By George! Enter Princess Caroline.

If Mrs. Fitzherbert is not the perfect wife for Prince George, then who is?

Up until now the Prince had shown a true talent for making bad decisions. Faced with the necessity of getting really and truly married, one of the biggest decisions of his life, he allowed his talent for making bad decisions to flower into genius. Princess Caroline of Brunswick was so astoundingly wrong for the Prince on nearly every count that one suspects the Prince of wishing, subconsciously, to punish either himself or his parents by making such a bad choice.

I suspect the actual reason is that he didn’t care. Money was the point here. Whoever she was or whatever she looked like didn’t matter. No doubt the Prince fully expected to carry on as before. His wife would get a nice place to live with lots of servants and whatever she wanted. He would stay at Carlton House, drinking himself stupid, having it off with notorious ladies and losing taxpayer money at the track by the wheelbarrow-full.

For Princess Caroline’s part she had no reason to think the Prince had any interest in her. She was the Prince’s first cousin. While there were no legal or religious reasons why they could not marry, it was widely known that King George did not approve of such marriages. Her mother, the Duchess of Brunswick, had no hopes for such a union. The bitter truth of the matter was, she had little hope of ANY man wanting to marry her daughter.

The reasons for this were not far to seek. I appearance she was short with a tendency to be a bit overweight. While certainly not beautiful, had someone with fashion sense taken her in hand she could have pulled off “cute” with no problem at all. And that was the Big Problem. No one had, nor did anyone wish to, take her in hand.

She had a very active libido that she liked to exercise on an alarmingly regular basis. Her education was not on par with that of most highborn English ladies. Her personality was described by a contemporary, with admirable discretion, as “difficult.” And…She never met a bathtub or a bar of soap that she didn’t loathe. The first time her name was mentioned to the Queen as a possibility, Her Majesty shot it down in flames.

The Queen wrote to her brother concerning the matter. “The fact is, dear brother, that the King is completely ignorant of everything concerning the Duke’s (Brunswick’s) family, and it would be unseemly to speak to him against his niece. But it is not at all unseemly to tell you that a relative of that family, who is indeed very attached to the Duke, has spoken to me of Princess Caroline with very little respect. They say her passions are so strong that the Duke himself said that she was not to go from one room to another without her Governess, and that when she dances, this lady is obliged to follow her for the whole of the dance to prevent her from making an exhibition of herself by indecent conversations with men, and that the Duke as well as the Duchess have forbidden her, in the presence of this person from whom I hear all this, to speak to anyone at all except her Governess, and that all her amusements have been forbidden her because of her indecent conduct…There, dear brother, is a woman I do not recommend at all.”

It is unfortunate indeed that the Queen thought it would be “unseemly” to dis Caroline in front of her uncle, the King. When His Majesty heard her name mentioned as a possibility, he wrote to Prime Minster Pitt, “Undoubtedly she is the person who must be most agreeable to me. I expressed my approbation of the idea.”
Fortunately for His Majesty, he would be permanently and irreversibly insane before the marriage of the Prince and Princess would reach it’s denouement.