Free Charlotte & Leopold by James Chambers Page A

Cornelia Knight went out almost every day in her carriage and drove up and down for an hour or two in the Mall.
    On 1 March they returned from their drive to find that the Duchess of Leeds had been summoned to Carlton House. When she came back she told Miss Knight that the deliberations of the Privy Council had ‘finished dreadfully’. A paper was to be sent at eight o’clock that evening, and the Duchess was under orders to read it aloud to Charlotte and Miss Knight.
    At eight the paper duly arrived, sealed and addressed to the Duchess of Leeds. The Duchess handed it unopened to Charlotte.
    From that delicate moment onwards, Charlotte’s opinion of the Duchess changed. She still resented her regime, and she still found her company ‘disagreeable’. But she no longer disliked her.
    Charlotte read the paper. ‘I have no objection to anyone hearing this’, she said.
    According to Cornelia Knight, she then read it out loud to them. It was nothing more than the Privy Council’s re-wording of the report from ‘The Delicate Investigation’, together with the conclusion that in the light of this the Prince Regent was justified in limiting his daughter’s visits to her mother.
    Judging by what Charlotte wrote to Mercer next day, she does not seem to have known much about the original investigation. The document, she wrote, was merely a ‘vague & incomprehensible & undefined’ answer to her mother’s letter, although towards the end it contained ‘most insidious & infamous insinuations’.
    As for her father’s threat that she should no longer be allowed to see her mother, ‘it does not say a word against it , but only that my visits should be subjected to restrictions & limitations as usual’. ‘After all this farce’, she added, ‘it leaves you just where you were before’.
    But the continuing farce did not leave the Prince Regent just where he was before.
    Urged on by her Whig advisers, his wife milked the situation for all it was worth. She wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons demanding that Parliament should pass a motion exonerating her from all the unfounded charges that her husband had laid against her.
    For the first three weeks of March the original findings of ‘The Delicate Investigation’ were debated in the House of Commons. Whitbread spoke passionately and at length. Several members proposed that the Douglases should be charged with perjury. But eventually, when the Whigs realised that they could not push the embarrassed government any further without seeming sanctimonious, the debates petered out inconclusively.
    Outside Parliament, on the other hand, the discussion continued for some time. The investigation’s findings were now public knowledge. In the little world of society gossips they provided fuel for further salacious speculation. But to the press and the people at large they were just more evidence that the Prince Regent was a scoundrel. To them, his wife was a heroine who had borne his calumnies with commendable courage. She was cheered and clapped wherever she went; and she went everywhere she could to make the most of it.
    Using the most sinister of his many raffish friends as go-betweens, the Prince Regent tried to bribe or bully some of the newspapers into printing an attack on his wife’s character. But he was rebuffed so disdainfully that he was lucky not to be exposed for it. His only successful vengeance lay in continuing to prevent his wife from seeing his daughter.
    They did meet once fortuitously, when their carriages passed each other in the street. Ordering their drivers to halt as they drew level, they leaned out of the windows to embrace and then stayed there talking for several minutes while the people on the pavementsclapped. Despite this additional humiliation for the Prince, there were also two occasions on which he relented and allowed Charlotte a brief visit to her mother.