THE INDISCRETIONS OF A PRINCESS--_continued_
When Caroline, Princess of Wales, shook the dust of England off her feet
one August day in the year 1814, it was only natural that her steps
should first turn towards the Brunswick home which held for her at least
a few happy memories, and where she hoped to find in sympathy and old
associations some salve for her wounded heart.
But the fever of restlessness was in her blood--the restlessness which
was to make her a wanderer over the face of the earth for half a dozen
years. The peace and solace she had looked for in Brunswick eluded her;
and before many days had passed she was on her way through Switzerland
to the sunny skies of Italy, where she could perhaps find in distraction
and pleasure the anodyne which a life of retirement denied her. She was
full of rebellion against fate, of hatred against her husband and his
country which had treated her with such unmerited cruelty. She would
defy fate; she would put a whole continent between herself and the
nightmare life she had left behind, she hoped for ever. She would pursue
and find pleasure at whatever cost.
In September, within five weeks of leaving England, we find her at
Geneva, installed in a suite of rooms next to those occupied by Marie
Louise, late Empress of France, a fugitive and exile like herself, and
animated by the same spirit of reckless revolt against destiny--Marie
Louise, we read, "making excursions like a lunatic on foot and on
horseback, never even seeming to dream of making people remember that,
before she became mixed up with a Corsican adventurer, she was an
Archduchess"; the Princess of Wales, equally careless of her dignity and
position, finding her pleasure in questionable company.
"From the inn where she was stopping she heard music, and, quite
unaccompanied, immediately entered a neighbouring house and disappeared
in the medley of dancers." A few days later, at Lausanne, "she learned
that a little ball was in progress at a house opposite the 'Golden
Lion,' and she asked for an invitation. After dancing with everybody and
anybody, she finished up by dancing a Savoyard dance, called a
_fricassée_, with a nobody. Madame de Corsal, who blushed and wept for
the rest of the company, declares that it has made her ill, and that she
feels that the honour of England has been compromised." Thus early did
Caroline begin that career of indiscretion, to call it by no worse name,
which made of her six years' exile "a long suicide of her reputation."
In October we find the Princess entering Milan, with her retinue of
ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, equerry, page, courier, and coachman,
and with William Austin for companion--a boy, now about thirteen, whom
she treated as her son, and who was believed by many to be the child of
her imprudence at Blackheath, although the Commission of the "Delicate
Investigation" had pronounced that he was son of a poor woman at
Deptford. At Milan, as indeed wherever she wandered in Italy, the
"vagabond Princess" was received as a Queen. Count di Bellegarde, the
Austrian Governor, was the first to pay homage to her; at the Scala
Theatre, the same evening, her entry was greeted with thunders of
applause, and whenever she appeared in the Milan streets it was to an
accompaniment of doffed hats and cheers.
One of her first visits was to the studio of Giuseppe Bossi, the famous
and handsome artist, whom she requested to paint her portrait. "On
Thursday," Bossi records, "I sketched her successfully in the character
of a Muse; then on Friday she came to show me her arms, of which she
was, not without reason, decidedly vain--she is a gay and whimsical
woman, she seems to have a good heart; at times she is ennuyée through
lack of occupation." On one occasion when she met in the studio some
French ladies, two of whom had been mistresses of the King of
Westphalia, the poor artist was driven to distraction by the chatter,
the singing, and dancing, in which the Princess especially displayed her
agility, until, as he pathetically says, "the house seemed possessed of
the devil, and you can imagine with what kind of ease it was possible
for me to work."
Before leaving Milan the Princess gave a grand banquet to Bellegarde
and a number of the principal men of the city--a feast which was to have
very important and serious consequences, for it was at this banquet that
General Pino, one of her guests, introduced to Caroline a new courier, a
man who, though she little dreamt it at the time, was destined to play a
very baleful part in her life.
This new courier was a tall and strikingly handsome man, who had seen
service in the Italian army, until a duel, in which he killed a superior
officer, compelled him to leave it in disgrace. At the time he entered
the Princess's service he was a needy adventurer, whose scheming brain
and utter lack of principle were in the market for the highest bidder.
"He is," said Baron Ompteda, "a sort of Apollo, of a superb and
commanding appearance, more than six feet high; his physical beauty
attracts all eyes. This man is called Pergami; he belongs to Milan, and
has entered the Princess's service. The Princess," he significantly
adds, "is shunned by all the English people of rank; her behaviour has
created the most marked scandal."
Such was the man with whose life that of the Princess of Wales was to be
so intimately and disastrously linked, and whose relations with her were
to be displayed to a shocked world but a few years later. It was indeed
an evil fate that brought this "superb Apollo" of the crafty brain and
conscienceless ambition into the life of the Princess at the high tide
of her revolt against the world and its conventions.
