for the throne.
            Lured by the promise of having Parliament pay off his massive debts, George was persuaded to dump his illegal wife and marry his German cousin, Caroline. It was a steep price to pay for a clean credit report. Among other qualities, Caroline was a crude, foul-smelling exhibitionist with an enormous sexual appetite. Harris, Lord Malmesbury, the diplomat given the task of bringing Caroline from Brunswick to marry the prince, described her as having “no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity”—a reputation she enjoyed all over Germany. She was short and stocky, described by Malmesbury as having “a head always too large for her body, and her neck too short.”
            She also apparently shared the same royal malady—porphyria—that is thought to have driven her future father-in-law and uncle, George III, into babbling fits of insanity. While Prince George’s mother, Queen Charlotte, had serious reservations about Caroline’s suitability, his father was delighted. Demonstrating all the shrewd judgment he had earlier used in assessing the mood of the American colonists, George III roundly endorsed his niece. “Undoubtedly she is the person who naturally must be most agreeable to me,” he wrote Prime Minister William Pitt. “I expressed my approbation of the idea.”
            The Prince of Wales was introduced to his betrothed for the first time on April 5, 1795. Malmesbury was there to relate the scene at St. James’s Palace. “He turned around, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and, calling me to him, said, ‘Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.’” Three days, and many brandies later, the happy couple were married. George spent the wedding night passed out drunk on the floor, with his mistress Lady Jersey in close attendance during the entire honeymoon.
            Several weeks later, they were no longer living as man and wife, although Caroline did manage to get pregnant. Having satisfied the dual purposes of his marriage—siring a legitimate heir and settling his debts—George announced to Caroline a formal separation. “Our inclinations are not in our power,” he wrote her, “nor should either of us be held answerable to the other, because nature had not made us suitable to each other. Tranquil and comfortable society is, however, in our power; let our intercourse, therefore, be restricted to that.”
           Caroline took her estranged husband’s letter as a license to let loose, which she did on a spectacular scale. She took to indecorous public displays of flesh. Basically, she became a flasher. “Oh! what an impudent woman was that Princess of Wales,” cried Lady Hester Stanhope. “How many sea-captains used to color up when she danced about, exposing herself like an opera-girl.” Lord Holland called her “utterly destitute of all female delicacy,” while the Rev. William Mason wrote to Bishop Hurd and declared himself “a perfect convert to Your Lordship’s Hypothesis of Insanity.”
            All the tongue-wagging eventually landed Caroline in court. A Lady Douglas was spreading tales that the wayward princess had gotten pregnant in an adulterous affair and had given birth to a bastard boy. Caroline’s indignant husband called for an inquiry and the king agreed. What became known as “The Delicate Investigation” convened in July 1806. Several months later, Caroline was acquitted of the charges, but a thorough review of her sex life left her reputation in ruins.
            The Princess of Wales became a social pariah. Eight years later, tired of the relentless persecution, she fled Britain right into the arms of King Joachim of Naples. This was a stinging slap at George, now serving as Regent of his father’s kingdom, because Joachim was the brother-in-law of the Prince Regent’s archenemy, Napoleon of France. While the Naples revel ended when Napoleon escaped his exile on Elba in 1815, Caroline’s adventures abroad were just beginning. Soon she had a new beau. “I have Napoleon’s courier with me,” she announced, “which is quite a treasure to me, faithful and prudent. I shall keep him.” The courier and the queen-to-be marauded all over Europe, flaunting their treasonous affair everywhere they went. She showered him with honors, having him named a Knight of Malta and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, for example, as well as Grand Master of her own Order of St. Caroline.
            Never intending to return to England, Caroline found she had changed her mind upon the death of her husband’s father, George III. Since she was not officially divorced, she was now the Queen of England and fully intended to serve. But the new King George IV thought otherwise and set out pursuing a divorce through Parliament. A problem arose, however, as it was determined that the public sentiment was firmly with Caroline—not so much out of loyalty to her, but due to deep disdain for him.
            The people reminded George just how unpopular he was with them when they turned out in droves to support Caroline as she faced the “Bill of Pains and Penalties” to “deprive Her Majesty Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of the Title, Prerogatives, Rights, Privileges and Pretensions of Queen Consort of the Realm, and to dissolve the Marriage between His Majesty and the said Queen.” Guards had to be stationed all over the area of Westminster to control the crowds as a parade of witnesses testified inside about the queen’s outrageous conduct abroad. But without the support of the people, the bill, after some debate, was abandoned in Parliament.
            George was stuck, but not defeated. When Caroline, looking like a caricature of a queen, arrived at his coronation and demanded entry, the doors to Westminster Abbey were slammed shut right in her face. Several weeks later she was dead, suffering from acute porphyria, or maybe poison, as some suggested. The inscription on her coffin, which she wrote herself, read: “Deposited, Caroline of Brunswick, the Injured Queen of England.”
            George IV never remarried.