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Queen consort

The Trial of Queen Caroline, 1820 by Sir George Hayter

Detail from The Trial of Queen Caroline by Sir George Hayter

Instead of being treated like a queen, Caroline found that her estranged husband's accession paradoxically made her position worse. On visiting Rome, the pope refused her an audience, and the pope's minister Cardinal Consalvi insisted that she be greeted only as a duchess of Brunswick, and not as a queen. In an attempt to assert her rights, she made plans to return to Britain. The King demanded that his ministers get rid of her. He successfully persuaded them to remove her name from the liturgy of the Church of England, but they would not agree to a divorce because they feared the effect of a public trial. The government was weak and unpopular, and a trial detailing salacious details of both Caroline's and George's separate love lives was certain to destabilise it further. Rather than run the risk, the government entered into negotiations with Caroline, and offered her an increased annuity of £50,000 if she stayed abroad.

By the beginning of June, Caroline had travelled north from Italy, and was at St Omer near Calais. Acting on the advice of Alderman Matthew Wood and Lady Anne Hamilton (daughter of Archibald Hamilton, 9th Duke of Hamilton), she rejected the government's offer. She bid farewell to Pergami, and embarked for England. When she arrived on 5 June, she was greeted rapturously and her carriage drawn from Dover to London. Nevertheless, the King still adamantly desired a divorce, and the following day, he submitted the evidence gathered by the Milan commission to Parliament in two green bags. On 15 June, the Guards in the King's Mews mutinied. The mutiny was contained, but the government was fearful of further unrest. Examination of the bags of evidence was delayed as Parliament debated the form of the investigation, but eventually, on 27 June, they were opened and examined in secret by 15 peers. The peers considered the contents scandalous, and a week later, after their report to the House, the government introduced a bill in Parliament, the Pains and Penalties Bill 1820, to strip Caroline of the title of queen consort and dissolve her marriage. It was claimed that Caroline had committed adultery with a low-born man: Bartolomeo Pergami. Various witnesses, such as Theodore Majocchi, were called during the reading of the bill, which was effectively a public trial of the Queen. The trial caused a sensation, as details of Caroline's familiarity with Pergami were revealed. Witnesses said the couple had slept in the same room, kissed, and been seen together in a state of undress. The bill passed the House of Lords, but was not submitted to the House of Commons as there was little prospect that the Commons would pass it. To her friends, Caroline joked that she had indeed committed adultery once—with the husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert, the King.

Even during the trial, the Queen remained immensely popular, as witnessed by over 800 petitions and nearly a million signatures that favoured her cause. As a figurehead of the opposition movement demanding reform, many revolutionary pronouncements were made in Caroline's name.

“ All classes will ever find in me a sincere friend to their liberties, and a zealous advocate of their rights. ” — Queen Caroline, September 1820, quoted in Robins, p. 240

“ A government cannot stop the march of intellect any more than they can arrest the motion of the tides or the course of the planets. ” — Queen Caroline quoted in The Times, 7 October 1820

But with the end of the trial her alliance with the radicals came to an end. The government again extended the offer of £50,000 a year, this time without preconditions, and Caroline accepted.