portland's new government. Five thousand copies of the book stood ready for sale.^[39] They were suppressed, and the text did not reach the public until reprints appeared in 1813, one of them advertised as "superintended through the press" by Perceval.^[40] Pearce suspected a private bargain. Whitbread later said that publication had been held back until Eldon and Perceval had kissed hands on taking office, though he also said that Perceval proclaimed her innocence until his death.^[41]

The new cabinet paid its debt in official language. A minute of Council dated April 22, 1807, attended by Eldon and Canning among others, called the charges of pregnancy and delivery "completely disproved." It found the remaining charges "either satisfactorily contradicted" or resting on evidence "undeserving of credit." It advised that she be admitted "with as little delay as possible" and received in a manner due to her rank. It also proposed that the inquiry papers be sealed up. Castlereagh later described this as little more than a confirmation of what Grenville's cabinet had concluded. A further minute recommended that she be given apartments in a royal palace.^[42] The crown's lawyers were satisfied that Lady Douglas had perjured herself but saw difficulties in proving it, and they advised no prosecution.^[43]

Caroline attended a drawing-room, where the king received her warmly. At a royal birthday party soon afterward, she and the prince met in the center of the room while the company fell silent. They exchanged a few words that no one could hear and passed on. The often-quoted phrase "stately as an iceberg" comes from the later writer John Doran, and it should be read as his image of the prince. According to Pearce, the two never met again.^[44]

The government had vindicated her in every way it could without a trial, yet suspicion remained. Caroline did little to dispel it. In later years, by the account of Lady Charlotte Campbell (later Bury), she claimed to have answered a question about Willikin's parentage with the words "Prove it, and he shall be your king." She swore that he was not her son, but she also teased that he was not really William Austin, and Lady Charlotte did not know what to believe.^[45] The commissioners' finding rests on far better evidence than this talk.

Two Houses on the Heath

While the affair was still unresolved, her family's world collapsed. Her father, the Duke of Brunswick, was mortally wounded in the Prussian defeat of October 1806, and the French occupied his duchy. Her mother, Augusta, George III's elder sister, reached Gravesend on July 7, 1807, a few weeks short of seventy, and stayed at first with Caroline.^[46]

The two women had not lived together since Caroline's marriage, and they did not manage it for long. Each, Caroline wrote after a month, liked "to live her own way." By September the duchess had moved next door to Chesterfield House, which became known as Brunswick House and is now Ranger's House. A "private communication" joined the two properties.^[47] The arrangement proved useful, because Charlotte could now see her mother once a week at her grandmother's. Caroline described the routine dryly. The girl came to dinner at three on Saturdays to meet "old and steady people," Caroline joined them at four, and Charlotte left at six.^[48]

Caroline continued to entertain on a large scale. In June 1808 she gave a grand fete that used both houses, with a temporary ballroom a hundred feet long and a covered way leading to the supper room at her mother's.^[49] Her access to her daughter remained narrow. When Charlotte fell ill, in about 1808, Caroline went to Warwick House despite the prohibition. When she proposed to return after the girl recovered, the prince wrote that the illness had been an exception and could no longer serve as an excuse.^[50] He also ruled that her unfinished apartments at Kensington gave her no right to come. By Pearce's account, she increasingly lived in those apartments from then on, while keeping Montague House as well.^[51]

News from Germany

By 1809 public attention had moved elsewhere. That winter a Commons inquiry into the sale of army commissions by Mary Anne Clarke, the Duke of York's mistress, gave the country a new royal scandal and forced the duke to resign as commander in chief. Caroline later judged that the session had to some degree lessened the royal family's quarrels, since they now had reason to hang together.^[52] Her own affairs had gone quiet.

On Monday, August 7, 1809, Caroline sat down to write to her thirteen-year-old daughter. She passed on the first news of the British expedition to the Scheldt and gave thanks that few lives had been lost. She also confessed a horror of capitulations, which she said generally ended in very bad conventions. Then she added, "I have heard nothing from Germany, which rather surprises me." She was about to leave for Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole's old house, and she signed herself Charlotte's attached mother.^[53]

Her brother was then reaching the end of a remarkable march. Frederick William, the new Duke of Brunswick, had raised a volunteer corps with Austrian support, and he refused to stop when Austria signed an armistice. He led his black-uniformed men across northern Germany and fought his way past Westphalian troops outside his own lost capital. In the first days of August he reached the Weser, where a British naval raid had just destroyed a battery at the river's mouth, and his corps embarked for England.^[54] Caroline did not say whose news she was awaiting, but her brother was the member of her family then fighting in Germany. By one newspaper report, he dined with her at Kensington Palace on August 18.^[55] Napoleon's wars had now driven her mother and her brother from their duchy, and both had found refuge near her in England.

The visit to Strawberry Hill offers a last view of her at the close of these years. Mary Berry, Walpole's friend, was staying with the owner of the house, Anne Damer. Berry was no admirer, yet she thought that, at her best, the princess had more natural cleverness than any of her rank she had met. She also regretted that Caroline had "not a grain of common sense." The princess had brought Willikin, then seven or eight years old, and Berry noted with disapproval what people would inevitably say about her taking the boy everywhere.^[56] After a secret inquiry and a search of hospital registers, Caroline was still taking him out in public. Her reasons may have been defiance, affection, or simple heedlessness. Any of the three would fit what she had done since leaving Carlton House.

A Question of State

The Blackheath years mattered because they turned a failed marriage into a public question. A commission meeting in private had treated a woman's friendships, jokes, and adopted child as evidence bearing on the succession. A decade later the government would send another commission to gather evidence about her, this time in Milan. The commissioners and cabinets had cleared her of the great charge but left a record of lesser ones that any later minister could reopen. Her letter of complaint brought the matter before Parliament in March 1813, when Whitbread protested that the old evidence was being raked up again.^[57] The suppressed book reached print that same year. Public opinion would take her side still more strongly during the proceedings of 1820.

The child who danced at Charlton in 1797 had become, by 1809, the object of a contest that neither parent would give up. She now received her mother's war news by letter from a few miles away. The prince had wanted to be rid of his wife, and the inquiry had not given him that. Caroline had wanted her daughter and her place at court. She had gained only the second, and only in form. She kept the house on the heath for a few more years, and it was pulled down after she left England in 1814.