The story of the trial which so soon followed her arrival has too enduring a place in our history to call for a detailed description—­the trial in which all 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 all 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for ever dissolved and annulled—­how it was forced through the House of Lords with a diminishing majority, and finally withdrawn.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 allow 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 called Caroline “mother,” ended his days, while still a young man, in a madhouse.

CHAPTER XX

THE LOVE-AFFAIRS OF A REGENT

When Louis XIV. laid down, one September day in the year 1715, the crown which he had worn with such splendour for more than seventy years, his sceptre fell into the hands of his nephew Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, who for eight years ruled France as Regent, and as guardian of the child-King, the fifteenth Louis.

Seldom in the world’s history has a reign, so splendid as that of the Sun-King, closed in such darkness and tragedy.  The disastrous war of the Spanish Succession had drained France of her strength and her gold.  She lay crushed under a mountain of debt—­ten thousand million francs; she was reduced to the lowest depths of wretchedness, ruin, and disorder, and it was at this crisis in her life as a nation that fate placed a child of four on her throne, and gave the reins of power into the hands of the most dissolute man in Europe.