Queen Caroline

DESCRIPTION: "Queen, queen, Caroline, Dipped her hair in turpentine, Turpentine made it shine, Queen, queen Caroline"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1906 (Greig/Duncan8)
KEYWORDS: nonballad royalty
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1762-1830 - Life of King George IV
Apr 8, 1795 - Marriage of George, Prince of Wales (the future George IV) to Caroline of Brunswick. The marriage was a complete failure
1820 - George IV succeeds his father George III
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland(Aber)) Ireland
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Greig/Duncan8 1643, "Queen Caroline" (1 text)
Brady-AllInAllIn, p. 57, "(Gipsy, gipsy, Caroline" (1 text)
Abrahams-JumpRopeRhymes, #535, "Sweet, sweet Caroline" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Peter and Iona Opie, _I Saw Esau: Traditional Rhymes of Youth_, #8, "(Queen, queen, Caroline)" (1 text)
Henry Carrington Bolton, Counting-Out Rhymes of Children (New York, 1888 ("Digitized by Google")), #785 p.116, ("Queen, queen, Caroline")
Roud #13061
NOTES [5208 words]: The current description is all of a Bolton text from Edinburgh. Except for spelling and punctuation differences, it is the same as Greig/Duncan8."And so began the mad, fantastic summer of 1820, the summer when international politics, sport and even the London season were forgotten. The Queen was the only subject of interest....
And in all four kingdoms the younger generation were chanting
Queenie, queenie Caroline
Washed her hair in turpentine
a song which is heard in the slums of Dublin today" (Source: Joanna Richardson, The Disastrous Marriage; a Study of George IV and Caroline of Brunswick (1960, London), pp. 137-138.) - BS
American versions differ only slightly, e.g.
Queen, queen, Caroline,
Washed her hair in turpentine
Turpentine to make it shine,
Queen, queen, Caroline.
Few versions have any additional lines. In this form, it is fairly popular as a counting-out and jump-rope rhyme; Abrahams and Rankin cite half a dozen uses as a counting-out rhyme and Abrahams has one as a jump-rope rhyme, though it features "Sweet, sweet Caroline." There are some other versions that don't refer to QUEEN Caroline; some mention "Can Can Caroline" or "Gipsy Caroline." But the majority seem to reference "Queen Queen Caroline," and that phrasing more easily could degenerate into the other forms than they give rise to it. I think "Queen Queen Caroline" is likely the original, or at least the earliest surviving version, and so needs explanation.
There were in fact two British Queens Caroline, great-grandmother-in-law (if there is such a thing) and great-granddaughter-in-law. Caroline of (Brandenburg-)Anbsbach, 1683-1737, was the wife of George II; Caroline of Brunswick (1768-1821) was the wife of George IV, the eldest son of George III (who was the grandson of George II).
George II and Caroline of Anspach got along pretty well despite his infidelities. George IV was also a womanizer, and he and Caroline of Brunswick did *not* get along; OxfordCompanion, p. 169, calls their marriage a "spectacular disaster. According to her own testimony, intimacy was confined to the first night, and certainly the couple separated after the birth of their first daughter." Hibbert, p. 149, says that the Prince's feelings turned to "positive hatred" soon after the child was born -- a fact which did not help his reputation with the common people. It reached the point where she requested orders "in writing," and he in fact supplied those written orders (Hibbert, pp. 152-153).
