By George! What a Ride.

While George IV’s daughter, Charlotte, struggled with her father over whom to marry, her mother was off gallivanting around Europe. But how much trouble could a wayward princess get into?

And what of Princess Caroline? When we last saw her she was skipping the country, much to Charlotte’s annoyance, while Charlotte was the unwilling guest at Cranborne Lodge. It was this act that convinced Charlotte that she had been truly abandoned to her fate. It also gave Charlotte the plan to obtain her freedom by blaming all her naughtiness on mum’s malign influence.

It isn’t that Charlotte believed all the bad things people were saying about Caroline, she didn’t, but mom taking off like that without lifting a finger to help cheesed off Charlotte sufficiently that she was willing to tell dad what she knew dad wanted to hear. Mom’s a flaming bitch who was trying to drag her only child into the gutter.

An easy thing to believe when we look at Caroline’s behavior after returning to the Continent. If Princess Caroline had not quite descended to the gutter, she had certainly reached new lows in bad taste. She attended a ball in conservative Geneva “dressed en Venus, or rather not dressed further than the waist.”

In Baden, according to Lord Redesdale, “When a partie de chasse had been made for her, she appeared with half a pumpkin on her head, explaining to the astonished Grand Duke that it was the “coolest sort of coiffure.” In Genoa she traveled about in a gilt and mother of pearl inlay phaeton “dressed in pink and white, like a little girl, though exhibiting a large expanse of middle aged bosom and showing two stout legs in pink top boots.”

If sartorial atrocities were her only crime, she would have gotten off lightly. What the Princess seemed unaware of, or perhaps indifferent to, was that she was being watched like a hawk. Not only did the Prince Regent have every British embassy keep close tabs on her, but Count Munster, the Minister of Hanover had agents following her and reporting on everyone close to her. The Queen used her unofficial lines of communication with European Royal families to gather her own reports.

Among the tidbits they uncovered, in Athens she “Dressed almost naked and danced with her servants.” I have no idea how one dresses naked, but there it is. Walter Landor reported on “orgiastic balls” and the walls of her villa in Italy covered with “indecent paintings.” So unpleasant had her behavior become that the English members of her entourage fell away and returned home one by one.

“I cannot tell you how sorry and ashamed I felt as an Englishwoman,” wrote Lady Bessborough to her lover, Granville Leveson Gower about seeing the Princess at a ball; “In the room, dancing, was a short, very fat, elderly woman, (Caroline was forty-seven at the time.) with an extremely red face, owing, I suppose, to the heat, in a girls white frock-looking dress, but with shoulder, back and neck, quite low, disgustingly so, down to the middle of her stomach; very black hair, (a wig) and eyebrows which gave her a very fierce look, and a wreath of light pink roses on her head…I stared at the oddity of her appearance. When suddenly she nodded and smiled at me, and not recollecting her, I was convinced she was mad; till William Bentink (the British envoy) pushed me and said, “Do you not see the Princess of Wales nodding to you?”…I could not bear the sort of whispering and talking all around about the Principessa d’Inghilterra.”

The Princess was becoming quite the seasoned traveler not only around Europe, but the Middle East as well. As her English friends abandoned her, their places were taken by “an extraordinary collection of retainers including French chambermaids and French cooks, Arab foot boys, Austrian postilions and Italian footmen who’s overbearing insolence was beyond description.”The entrance of Princess Caroline’s traveling circus into any country was “as much dreaded as the incursion of freebooters.” Be that as it may, the Princess decided she had to make a trip to the Holy Land, then firmly under Ottoman control.

After sailing to Constantinople and inspecting the defenses of Acre, her little entourage, now numbering two hundred persons, descended on Jerusalem. The Princess herself rode into town on an ass. I wonder where she got that idea? After a visit to Jericho, she returned to Italy, moving into a villa on Lake Como; “which she greatly enlarged and named Villa d’Este after the distinguished family from which she was descended.”

From there she moved into Villa Cassielli, on the Adriatic, near Pesaro. It was there that she received the news of Charlotte’s death. With that bit of news she realized her days as Princess of Wales, and her allowance from the good taxpayers of England, were numbered.

– Mr. Al