A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV | Page 5

been made memorable, if there were nothing else to make them so, by
the speeches which Brougham and {8} Denman delivered in defence of
the Queen. Never perhaps in the course of history have the ears of a
monarch's advisers been made to tingle by such sentences of
magnificent and scathing denunciation poured out in arraignment of the
monarch's personal conduct. Denman, indeed, incurred the implacable
hostility of George because, in the course of his speech, he introduced a
famous citation from Roman history which, although intended to tell
heavily against the King, was mistakenly believed by some of the
King's friends to convey a much darker and deeper imputation on the
sovereign than that which was really in Denman's mind.
[Sidenote: 1821--Queen Caroline and the King's coronation]
The case may be briefly said to have broken down. In the House of
Lords, where the friends of the sovereign were most powerful, there
was only a majority of nine for the third reading of the Bill of Divorce,

and the Bill if persevered in would yet have to encounter the House of
Commons. The Government, therefore, made up their minds to
abandon the proceedings, and thereupon the friends of the Queen
exulted tumultuously over the victory they had won. But the struggle
was not by any means at an end. The royal coronation had yet to come,
and the King was anxious that the ceremonial should be got through at
as early a date as possible. The Queen announced her determination to
present herself on the Day of Coronation and claim her right to be
crowned as Queen Consort of George the Fourth. Then the advisers on
both sides went to work anew with the vain hope of bringing about
something like a compromise which might save the sovereign, the
Court, and the country from scandalous and tumultuous scenes. Again
the Queen was offered the allowance which had been tendered to her
before, on the old conditions that she would behave quietly and keep
herself out of sight. Again she insisted that her name must be included
in the Royal Liturgy, and again the King announced his resolve to
make no such concession. Then the Queen once more made it known
that her resolve was final, and that she would present herself at
Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day. George had been advised
{9} that all historical precedents warranted him in maintaining that the
King had an absolute right to direct the forms of the ceremonial to be
used on such an occasion, and he declared that he would not allow the
Queen to take any part in the solemnity or even to be present during its
performance. The Queen wrote letters to the King which she sent to
him through his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. George sent back the
letters unopened to Lord Liverpool, with the announcement that the
King would read no letter addressed to him by the Queen, and would
only communicate with her through the ordinary official medium of
one of his ministers.
The letters thus written on both sides have long since been published,
and the perusal of them will probably impress most readers with the
idea of a certain sincerity on the part of both the principal writers, the
King and Queen. Let us speak as harshly and as justly as we may of the
King's general conduct, of his mode of living, and of the manner in
which he had always treated the Queen, we shall find it hard not to
believe that there was in the depth of George's mind a fixed conviction

that he had real cause of complaint against his unhappy wife. Let us, on
the other hand, give the fullest recognition to the fact that although the
scandalous levities in the conduct of the Queen abroad told heavily
against her, we are none the less compelled to admit that her letters to
the King, and her demand to be included in the Coronation ceremonies,
seemed to be part of the conduct of a woman who will not and cannot
admit that she has done anything to forfeit her place at her husband's
side.
The whole story seems now so preposterously out of keeping with all
the associations of a modern Court that it startles our sense of historical
credibility when we find by the actual dates that men and women are
still living who might have been carried by their nurses to see the
crowds round Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day of King
George the Fourth. The Coronation took place on July 19, 1821, and
the whole ceremony was got up in the most costly, the most gorgeous,
and, as it would seem now {10} to a calm and critical reader of history,
in the most theatrical style. The poor