Probably the marriage should not have taken place. But George, as Prince of Wales, had built up tremendous debts (and also married -- horrors -- a Catholic; for background on this, see the notes to "The Ass and the Orangeman's Daughter"). The only way George III was willing to pay his son's debts was for him to marry a nice respectable Protestant princess and get on with the business of producing an heir. (Never mind that the younger George was already married, albeit in a marriage that he legally could not contract -- the royal heir could not marry a Catholic, and could not marry until he reached age 25 without his father's consent; Fraser, p. 34. The government ignored his marriage, and George was temporarily bored with his first wife Maria Fitzherbert. And he really did need help with his debts; he seems to have been unable to manage money at all; Hibbert, p. 135. Indeed, Fitzherbert apparently had to "lend" him money at times -- Fraser, p. 39 -- even though he had all the resources of the Principality of Wales at his disposal. The man was a menace. George III eventually declared the marriage null and void -- Fraser, p. 41 -- but it would have been fascinating to see what would have happened had the Anglican church not gone along supinely. Fraser thinks Prince George knew this would happen and had been maneuvering to get into Maria Fitzherbert's pants without having to take responsibility for it. I can't prove it, but he was certainly a very irresponsible man.)
(When he had made his unofficial marriage, George had been content to let the throne pass to his younger brother's children, but it turned out that his younger brother -- like most of George III's children -- proved unable to produce a legitimate child. Queen Victoria, who succeeded in 1837, was the daughter of George III's fourth son; the three older brothers all left no heirs. Fraser, p. 296, says that when George's daughter Princess Charlotte went into labor in 1817, it was the first time there was a legitimate birth in the royal family since Charlotte herself had been born 21 years before! Much of this was the fault of George III, who basically locked up his daughters and required his sons to marry only Protestant German princesses; Holme, p. 24. So the sons found mistresses and didn't make much attempt to marry until George III wasn't in position to do much about it.)
The most available princess was apparently Caroline of Brunswick (Smith, pp. 70-71), even though, at age 26, she was approaching old maid status (Smith, p. 70; still, she was half a dozen years younger than George) -- plus she was his first cousin (Hibbert, p. 133; the genealogy on p. xiv of Fraser shows that Caroline's mother Augusta was the sister of George III, of George IV. They were also third cousins in a different line of descent going back to George I). They had never met.
Several reports describe her as being quite pretty as a teenager (Fraser, pp. 22, 25), and was still decent-looking at the time of her marriage (Fraser, p. 56), but it sounds as if she aged rather rapidly. Lady Charlotte Campbell said her head was too large for her body and her neck too short; others thought her dumpy (Fraser, p. 56). When growing up, "She was an odd girl, precocious, pert, with a freakish and rather cruel sense of humour" (Holme, p. 2). When Lord Malmesbury was sent to bring her to England, he was worried; he considered her looks (minimally) acceptable, but she displayed "skitttish behavior, gossipy manner, and a certain lack of hygiene in person and dress" (Smith, p. 71; Fraser, p. 52, also emphasizes the fact that she probably smelled very bad). He thought she had "some natural but no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity; warm feelings and nothing to counterbalance them; great good humour and much good nature -- no appearance of caprice -- rather quick and vive, but not a grain of rancour" (Plowden, pp. 12-13). And she had "a silly pride of finding out everything" (Plowden, p. 14). Nor was she likely to be much of a help to George; except for music, her education had been badly neglected (Fraser, p. 21. Plowden, p. 96, says her voice was "untuneful," but she apparently had a piano, harp, hand-organ, and "other musical instruments," according to Fraser, p. 330, and there is a painting of her tuning her harp while her daughter Charlotte looks on).
George had strange tastes in women, but he was a bit of a dandy, and Malmesbury's attempts to clean Caroline up apparently failed; when George first saw her, three days before the wedding, he had no sooner tried an embrace than he fled and demanded a drink (Smith, p. 72. Her response -- in French, since she was just starting to learn English -- was "My God! Does the prince always act like this? I think he's very fat and he's nothing like as handsome as his portrait"; Hibbert, p. 144. That at once summed up her dilemma and showed how freely she gave voice to thoughts perhaps better kept secret).
