When Caroline, Princess of Wales, shook the dust of England off her feet one August day in the year 1814, it was only natural that her steps should first turn towards the Brunswick home which held for her at least a few happy memories, and where she hoped to find in sympathy and old associations some salve for her wounded heart.
But the fever of restlessness was in her blood--the restlessness which was to make her a wanderer over the face of the earth for half a dozen years. The peace and solace she had looked for in Brunswick eluded her; and before many days had passed she was on her way through Switzerland to the sunny skies of Italy, where she could perhaps find in distraction and pleasure the anodyne which a life of retirement denied her. She was ful of rebel ion against fate, of hatred against her husband and his country which had treated her with such unmerited cruelty. She would defy fate; she would put a whole continent between herself and the nightmare life she had left behind, she hoped for ever. She would pursue and find pleasure at whatever cost.
In September, within five weeks of leaving England, we find her at Geneva, installed in a suite of rooms next to those occupied by Marie Louise, late Empress of France, a fugitive and exile like herself, and animated by the same spirit of reckless revolt against destiny--Marie Louise, we read, "making excursions like a lunatic on foot and on horseback, never even seeming to dream of making people remember that, before she became mixed up with a Corsican adventurer, she was an Archduchess"; the Princess of Wales, equally careless of her dignity and position, finding her pleasure in questionable company.
"From the inn where she was stopping she heard music, and, quite unaccompanied, immediately entered a neighbouring house and disappeared in the medley of dancers." A few days later, at Lausanne, "she learned that a little bal was in progress at a house opposite the 'Golden Lion,' and she asked for an invitation. After dancing with everybody and anybody, she finished up by dancing a Savoyard dance, cal ed a _fricassee_, with a nobody. Madame de Corsal, who blushed and wept for the rest of the company, declares that it has made her ill, and that she feels that the honour of England has been compromised." Thus early did Caroline begin that career of indiscretion, to cal it by no worse name, which made of her six years' exile "a long suicide of her reputation."
In October we find the Princess entering Milan, with her retinue of ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, equerry, page, courier, and coachman, and with William Austin for companion--a boy, now about thirteen, whom she treated as her son, and who was believed by many to be the child of her imprudence at Blackheath, although the Commission of the "Delicate Investigation" had pronounced that he was son of a poor woman at Deptford. At Milan, as indeed wherever she wandered in Italy, the
"vagabond Princess" was received as a Queen. Count di Bellegarde, the Austrian Governor, was the first to pay homage to her; at the Scala Theatre, the same evening, her entry was greeted with thunders of applause, and whenever she appeared in the Milan streets it was to an accompaniment of doffed hats and cheers.
One of her first visits was to the studio of Giuseppe Bossi, the famous and handsome artist, whom she requested to paint her portrait. "On Thursday," Bossi records, "I sketched her successful y in the character of a Muse; then on Friday she came to show me her arms, of which she was, not without reason, decidedly vain--she is a gay and whimsical woman, she seems to have a good heart; at times she is ennuyee through lack of occupation." On one occasion when she met in the studio some French ladies, two of whom had been mistresses of the King of Westphalia, the poor artist was driven to distraction by the chatter, the singing, and dancing, in which the Princess especial y displayed her agility, until, as he pathetically says, "the house seemed possessed of the devil, and you can imagine with what kind of ease it was possible for me to work."
Before leaving Milan the Princess gave a grand banquet to Bel egarde and a number of the principal men of the city--a feast which was to have very important and serious consequences, for it was at this banquet that General Pino, one of her guests, introduced to Caroline a new courier, a man who, though she little dreamt it at the time, was destined to play a very baleful part in her life.
This new courier was a tal and strikingly handsome man, who had seen service in the Italian army, until a duel, in which he killed a superior officer, compel ed him to leave it in disgrace. At the time he entered the Princess's service he was a needy adventurer, whose scheming brain and utter lack of principle were in the market for the highest bidder.
"He is," said Baron Ompteda, "a sort of Apollo, of a superb and commanding appearance, more than six feet high; his physical beauty attracts al eyes. This man is cal ed Pergami; he belongs to Milan, and has entered the Princess's service. The Princess," he significantly adds, "is shunned by al the English people of rank; her behaviour has created the most marked scandal."
Such was the man with whose life that of the Princess of Wales was to be so intimately and disastrously linked, and whose relations with her were to be displayed to a shocked world but a few years later. It was indeed an evil fate that brought this "superb Apollo" of the crafty brain and conscienceless ambition into the life of the Princess at the high tide of her revolt against the world and its conventions.
