For a long, pregnant moment, the Princess held Hero’s gaze. Then she nodded silently and smiled.
It would take courage for a powerless girl of just eighteen to stand against the overbearing will of a selfish, bullying father who was also her prince. But Hero suspected Charlotte had the grit to do it.
“How did two people as selfish and foolish as Prinny and Caroline manage to beget a child as basically good and decent as Charlotte?” Devlin asked later that evening when they gathered in the drawing room before dinner.
Hero looked up from where she sat by the fire with Simon and Mr. Darcy. “I honestly can’t imagine.”
He took a long, slow swallow of his wine. “Do you think she will indeed stand up to Prinny?”
“I believe she might. In some way I can’t quite define, I think Jane’s death has given Charlotte the determination she needs to refuse to let her father destroy her life.”
Devlin cradled his glass in one hand, his gaze on the flames dancing on the hearth. “I wish I could have met her. Jane, I mean.”
Hero watched their son pet the big black cat with studied care, and felt a part of the burden that had weighed so heavily upon her begin to shift. “I’m glad we know how and why she died—and that Princess Charlotte knows, as well. I suppose in the grand scheme of things it makes no real difference. And yet, on another level, it does.”
“She was an extraordinary person—steadfast, loving, and brave.”
“Yes,” said Hero. “Yes, she was.”
Author’s Note
T he Frost Fair of 1814 was the last Frost Fair held on the Thames. It came at the culmination of a horrid winter that included what was known as the Great Fog. Smothering London from late December to early January, the fog was followed by days of massive snowfall that buried the entire Kingdom and then weeks more of freezing temperatures and continuing snow. Food and coal in the city became scarce and prohibitively expensive, and many of London’s poorest died. In late January, ice floating down from the upper reaches of the river became caught between London Bridge and Blackfriars; eventually the remaining open water froze, and the people of the city took to the ice for a Frost Fair that lasted until the fifth of February. Then a shift in the wind and warming temperatures led the ice to break up rather suddenly, carrying off booths and people. The exact number killed was never determined since most of the bodies were never recovered. There had been other Frost Fairs on the Thames down through the ages, but with the removal of the old narrow-arched London Bridge in 1831, the Thames has never again frozen so solid.
The verse on Liam Maxwell’s souvenir is adapted from one actually printed at the fair and reproduced in John Ashton’s Social England Under the Regency. Maxwell’s “free press” sales pitch was also used at the fair.
The Prince of Wales was every bit as horrid to his wife, Caroline, as portrayed here. He did send his mistress to meet her ship when she landed, had Lady Jersey attend their wedding feast, and took her on their honeymoon (along with a bunch of his male friends who—like the Prince—were constantly falling-down drunk). He also forced Caroline to accept his mistress as her lady-in-waiting. The nasty stories about the furniture and pearl bracelets he took back are likewise true. Through his unsavory personal secretary, Colonel McMahon, he deliberately spread false gossip about his wife and paid newspapers to print ugly rumors about her, and he actually did award a certain Lady Douglas a pension for life after she swore to a tawdry—and easily disproven—pack of lies about the Princess of Wales as part of one of his numerous attempts to secure a divorce. In his preserved letters to friends and family, the Prince comes across as a petty, manipulative, breathtakingly narcissistic pathological liar, and paranoid to the point of being mentally unbalanced. He actually did have a fervent but totally unfounded belief that Caroline was conspiring to destroy the British monarchy.
Caroline of Brunswick is a fascinating, colorful character, although difficult to research because so many lies were told about her at the time and most of her biographers have been far too credulous. She was twenty-seven when she married. Although I do not believe she was as promiscuous as she is sometimes portrayed, it appears likely that when she was younger she fell in love with a certain Irish officer and might have had a child by him. That child would have been taken away from her, which was probably the cause of the intense hatred she exhibited toward her mother the rest of her life. After the Prince essentially took baby Charlotte away, Caroline then poured her maternal urges and considerable financial resources into fostering a string of poor orphans.
Although relatively pretty when young, she was always careless in her attire, blunt spoken, and utterly unsophisticated. Yet she was far from stupid; a polyglot and lifelong enthusiastic reader, she was acknowledged even by those who disliked her to be a well-trained and unusually fine pianist. She was also artistic and continued to study painting and sculpture as an adult. She had a very real and oft-expressed fear of being unjustly accused of adultery and executed for treason. Given how hard the Prince tried to convict her of adultery, including hiring men to hide in the bushes and break into her house to search her bedroom, I strongly doubt she violated her vows while in England. After she left England and moved to Italy, however, she does appear to have made up for all those lonely years by indulging in a torrid affair with a handsome young Italian. And yes, Caroline really did make wax effigies of her husband, stick them with pins, and burn them.
Caroline’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, is best known through the memoirs of her subgoverness Miss Cornelia