The marriage followed on April 8, 1795, but even at the ceremony, George was looking at other women and was so drunk that he could not consummate the marriage (Smith, pp. 72-73; Hibbert, pp. 146-148). After finally managing to perform his duty, he went back to his current mistress (Smith, p. 73). Fortunately, Caroline quickly became pregnant; unfortunately, the daughter -- the only child Caroline ever had -- would not outlive her father. So the British succession did not pass through Caroline's descendants. Or George's. (But, despite all the claims about Caroline playing the field, it seems almost certain that George was the father; they were married on April 8, 1795 and Fraser, p. 62, estimates based on the date of birth that the baby Charlotte was conceived on around April 16, 1795.)
After months or trouble, Caroline finally moved out of George's residence at Carlton House in February 1797 -- although George III never granted a formal separation (Smith, p. 77). At about the same time, George IV was trying to get back with his morganatic wife Maria Fitzherbert (Smith, p. 79). Maria actually wrote to the Pope to try to figure out what to do. He told her to regard herself as George's only true wife (Smith, pp. 80-81). She was old enough by then that children were perhaps not likely, but I shudder to think what the constitutional situation would have been had she had any. George didn't finally split with Maria until 1811, when he was about to become Regent (Smith, p. 119).
George IV continued to persecute Caroline even after she moved out, e.g. trying to deny her any part in the education of their daughter (Smith, p. 103).
Lofts, p. 151, says that her behavior once she and her husband parted was so scandalous as to prompt an investigation, although it found that she was merely indiscrete, not adulterous (the "Delicate Investigation" was so high-stakes that the Prime Minister was actually part of the committee, though it did not allow Caroline to present a defense; Plowden, pp. 62, 68). It seems as if she and George Canning, the future Prime Minister, were actually seriously involved (Fraser, pp. 123-125), but he broken it off to marry another.
Later, her indiscretion apparently reached the point of appearing topless in public (Lofts, p. 153; according to Plowden, p. 179, this was at a ball in Geneva when Caroline was in her forties. I have to think there was an explanation, if probably a strange one, but I suspect no one dared ask. She was described at about this time as "a short, very fat, elderly woman with 'an extremely red face'" -- Plowden, p. 180 -- so it is unlikely that she was trying to attract men even if you ignore the fact that she was probably committed to her Italian friend Pergami. Plowden comments that she was "fast approaching, if she had not already crossed, the boundary which separates the licensed eccentric from the true outcast." Eccentric she certainly was -- e.g., in her later years, she was said to wear a half pumpkin on her head t keep it cool -- Fraser, p. 291).
Worse, from a legal standpoint, it was reported that various men had slept in her home without chaperonage. There was even a claim that she had gotten pregnant in 1802 -- indeed, she seems once to have pretended to be pregnant (Plowden, p. 54), and there was a child who some claimed was hers, though in fact she merely treated another woman's baby, William Austin, as her son. (It's worth remembering that anyone who actually got her pregnant would almost certainly have faced a treason charge -- as could Caroline herself -- with a death sentence almost guaranteed. Caroline apparently wasn't aware of this until after the engagement; Holme, p. 14. Caroline seems often seems to have spent long periods alone with men -- Plowden, pp. 63-64 -- but I doubt any of them were stupid enough to risk sleeping with her.) The child William Austin was a boy, which meant that, were he George's, he would be senior in the succession to the Princess Charlotte, so this had complicated political implications before it was demonstrated that the child was not Caroline's (Smith, p. 113; Fraser, pp. 137, 167, and Plowden, pp. 64-65, describe how a new mother had, in effect, let Caroline adopt her baby because the family could not afford to bring up the child).
Caroline certainly hadn't behaved well. But for all the rumor about her, there wasn't anything concrete. (As Caroline supposedly quipped, that "her only real sin was to commit adultery with Mrs Fitzherbert's husband"; Plowden, p. 95.) All the Prince accomplished was to make himself look bad again when a new, more pro-Caroline government came in in 1807 (Smith, p. 115). George's boorishness never ceased; he didn't even inform Caroline when their daughter Charlotte died in 1817 after giving birth to a stillborn child; Caroline learned of it from the newspaper (so Plowden, p. 210; Smith, p. 166) or a courtier who was taking the news to others and only accidentally provided it to her (so Fraser, p. 298). It was a severe blow (after all, she had hoped to be Queen Mother when George died), and it seems to have put Caroline into a bout of depression, in which she stopped traveling and largely isolated herself at her home in Italy (Fraser, pp. 298-301).