When Caroline and her retinue set out from Milan for Tuscany it was in the wake of Pergami, who had ridden ahead to discharge his duties as _avant courier_; but before Rome was reached his intimacy and familiarity with his mistress were already the subject of whispered comments and shrugged shoulders. At a ball given in her honour at Rome by the banker Tortonia, the Princess shocked even the least prudish by the abandon of her dancing and the tenuity of her costume, which, we are told, consisted of "a single embroidered garment, fastened beneath the bosom, without the shadow of a corset and without sleeves." And at Naples, where King Joachim Murat gave her a regal reception, with a sequel of fetes and gala-performances in honour of the wife of the Regent of England, she attended a rout, at the Teatro San Carlo, so lightly attired "that many who saw her at her first entrance looked her up and down, and, not recognising her, or pretending not to recognise her, began to mutter disapprobation to such an extent that she was compelled to withdraw.... The English residents soon let her understand, by ceasing to frequent her palace, that even at Naples there were certain laws of dress which could not be trampled underfoot in this hoydenish manner."
While Caroline was thus defying convention and even decency, watchful eyes were fol owing her everywhere. A body of secret police, whose headquarters were at Milan, was noting every indiscretion; and every week brought fresh and damaging reports to England, where they were eagerly welcomed by the Regent and his satellites. And while the Princess was thus playing unconsciously, or recklessly, into the hands of the enemy, Pergami was daily making his footing in her favour more secure. Before Caroline left Naples he had been promoted from courier to equerry, and in this more exalted and privileged role was always at her side. So marked, in fact, was the intimacy even at this early stage, that the Princess's retinue, one after another, and on one flimsy pretext or another, deserted her in disgust, each vacancy, as it occurred, being filled by one of Pergami's relatives--his brother, his daughter, his sister-in-law (the Countess Oidi), and others, until Caroline was soon surrounded by members of the ex-courier's family.
From Naples she wandered to Genoa, and from Genoa to Milan and Venice, received regal y everywhere by the Italians and shunned by the English residents. From Venice she drifted to Lake Como, with whose beauties she was so charmed that she decided to make her home there, purchasing the Villa del Garrovo for one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and setting the builders to work to make it a still more splendid home for a future Queen of England. But even to the lonely isolation of the Italian lakes the eyes of her husband's secret agents pursued her, spying on her every movement--"uncertain shadows gliding in the twilight along the paths and between the hedges, and even in the cel ars and attics of the villa"--until the shadowy presences filled her with such terror and unrest that she sought to escape them by a long tour in the East.
Thus it was that in November, 1815, the Princess and her Pergami household set forth on their journey to Sicily, Tunis, Athens, the cities of the East and Jerusalem, the strange story of which was to be unfolded to the world five years later. How intimate the Princess and her handsome, stalwart courier had by this time become was illustrated by the Attorney-General in his opening speech at her memorable trial.
"One day, after dinner, when the Princess's servants had withdrawn, a waiter at the hotel, Gran Brettagna, saw the Princess put a golden necklace round Pergami's neck. Pergami took it off again and put it jestingly on the neck of the Princess, who in her turn once more removed it and put it again round Pergami's neck."
As early as August in this year Pergami had his appointed place at the Princess's table, and his room communicating with hers, and on the various voyages of the Eastern tour there was abundant evidence to prove
"the habit which the Princess had of sleeping under one and the same awning with Pergami."
But it is as impossible in the limits of space to follow Caroline and her handsome cavalier through every stage of these Eastern wanderings, as it is unnecessary to describe in detail the evidence of intimacy so lavishly provided by the witnesses for the prosecution at the trial--evidence much of which was doubtless as false as it was venal.
That the Princess, however, was infatuated by her cavalier, and that she was in the highest degree indiscreet in her relations with him, seems abundantly clear, whatever the precise degree of actual guilt may have been.
Pergami had now been promoted from equerry to Grand Chamberlain to Her Royal Highness, and as further evidence of her favour, she bought for him in Sicily an estate which conferred on its owner the title of Baron del a Francina. At Malta she procured for him a knighthood of that island's famous order; at Jerusalem she secured his nomination as Knight of the Holy Sepulchre; and, to crown her favours, she herself instituted the Order of St Caroline, with Pergami for Grand Master. Behold now our ex-courier and adventurer in al his new glory as Grand Chamberlain and lover of a future Queen of England, as Baron della Francina, Knight of two Orders and Grand Master of a third, while every post of profit in that vagrant Court was held by some member of his family!
