Caroline of Brunswick
On the morning of 19 July 1821, the Queen of England turned up at her husband's coronation and was barred from entering.
Caroline of Brunswick had married George, Prince of Wales, on 8 April 1795 at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace.
They'd met three days earlier. George took one look at his bride, walked to the other side of the room, and asked for a glass of brandy.
Caroline told the man who'd escorted her from Germany that the prince was fat and nothing like his portrait.
Why marry at all? Money.
George had run up debts of around £630,000, a fortune, and Parliament wouldn't touch them unless he married a suitable Protestant princess and produced an heir.
There was also the small matter of Maria Fitzherbert, whom he'd already secretly married in 1785. That marriage broke the Royal Marriages Act, so legally, it was nothing. Awkward all the same.
Their daughter Charlotte was born in January 1796. The marriage was over within months.
George went back to his mistresses. Caroline set up her own household and did roughly as she pleased which, in the Georgian court, was scandal enough on its own.
In 1806, he had her investigated over rumours she'd borne an illegitimate child, a boy called William Austin she'd taken in.
The commission found nothing, though it gave her a good telling-off about her behaviour. Her access to her own daughter was cut back regardless.
By 1814, she'd had enough of England and left for the Continent. She toured Europe with a growing entourage, one of whom was an Italian named Bartolomeo Pergami.
He started as her courier. He ended up her chamberlain, riding in her carriage and living in her house. Every spy George could pay for wrote it all down.
Then George III died on 29 January 1820, and the woman he'd spent twenty-five years trying to be rid of became Queen of the United Kingdom.
He offered her £50,000 a year to stay out of the country. She came home instead, and the crowds cheered her all the way into London.
So George put his wife on trial.
The Bill of Pains and Penalties would have stripped Caroline of her title and dissolved the marriage.
Italian servants were shipped over to testify about bedrooms and boat trips. The evidence was printed in the papers. The cartoonists had the time of their lives.
It backfired spectacularly. Most people didn't think Caroline was a saint. They just couldn't stomach the sight of the most notoriously unfaithful man in England prosecuting his wife for adultery.
She became the people's queen almost overnight, her face on medals, plates and jugs.
The bill scraped through its third reading in the Lords by nine votes on November 10. Nine.
The government took one look at the Commons and quietly dropped the whole thing.
Caroline had won. But George still had the coronation. Her name was struck from the service.
On July 16, her chamberlain Lord Hood wrote to say the Queen would be attending and would like to be shown to her seat.
The reply was polite and it was final: it was not His Majesty's pleasure.
She went anyway.
Her carriage reached Westminster Hall at six in the morning. The guard asked for her ticket. She was refused, tried a side door, found a line of armed soldiers, tried the House of Lords, got nowhere.
Twenty minutes later, she was at the Abbey door by Poets' Corner, where Hood announced her to the doorkeeper: "I present to you your queen, do you refuse her admission?
He did. No ticket, no entry. Hood had a ticket of his own and offered it, but it admitted one person only and Caroline wouldn't go in alone.
The doorkeeper, by the way, was probably one of the professional prizefighters George had hired for the day. The King of England hired boxers to keep his wife out of a church.
The doors shut. The crowd shouted "Shame!"
She got back in her carriage and went home, and inside the Abbey, her husband was crowned in the most expensive ceremony this country has ever staged.
That night, she felt ill. She got worse for three weeks, put her papers in order, and burned her letters.
She died at Brandenburgh House in Hammersmith on 7 August 1821, aged 53, nineteen days after the coronation.
Her doctors thought it was an obstruction of the bowel. Others said cancer. The story went round that she'd been poisoned, which tells you exactly how much the public trusted her husband.
She asked to be buried in Brunswick under a plain inscription:
"Here lies Caroline, the Injured Queen of England."
The government wouldn't even let her coffin travel through the city on its way out in case the crowds rioted.
They were probably right to worry.
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Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (Caroline Amelia Elizabeth; 17 May 1768 – 7 August 1821) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Queen of Hanover from 29 January 1820 until her death in 1821 as the estranged wife of King George IV. She was Princess of Wales from 1795 to 1820.
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George IV (George Augustus Frederick; 12 August 1762 – 26 June 1830) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and King of Hanover from 29 January 1820 until his death in 1830.
At the time of his accession to the throne, he was acting as prince regent for his father, King George III, having done so since 5 February 1811 during his father's final mental illness.
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