Poor Princess Charlotte died when she was barely into her twenties, having married in part to try to escape her father's tyranny; she had already had two miscarriages before her fatal pregnancy (Plowden, p. 201). Her death looked like a disaster in the making; with Charlotte gone, George III had no legitimate grandchildren at all until several, including the future Queen Victoria, were born in 1819 (Fraser, p. 320). George, now Prince Regent and soon to be King, apparently cranked up his attempts to get a divorce when Charlotte died, but it was awfully late in the day for him to father another child, and in any case he had no one who particularly wanted him as a husband.
Caroline in these years traveled all over Europe, and blew through the limited budget allotted her (Fraser, p. 279) -- but no one ever really dared call her on it, because if the government cut off her funding, they were afraid she would return to England! (Fraser, p. 281). Her behavior was considered unacceptable, but for her to return to her nominal home was worse.
She was popular both in England and beyong; it was hard to get evidence against her in her new home in Italy, because her charity and interest in ordinary people made her popular (Fraser, p. 314). Investigators sent to Italy tried to buy evidence against her, and managed to obtain some, but of course such evidence was very tainted and unreliable (Fraser, pp. 313-314).
George tried to have Caroline convicted of treason -- under the bigoted laws of the time, for the consort of the king or crown prince to commit adultery was treason, but there was no punishment to the monarch who cheated -- but there was no proof of adultery. So he tried to claim that her adultery gave him the right to a divorce (Smith, p. 114) -- absurd, since the adultery still hadn't been proved. (In an ironic twist, they couldn't go after her paramour, a handsome Italian named Pergami, because he was a foreigner; Fraser, p. 378-379.) By 1818, she was willing to divorce if he would pay her a reasonable pension; she was happy with her household in Italy (Fraser, pp. 320-321) -- but the Church required a fault to allow a divorce (Smith, p. 177), and the fault was George, and he wasn't going to admit anything! (Fraser, p. 324.) So talks ground to a halt -- until, in early 1820, poor old George III died after the longest reign in British history to that time. So George IV was suddenly King, and Caroline was still legally his wife. She had been negotiating a settlement, but the talks had broken down -- in no small part because the man who had claimed to represent her interests,Henry Brougham, was playing both sides (Fraser, pp. 351-353 and elsewhere). She had already been planning to come to England to demand her rights (Smith, p.178); now her arrival brought a tumultuous welcome (Plowden, p. 212).
She did a good job of publicity; leaving Calais on the morning of June 5, she arrived at Dover in early afternoon -- and, when told she could not dock until 5:00 p.m., insisted on going ashore in an open boat, which courageous act was commemorated in a series of "Queenite" memorial items (Fraser, pp. 363-364). She also received a gunnery salute from the confused garrison commander who didn't know what to do when a queen-under-investigation landed.
George insisted on pushing a Bills of Pains and Penalties (the proper name for a Bill of Attainder that does not involve an execution: it is a form of punishment without trial by parliament). "The Bill's title stated its purpose all too clearly: 'An Act... to deprive her Majesty Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of the Title, Prerogatives, Rights, Privileges and Exemptions of Queen Consort to this Realm, and to dissolve the Marriage between his Majesty and the said Caroline Amelia Elizabeth.' Its preamble related her engagement in 1814 of Pergami, 'a foreigner of low station,' whom she had promoted, and alleged that she had conducted herself towards him 'with indecent and offensive familiarity and freedom, and carried on a licentious, disgraceful, and licentious intercourse' with him" (Fraser, p. 400). But the Lords still had to discuss it. It was a fascinating situation: The Lords often took the summer off, if they attended Parliament at all -- but, this time, they were *made* to attend, on penalty of a substantial fine (Fraser, p. 410); George didn't want anyone trying to dodge his revenge. They actually had to build temporary annexes to the building to provide space for all the extra peers.