When Caroline and her retinue set out from Milan for Tuscany it was in
the wake of Pergami, who had ridden ahead to discharge his duties as
_avant courier_; but before Rome was reached his intimacy and
familiarity with his mistress were already the subject of whispered
comments and shrugged shoulders. At a ball given in her honour at Rome
by the banker Tortonia, the Princess shocked even the least prudish by
the abandon of her dancing and the tenuity of her costume, which, we are
told, consisted of "a single embroidered garment, fastened beneath the
bosom, without the shadow of a corset and without sleeves." And at
Naples, where King Joachim Murat gave her a regal reception, with a
sequel of fêtes and gala-performances in honour of the wife of the
Regent of England, she attended a rout, at the Teatro San Carlo, so
lightly attired "that many who saw her at her first entrance looked her
up and down, and, not recognising her, or pretending not to recognise
her, began to mutter disapprobation to such an extent that she was
compelled to withdraw.... The English residents soon let her understand,
by ceasing to frequent her palace, that even at Naples there were
certain laws of dress which could not be trampled underfoot in this
hoydenish manner."
While Caroline was thus defying convention and even decency, watchful
eyes were following her everywhere. A body of secret police, whose
headquarters were at Milan, was noting every indiscretion; and every
week brought fresh and damaging reports to England, where they were
eagerly welcomed by the Regent and his satellites. And while the
Princess was thus playing unconsciously, or recklessly, into the hands
of the enemy, Pergami was daily making his footing in her favour more
secure. Before Caroline left Naples he had been promoted from courier to
equerry, and in this more exalted and privileged rôle was always at her
side. So marked, in fact, was the intimacy even at this early stage,
that the Princess's retinue, one after another, and on one flimsy
pretext or another, deserted her in disgust, each vacancy, as it
occurred, being filled by one of Pergami's relatives--his brother, his
daughter, his sister-in-law (the Countess Oidi), and others, until
Caroline was soon surrounded by members of the ex-courier's family.
From Naples she wandered to Genoa, and from Genoa to Milan and Venice,
received regally everywhere by the Italians and shunned by the English
residents. From Venice she drifted to Lake Como, with whose beauties she
was so charmed that she decided to make her home there, purchasing the
Villa del Garrovo for one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and setting
the builders to work to make it a still more splendid home for a future
Queen of England. But even to the lonely isolation of the Italian lakes
the eyes of her husband's secret agents pursued her, spying on her every
movement--"uncertain shadows gliding in the twilight along the paths and
between the hedges, and even in the cellars and attics of the
villa"--until the shadowy presences filled her with such terror and
unrest that she sought to escape them by a long tour in the East.
Thus it was that in November, 1815, the Princess and her Pergami
household set forth on their journey to Sicily, Tunis, Athens, the
cities of the East and Jerusalem, the strange story of which was to be
unfolded to the world five years later. How intimate the Princess and
her handsome, stalwart courier had by this time become was illustrated
by the Attorney-General in his opening speech at her memorable trial.
"One day, after dinner, when the Princess's servants had withdrawn, a
waiter at the hotel, Gran Brettagna, saw the Princess put a golden
necklace round Pergami's neck. Pergami took it off again and put it
jestingly on the neck of the Princess, who in her turn once more removed
it and put it again round Pergami's neck."
As early as August in this year Pergami had his appointed place at the
Princess's table, and his room communicating with hers, and on the
various voyages of the Eastern tour there was abundant evidence to prove
"the habit which the Princess had of sleeping under one and the same
awning with Pergami."
But it is as impossible in the limits of space to follow Caroline and
her handsome cavalier through every stage of these Eastern wanderings,
as it is unnecessary to describe in detail the evidence of intimacy so
lavishly provided by the witnesses for the prosecution at the
trial--evidence much of which was doubtless as false as it was venal.
That the Princess, however, was infatuated by her cavalier, and that she
was in the highest degree indiscreet in her relations with him, seems
abundantly clear, whatever the precise degree of actual guilt may have
been.
Pergami had now been promoted from equerry to Grand Chamberlain to Her
Royal Highness, and as further evidence of her favour, she bought for
him in Sicily an estate which conferred on its owner the title of Baron
della Francina. At Malta she procured for him a knighthood of that
island's famous order; at Jerusalem she secured his nomination as Knight
of the Holy Sepulchre; and, to crown her favours, she herself instituted
the Order of St Caroline, with Pergami for Grand Master. Behold now our
ex-courier and adventurer in all his new glory as Grand Chamberlain and
lover of a future Queen of England, as Baron della Francina, Knight of
two Orders and Grand Master of a third, while every post of profit in
that vagrant Court was held by some member of his family!