The Eastern tour ended, which had ranged from Algiers and Egypt to Constantinople and Jerusalem, and throughout which she had progressed and been received as a Queen, Caroline settled down for a time in her now restored villa on Lake Como, celebrating her return by lavish charities to her poor neighbours, and by popular fetes and bal s, in one of which "she danced as Columbine, wearing her lover's ear-rings, whilst Pergami, dressed as harlequin and wearing her ear-rings, supported her."
But even here she was to find no peace from her husband's spies, whose evidence, confirmed on oath by a score of witnesses, was being accumulated in London against the longed-for day of reckoning. And it was not long before Caroline and her Grand Chamberlain were on their wanderings again--this time to the Tyrol, to Austria, and through Northern Italy, always inseparable and everywhere setting the tongue of scandal wagging by their indiscreet intimacy. Even the tragic death in childbirth of her only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, which put al England in mourning, seemed powerless to check her career of fol y. It is true that, on hearing of it, she fell into a faint and afterwards into a kind of protracted lethargy, but within a few weeks she had flung herself again into her life of pleasure-chasing and reckless disregard of convention.
But matters were now hurrying fast to their tragic climax. For some time the life of George III. had been flickering to its close. Any day might bring news that the end had come, and that the Princess was a Queen. And for some time Caroline had been bracing herself to face this crisis in her life and to pit herself against her enemies in a grim struggle for a crown, the title to which her years of fol y (for such at the best they had been) had so gravely endangered. Over the remainder of her vagrant life, with its restless flittings, and its indiscretions, marked by spying eyes, we must pass to that February morning in 1820 when, to quote a historian, "the Princess had scarcely reached her hotel (at Florence) when her faithful major-domo, John Jacob Sicard, appeared before her, accompanied by two noblemen, and in a voice ful of emotion announced, 'You are Queen.'"
The fateful hour had at last arrived when Caroline must either renounce her new Queendom or present a bold front to her enemies and claim the crown that was hers. After a few indecisive days, spent in Rome, where news reached her that the King had given orders that her name should be excluded from the Prayer Book, her wavering resolution took a definite and determined shape. She would go to London and face the storm which she knew her coming would bring on her head.
At Paris she was met by Lord Hutchinson with a promise of an increase of her yearly allowance to fifty thousand pounds, on condition that she renounced her claim to the title of Queen, and consented never to put foot again in England--an offer to which she gave a prompt and scornful refusal; and on the afternoon of 5th June she reached Dover, greeted by enthusiastic cheers and shouts of "God save Queen Caroline!" by the fluttering of flags, and the jubilant clanging of church-bel s. The wanderer had come back to the land of her sorrow, to find herself welcomed with open arms by the subjects of the King whose brutality had driven her to exile and to shame.
The story of the trial which so soon fol owed her arrival has too enduring a place in our history to call for a detailed description--the trial in which al the weight of the Crown and the testimony of a small army of suborned witnesses--"a troupe of comedians in the pay of malevolence," to quote Brougham--were arrayed against her; and in which she had so doughty a champion in Brougham, and such solace and support in the sympathy of al England. We know the fate of that Bill of Pains and Penalties, which charged her with having permitted a shameful intimacy with one Bartolomeo Pergami, and provided as penalty that she should be deprived of the title and privilege of Queen, and that her marriage to King George IV. should be for ever dissolved and annul ed--how it was forced through the House of Lords with a diminishing majority, and finally withdrawn. And we know, too, the outburst of almost delirious delight that swept from end to end of England at the virtual acquittal of the persecuted Caroline. "The generous exultation of the people was," to quote a contemporary, "beyond all description. It was a conflagration of hearts."
We also recall that pathetic scene when Caroline presented herself at the door of Westminster Abbey to demand admission, on the day of her husband's coronation, to be received by the frigid words, "We have no instructions to al ow you to pass"; and we can see her as, "humiliated, confounded, and with tears in her eyes," she returned sadly to her carriage, the heart crushed within her. Less than three weeks later, seized by a grave and mysterious illness, she laid down for ever the burden of her sorrows, leaving instructions that her tomb should bear the words:
CAROLINE
THE INJURED QUEEN OF ENGLAND.
As for Pergami, the idol with the feet of clay, who had clouded her last years in tragedy, he survived for twenty years more to enjoy his honours and his ill-gotten gold; while William Austin, who had masqueraded as a Prince and cal ed Caroline "mother," ended his days, while still a young man, in a madhouse.