The trial began August 17, 1820, according to Fraser, p. 413, who has the best account, and was so controversial that companies of constables, and even Life Guard units, were brought in to guard the proceedings. The crowd that gathered outside to support Caroline numbered at least ten thousand (Fraser, p. 414).
I can't help but note that one of the arguments used against her, by government solicitor-general: "The purity of women was prized in society, said Copley, precisely because men could not aspire to that honour and grace... Hence, to safeguard that purity, adultery in women was a crime, and a ground for divorce, while it was condoned in the stronger sex" (Fraser p. 421). Seems to me that the moral crime here is letting people like that anywhere near a court case. If you can't trust men, why are you letting them be kings? But, of course, that particular form of hypocrisy was standard for the time.
The trial brought much evidence against Caroline -- most of it of very low quality. Henry Brougham's defense team was able to offer evidence that the government suborned perjury, coached witnesses, hid its evidence from the defense, blocked defense witnesses from entering the country, and conducted a level of surveillance against Caroline that clearly violated her rights. And still they had only inferential proof. (See Fraser, pp. 422-444).
Did they have enough evidence to prove that Caroline slept with Pergami, despite all the defense objections? Most of us would probably say no, with one caveat which I'll get to below. But it was really, truly, ugly, tainted evidence -- the only thing it proved absolutely was that George IV would do anything to convict his wife. (A single witness eventually turned up who claimed to have seen Pergami having sex with her, but it was after the trial; Fraser, p. 446.)
The Lords discussed at length, and even though there was much evidence of "scandalous" behavior on Caroline's part, the bill against her barely passed, with only a nine vote majority. The government withdrew it rather than watch it go down in flames in the Commons (Smith, p. 181; Fraser, p. 443; Plowden, p. 214). Caroline was still the (uncrowned) queen.
Anderson, p. xi, has an interesting quote from Henry Mayhew about the vulgar press and the trial: "The best known, and the most successful printer and publisher of all who... [supplied].... the 'paper' in demand for street sale, and in every department of street literature, was the late Jemmy Catnach, who was said to have amassed upward of 10,000 pounds in the business. He is reported to have made the greater part of that sum during the trial of Queen Caroline, by the sale of whole-sheet 'papers,' descriptive of the trial and embellished with 'splendid illustrations.'"
In the end, though, no one was really happy with the outcome. George of course went ballistic, and threatened to abdicate. He tried to change governments -- but no other faction wanted to do his hatchet work, so there was no change. Henry Brougham, whose legal skill had saved Caroline but who had done it for his sake not for hers, failed to secure a change of government he wanted and failed to increase his own power. And Caroline, although she hadn't been convicted, didn't get any more consideration out of the government (Fraser, pp. 447-448).
Caroline was still written out of the liturgy of George's coronation and other ceremonies (Plowden, p. 212). She would not be allowed the privileges of a queen. She did get the offer of an annuity, which she took, but nothing else -- the coalition behind her fractured; she had only been a figurehead for various opposition forces who didn't agree on what they wanted (Fraser, pp. 452-453).
When she was barred from the coronation, she tried to attend anyway and was turned back -- George actually hired prizefighters to bar the door! It was her last public act; that very night, she was evidently having strong enough intestinal pains that she took a dose of magnesia and laudanum so large that it made her attendants fear for her (Fraser, p.457). She died suddenly just weeks after George's coronation (Smith, p.189), which no doubt saved everyone (except her) a good deal of grief. She had suffered severe intestinal pain for a time before the end, trying intense quantities of calomel and castor oil as a treatment; Plowden, p. 217, somehow concludes from this that she had cancer. (She had had a severe bout of rheumatic fever shortly before coming to England -- Fraser, p. 354. No one seems to connect the two, but I wonder. The first stomach attack came soon after; Fraser, p. 355. It doubtless didn't help that they not only stuffed her full of purgatives but bled her enough to supply a small hospital; Fraser, p. 460. Fraser, p. 461, mentions the idea that she might have had a tumor but says the evidence is insufficient; I think that is true. Fraser thinks that, apart from physical problems, she may have lost the will to live, which seems not unlikely.)