The Eastern tour ended, which had ranged from Algiers and Egypt to
Constantinople and Jerusalem, and throughout which she had progressed
and been received as a Queen, Caroline settled down for a time in her
now restored villa on Lake Como, celebrating her return by lavish
charities to her poor neighbours, and by popular fêtes and balls, in one
of which "she danced as Columbine, wearing her lover's ear-rings, whilst
Pergami, dressed as harlequin and wearing her ear-rings, supported her."
But even here she was to find no peace from her husband's spies, whose
evidence, confirmed on oath by a score of witnesses, was being
accumulated in London against the longed-for day of reckoning. And it
was not long before Caroline and her Grand Chamberlain were on their
wanderings again--this time to the Tyrol, to Austria, and through
Northern Italy, always inseparable and everywhere setting the tongue of
scandal wagging by their indiscreet intimacy. Even the tragic death in
childbirth of her only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, which put all
England in mourning, seemed powerless to check her career of folly. It
is true that, on hearing of it, she fell into a faint and afterwards
into a kind of protracted lethargy, but within a few weeks she had flung
herself again into her life of pleasure-chasing and reckless disregard
of convention.
But matters were now hurrying fast to their tragic climax. For some time
the life of George III. had been flickering to its close. Any day might
bring news that the end had come, and that the Princess was a Queen. And
for some time Caroline had been bracing herself to face this crisis in
her life and to pit herself against her enemies in a grim struggle for a
crown, the title to which her years of folly (for such at the best they
had been) had so gravely endangered. Over the remainder of her vagrant
life, with its restless flittings, and its indiscretions, marked by
spying eyes, we must pass to that February morning in 1820 when, to
quote a historian, "the Princess had scarcely reached her hotel (at
Florence) when her faithful major-domo, John Jacob Sicard, appeared
before her, accompanied by two noblemen, and in a voice full of emotion
announced, 'You are Queen.'"
The fateful hour had at last arrived when Caroline must either renounce
her new Queendom or present a bold front to her enemies and claim the
crown that was hers. After a few indecisive days, spent in Rome, where
news reached her that the King had given orders that her name should be
excluded from the Prayer Book, her wavering resolution took a definite
and determined shape. She would go to London and face the storm which
she knew her coming would bring on her head.
At Paris she was met by Lord Hutchinson with a promise of an increase of
her yearly allowance to fifty thousand pounds, on condition that she
renounced her claim to the title of Queen, and consented never to put
foot again in England--an offer to which she gave a prompt and scornful
refusal; and on the afternoon of 5th June she reached Dover, greeted by
enthusiastic cheers and shouts of "God save Queen Caroline!" by the
fluttering of flags, and the jubilant clanging of church-bells. The
wanderer had come back to the land of her sorrow, to find herself
welcomed with open arms by the subjects of the King whose brutality had
driven her to exile and to shame.
The story of the trial which so soon followed her arrival has too
enduring a place in our history to call for a detailed description--the
trial in which all the weight of the Crown and the testimony of a small
army of suborned witnesses--"a troupe of comedians in the pay of
malevolence," to quote Brougham--were arrayed against her; and in which
she had so doughty a champion in Brougham, and such solace and support
in the sympathy of all England. We know the fate of that Bill of Pains
and Penalties, which charged her with having permitted a shameful
intimacy with one Bartolomeo Pergami, and provided as penalty that she
should be deprived of the title and privilege of Queen, and that her
marriage to King George IV. should be for ever dissolved and
annulled--how it was forced through the House of Lords with a
diminishing majority, and finally withdrawn. And we know, too, the
outburst of almost delirious delight that swept from end to end of
England at the virtual acquittal of the persecuted Caroline. "The
generous exultation of the people was," to quote a contemporary, "beyond
all description. It was a conflagration of hearts."
We also recall that pathetic scene when Caroline presented herself at
the door of Westminster Abbey to demand admission, on the day of her
husband's coronation, to be received by the frigid words, "We have no
instructions to allow you to pass"; and we can see her as, "humiliated,
confounded, and with tears in her eyes," she returned sadly to her
carriage, the heart crushed within her. Less than three weeks later,
seized by a grave and mysterious illness, she laid down for ever the
burden of her sorrows, leaving instructions that her tomb should bear
the words:
CAROLINE
THE INJURED QUEEN OF ENGLAND.
As for Pergami, the idol with the feet of clay, who had clouded her last
years in tragedy, he survived for twenty years more to enjoy his honours
and his ill-gotten gold; while William Austin, who had masqueraded as a
Prince and called Caroline "mother," ended his days, while still a young
man, in a madhouse.