Everybody was speaking about it. All through England, there was countless hypothesis about whether or not a sure royal member of the family would attend the upcoming coronation of the brand new king. “The city is in a state of basic lunacy,” Parliamentarian Henry Brougham wrote, “starting most definitely with the illustrious individual on the throne.”
Sound acquainted? Royal watchers are eagerly awaiting to see if Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attend King Charles’s coronation in Could. Even larger questions loom—how will they be acquired? Will Prince Harry go alone? However whereas the chatter surrounding the royal household appears to be reaching a fever pitch, it’s nothing in comparison with the drama that surrounded the coronation of King George IV in the summertime of 1821.
Like King Charles, 58-year-old King George had spent a lifetime ready to take the throne. An extravagant, creative kind with a penchant for peacocking, George spent months planning probably the most elaborate coronation Europe had ever seen, which he hoped would outshine that of Napoleon. In response to Fergus Kelly of The Categorical on Sunday, his outfit alone price £2.7 million in immediately’s cash, with the full price of the coronation coming in at greater than £240,000—that’s roughly £27 million immediately or $32.8 million.
Nonetheless, the rigorously deliberate extravaganza was threatened by the one individual King George didn’t wish to indulge in his mirrored glory: his spouse and rightful consort, Queen Caroline.
From the beginning, their relationship was a match made in hell. Born in 1762, George, Prince of Wales, was the eldest youngster of “mad” King George III and Queen Charlotte. The prince, derisively nicknamed “Prinny,” was often called a debauched, spoilt dandy, perpetually in debt and at one time secretly (and illegally) married to a Catholic magnificence named Maria Fitzherbert. Though he may very well be charming, the hard-drinking, womanizing prince was despised by the press and far of the general public, resulting in numerous caricatures and the notorious poem “The Triumph of the Whale” by Charles Lamb:
In 1795, he agreed to marry his cousin—the purportedly unsophisticated, guileless, considerably sloppy Caroline of Brunswick—partly to steer Parliament to repay his money owed. Within the deliciously detailed The Unruly Queen: The Lifetime of Queen Caroline, historic biographer Flora Fraser describes the cousins’ first assembly. “She very correctly … tried to kneel to him,” eyewitness Earl of Malmesbury wrote. “He raised her (gracefully sufficient) and embraced her, stated barely one phrase, circled, retired to a distant a part of the condominium, calling me to him stated ‘Harris, I’m not nicely, pray get me a glass of brandy.’”
After the prince dramatically rushed from the room, Caroline gave nearly as good as she obtained, remarking that her future husband was “very fats and nothing like as good-looking as his portrait.”
Their marriage ceremony on April 8, 1795, continued on the identical disastrous course. “Choose what it was to have a drunken husband on one’s marriage ceremony day, and one who handed the best a part of his bridal night time beneath the grate, the place he fell, and the place I left him,” Caroline later recounted.
Though the couple welcomed a daughter, Princess Charlotte, in 1796, they quickly lived completely separate lives, with King George reportedly claiming he’d relatively “see toads and vipers crawling over my victuals than sit on the similar desk along with her.”
Whereas she was initially bewildered, damage, and horribly handled by her vindictive husband and a lot of the royal household, Caroline finally fought again via the media, main politicians and newspapers to publicly take sides on this model of “Warfare of the Waleses.” In response to Martin Linton of The Guardian, in 1806, the Prince of Wales—a serial philanderer—had the audacity to arrange a fee often called “the fragile investigation” to look into Caroline’s alleged infidelities.
