“What,” as Thackeray asks, “could be expected from a wedding which had such a beginning—­from such a bridegroom and such a bride?  Malmesbury tells us how the Prince reeled into the Chapel Royal to be married on the evening of Wednesday, the 8th of April; and how he hiccuped out his vows of fidelity.”  “My brother,” John, Duke of Bedford, records, “was one of the two unmarried dukes who supported the Prince at the ceremony, and he had need of his support; for my brother told me the Prince was so drunk that he could scarcely support himself from falling.  He told my brother that he had drunk several glasses of brandy to enable him to go through the ceremony.  There is no doubt that it was a compulsory marriage.”

With such an overture, we are not surprised to learn that the Royal bridegroom spent his wedding-night in a state of stupor on the floor of his bedroom; or that at dawn, when he had slept off the effects of his debauch, “pages heard cries proceeding from the nuptial chamber, and shortly afterwards saw the bridegroom rush out violently.”

Nor, we may be sure, was the Prince’s undisguised hatred of his bride in any way mitigated by the stories which Lady Jersey and others of hex rivals poured into his willing ears—­stories of her attachment to a young German Prince whom she was not allowed to marry; of a mysterious illness, followed by a few weeks’ retreat; of that midnight promenade with the young naval officer; of assignations with Major Toebingen, the handsomest soldier in Europe, who so proudly wore the amethyst tie-pin she had presented to him—­these and many another story which reflected none too well on her reputation before he had set eyes on her.  But it needed no such whispered scandal to strengthen his hatred of a bride who personally repelled him, and who had been forced on him at a time when his heart was fully engaged with his lawful wedded wife, Mrs Fitzherbert, when it was not straying to Lady Jersey, to “Perdita” or others of his legion of lights-o’-love.

From the first day the ill-fated union was doomed.  One violent scene succeeded another, until, before she had been two months a wife, the Prince declared that he would no longer live with her.  He would only wait until her child was born; then he would formally and finally leave her.  Thus, three months after the birth of the Princess Charlotte, the deed of separation was signed, and Caroline was at last free to escape from a Court which she had grown to detest, with good reason, and from a husband whose brutalities and infidelities filled her with loathing.

She carried with her, however, this consolation, that the “great, hearty people of England loved and pitied her.”  “God bless you! we will bring your husband back to you,” was among the many cries that greeted her as she left the palace on her way to exile.  But, to quote Thackeray again, “they could not bring that husband back; they could not cleanse that selfish heart.  Was hers the only one he had wounded?  Steeped in selfishness, impotent for faithful attachment and manly enduring love—­had it not survived remorse, was it not accustomed to desertion?”