She asked to be buried in Brunswick. George IV did not think the nation should bother with a public mourning ceremony, but was convinced to allow a minor events. He was not there for it; he was making a visit to Ireland (Fraser, pp. 462-463). There were riotous incidents as her remains were taken to the ship that would take her to Germany (Fraser, pp. 463-465), though no one seems to know exactly why. Fraser claims, p. 466, "Her high-spirited, even reckless, response to her predicament brought her unprecedented liberty, as she confounded the machinations of her husband and of governments in England and on the continent to bring her to book. But in the end Caroline's breathtaking audacity had fatal consequences, contributing to the loss of her daughter, her crown and her life."
I'm not sure that that last sentence is entirely true, but it certainly caused her to be talked and written about, with both friendship and hostility -- and sometimes, perhaps, some of both. Around the time of the coronation, for instance, one wit wrote,
Most Gracious Queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more,
But if that effort be to great,
To go away, at any rate (Smith, p. 183; Plowden, p. 215).
A story from 1821 gives an idea of how George IV felt about Caroline at that time. Word had just reached Britain of the death of Napoleon on Saint Helena. The first messenger to reach George, instead of giving the news directly, is reported to have said, "Sire, your great enemy is dead!" And George supposedly responded, "Is she, by God" (Smith, p. 193).
(Curiously, almost all the sources I've read seem to think George IV was more sinned against than sinning. I simply cannot agree. Even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, that Caroline slept around, well, guess what: George IV spent his life hopping from mistress to mistress. And he was a bigamist. Is it "worse" when a woman commits adultery than when a man does? I do not agree. But the main point is, he spurned her, for no reason except pique. Even if he found he didn't like her and they kept separate establishments, he didn't need to persecute her. He was the aggressor and the bully. The fault is his. Period. As his daughter Charlotte is once reputed to have said, "My mother was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she was if my father had not been infinitely worse"; Plowden, p. 87).
Does any of that explain this song? No doubt, given her odd behavior, Caroline was quite capable of using turpentine to try to color her hair -- or maybe Malmesbury tried it to cover her body odor. But... "It was rumored that Lady Jersey [George's current mistress, whom he had made one of her "ladies" in one of the most tactless moves that this boor of a prince had ever made] had gone so far as to deposit some evil-smelling substance in [Caroline's] hair to increase the prince's distaste, had put Epsom salts into the pastry which she had for dinner, and had dropped strong spirits into her wine to make the Queen think she was a drunkard" (Hibbert, p. 145). If that doesn't sound like the source for this rhyme, what would?
Macalpine/Hunter, pp. 247-250, suggest that Caroline's problem was porphyria, a disease she supposedly shared with her uncle George III and her first cousin and husband George IV. Fraser, p. 461, declares this "unconvincing," and I agree. That George III had mental problems is certain; that the cause was porphyria (a genetic disease which both might have inherited from their common ancestors) is likely but in need of demonstration by DNA testing. As for George IV having porphyria, I think it much more likely that the condition he suffered from was "being a jerk." (If you truly want a diagnosis, maybe narcissistic personality disorder.) And we'd need a lot more evidence to say that so many of his relatives had it!
