George, Prince of Wales and Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick, Sloane after Cosway, 1797. Photo: National Portrait Gallery. I don’t think the couple EVER looked this content together in actuality.
Royal weddings have always exerted a curious fascination on fans of history, but I think that the nuptials of the future George IV and Caroline of Brunswick on the 8th of April 1795 are definitely up there when it comes to melodrama, iniquity and soap opera levels of awfulness.
Although George had been winsomely charming and rather good looking in a pop eyed sort of way in his youth, he had, alas, become rather resplendently portly and somewhat tarnished around the edges by the time he married at the age of thirty two. Of course, he would probably have been happy to pursue his bachelor pleasures for much longer had not a mountain of debts forced him to look about for a bride who would bring with her both a dowry, an increase in the allowance granted to him by parliament and the fiscal assistance of his father, a great believer in the regularising effects of a good wife, who refused to step in unless he got married.
The Lover’s Dream, Gillray, January 1795. Photo: National Portrait Gallery. Poor George is shown here dreaming about what he hopes will be his beautiful young bride and the riches that marriage will bring to him while his mistresses are all sadly sent away. We can only imagine how OVERJOYED Gillray was when Caroline arrived in England and wasn’t quite the beauteous princess that all had hoped for.
With a marked lack of enthusiasm and probably thinking that one royal heiress was as good as another, George eyed up the eligible Protestant princesses of Europe and finally settled on his first cousin (she was the daughter of his father’s sister Amelia) Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick, who was twenty six years old and so could be considered to be already on the shelf gathering dust when George’s proposal was made.
Lord Malmesbury was duly despatched to fetch Caroline from her home in Brunswick and quickly came to the conclusion that his charge was not really a good match for the fussy and rather fastidious George, being rather slovenly in her personal habits and, more to the point, of a brash and outspoken nature whereas everyone knew that her fiancé’s taste in women tended more towards waif like, witty beauties with exquisite manners.
George and Caroline on their wedding day, detail from The Marriage of George, Prince of Wales, and Princess Caroline of Brunswick, Hamilton, 1795. Photo: Royal Collection. The artist was actually present at the wedding and this work in the Royal Collection is the preparatory sketch for the full sized painting, which ended up in the possession of Madame Tussaud and was lost in the fire of 1925.
The ill matched couple met for the first time shortly before their wedding. It’s fair to say that this wasn’t an unqualified success, with the Prince taking one look at his bride and turning aside to demand a glass of brandy to restore his nerves, while Caroline for her part was equally unimpressed and informed Lord Malmesbury that her future husband was ‘fat and nothing like as handsome as his husband’.
Nonetheless, the marriage went ahead in the Chapel Royal of St James’ Palace, with the groom turning up drunk and becoming increasingly paralytic as the festivities went on, while the humiliated and disappointed bride became increasingly loud and crass, even making vulgar jokes about the appearance of George’s reigning mistress, Lady Jersey, who, with the stunning lack of tact that seems to have been a byword of the Hanoverian dynasty, had been made her Lady of the Bedchamber. We can only imagine what everyone else at court made of this sorry affair – the awkward silences at the royal table must have been quite spectacular as both bride and groom glared at each other.
Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick, Murphy, 1795. Photo: National Portrait Gallery.
According to Caroline, George ended up passing out on the floor of their bedchamber that night but he would later tell a friend that despite his drunken and unwilling state, they managed to have sex twice that night. In fact, the couple were to have sex just three times if George is to be believed, with the third and final copulation occurring on the second night of their marriage. Luckily for them, it was enough and almost exactly nine months later, on the 7th of January 1796 their daughter Charlotte was born. We can only speculate as to how many children they might have ended up with had their marriage been happier – it’s possible that George and Caroline would have given his own parents with their fifteen children a run for their money.
Unsurprisingly, the couple were already living mostly separate lives by the time Charlotte was born although George did his best to control his wife by insisting that she retain the detested Lady Jersey in her household and demanding that she ask permission to make any visits. Adding fuel to his fire was the fact that as he became increasingly unpopular, Caroline began to become something of a darling to the fickle populace who saw her as a wronged wife, forced to tolerate his mistresses and kept on a close rein while he indulged himself in every ridiculous and extravagant excess.
The Jersey smuggler detected – or – good cause for (separation) discontent, Gillray, 1796. Photo: National Portrait Gallery. This depicts Caroline walking in on George and Lady Jersey in bed together while Princess Charlotte sleeps in her cradle in the other room. AWKWARD.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to embarrass her husband, Caroline did her best to show herself in public as often as possible and was always at her most affable, winning hearts with her own combination of natural good humor and easy going manners. Sadly for George, who had traded on his reputation as something of a Prince Charming for rather too long by this point, Caroline was by far the most likeable of the pair of them which caused his resentment and dislike to burn ever brighter until finally he wrote to her in April 1796, just three months after the birth of their daughter, and demanded a separation on the grounds that ‘we cannot find happiness in our union’. We can only imagine how pleased Caroline must have been about this.
The royal marriage, such as it was, had lasted just a year although the couple were never to be divorced despite attempts to bring it about. In the end, George found himself a very merry widower indeed after Caroline died on the 7th of August 1821 at the age of fifty three.