All of Caroline's characteristics -- including the bad hygiene, as well as her overly-large head (Hibbert, p. 136), her tendency to ask impolite questions (Hibbert, pp. 136-137), the fact that she was extremely impressionable (Hibbert, p. 137), her intellectual precocity (Holme, p. 2), what her doctor called her "sort of irrational bravery" in the face of what proved her final illness (Fraser, p. 458), and her collector's mania (Plowden, p. 44, although what she collected was babies!) -- would be a very good fit for autism. If Fraser, p. 461, is right that Caroline eventually lost the will to live, that too would fit. And apparently she had suffered intestinal problems long before her death (Fraser, p.461), and gastrointestinal problems are extremely common in autism -- the estimate is that they occur in at least a third of cases, and it may be more because so many autistics can't really communicate how they feel. It is true that the fact that one of her brothers was considered mentally defective (Holme, p. 4) does hint at a genetic condition. Of course, autism is almost as genetic as porphyria.... If, as seems to be the general consensus, Caroline did not suffer from intellectual disability, and hence is not likely to have had Down Syndrome, then autism seems by far the explanation (as an autistic myself, I felt like I recognized her). Malmesbury had said that "with a steady man she would do vastly well" (Fraser, p. 143); I think this is exactly right, but it was her incredibly bad luck to end up with a boor who never figured out that whipping a slave will not make her obey you.
This is also my one caveat to the idea that Caroline slept with Pergami (except for the fact that such a handsome young man probably wouldn't be much interested in a fat, strange woman who didn't really speak his language): People with autism are often incredibly loyal to their friends, in such a way that it can look like love to someone who doesn't understand them, and people with autism often behave in ways that others don't understand. So if Caroline had autism, it might (I stress *might*) provide an alternate explanation for all the evidence brought against her at trial.
Autism might even explain a willingness for Caroline to put turpentine in her hair; autism often affects the sensory system, so it might not have smelled as objectionable to her as it does to most people.
For a child whose mother was peculiar and whose father was scum, their daughter Charlotte seems to have turned out relatively well -- she was a very pretty child by all accounts (although portraits of her as an adult don't strike me as being especially attractive), and she seems to have been both clever and charming when she was calm (though her early education seems to have been extremely poor; Plowden, p. 82). But she was prone to meltdowns (Plowden, p. 76), and of a sort that again hint at autism. And she had terrible relations with her father, who had a bad tendency to try to control everything about her life (at one time, in response to one of his numerous carping criticisms, she said "he is compleatly poisoned against me"; Plowden, p. 131; on another, she made a serious attempt to run away from home; Plowden, p. 154 and following). We can't really know how she would have turned out, though, given that she died so young. What is certain is that the nation mourned her death deeply (Plowden, p. 208), as they never cared about her father.
Of course, it doesn't really matter what Caroline's (or Charlotte's) modern diagnosis would be; what matters is that people at the time thought Caroline very strange.
Which doesn't change the fact that the public preferred her. The papers put almost all the blame on him -- deservedly, I think, in that if George had not squandered everything he had twice over, there would have been no need for his bad marriage. But it really hurt his reputation. In the year George III died, for instance, an opposition paper called Caroline "this injured woman -- the victim, first to unbridled lust, and now to despotism... This innocent, injured, and unfortunate Princess had her future happiness sacrificed at the altar of profligacy" (Smith, p. 173). Even before that -- from the moment George had started talking about separation -- the public was on her side, as e.g. when they cheered her when she appeared at the Opera (Plowden, p. 37).
Bottom line: Although Caroline of Brunswick, George IV's wife, was only Queen (as opposed to Princess of Wales) for a handful of months, and never actually fulfilled the functions of a Queen, or even of a Princess of Wales, the rumors about her seem such a good fit in other ways that I am inclined to think this is about her if it is about anyone. Of course, I'm far from sure it's about anyone.
There were a number of broadsides about Caroline's life; Fraser, facing p. 299, shows an amazingly big one with eleven woodcuts, a poem, a dirge, and a prayer. It was printed by James Catnach on December 10, 1821. Sadly, I can't find a copy in any of the online broadside collections.
Of all the books about Caroline, or about George IV, I think Fraser is by far the best; I just didn't have time to fully process it for this entry. - RBW
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