*

on, and even to dissolve the Parliament and elect a new one; aware how impossible it was to change the Ministry without any ground on which he could appeal to the country for support." While thus watching his time, the affair of the Princess, whom he had always loved with a genuine warmth of affection, and supported with his wonted strength of purpose, but greatly confirmed by his hatred of her persecutor and slanderer, came to his aid. He resolved to make this the ground of quarrel with the Whigs, who were the Prince's associates, had taken his part, had conducted the investigation, and presented the offensive Report. The strong feelings of the English people, he knew, would be easily roused against the violator of all conjugal duties; and the appeal to English generosity and justice against the partisans of one who violated both in his treatment of a friendless stranger, he felt assured would not be made in vain. There is no doubt whatever that The Book, written by Mr Perceval, and previously printed at his house under Lord Eldon's superintendence and his own, was prepared in concert with the King, and was intended to sound the alarm against Carlton House and the Whigs, when a still more favourable opportunity of making a breach with the latter unexpectedly offered itself in the Catholic question. The King, with his accustomed quickness and sagacity, at once perceived that this afforded a still more advantageous ground of fighting the battle he had so long wished to join with his enemies. To Lord Eldon and Mr Perceval nothing could be more suitable or agreeable; the cry against the Prince was laid aside for the cry of No Popery; and instead of proclaiming conjugal rights to be menaced by the Whigs, the Church was announced to be in danger from their machinations. The success of this movement is well known, and it laid the cause of the Princess out of view for some years.

It is difficult, however, to describe the sensation which the Report of the Secret Tribunal had made wherever a knowledge of its contents reached. That a wife, a Princess, and a stranger should be subjected to treatment the most cruel and unmanly, should then be driven from the shelter of her husband's roof, should be surrounded by spies and false-witnesses, and having been charged with a capital offence-nay, with high treasonshould be tried behind her back, with the most able counsel to attend on behalf of her persecutor and accuser, without a human

*The inextricable difficulties which the late King brought on himself by his foolish and worse than foolish conduct in the year 1834 are fresh in all men's remembrance.

being present on her behalf, so much as to cross-examine a witness, or even to take a note of the evidence-was a proceeding which struck all men's minds with astonishment and dismay; and seemed rather to approach the mockery of all justice presented in the accounts of Eastern seraglios, than to resemble any thing that is known among nations living under constitutional Governments. But if the investigation itself was thus an object of reprobation and disgust, its result gave, if possible, less satisfaction still. What could be said of a sentence which showed that even when tried behind her back, and by an invisible tribunal, formed wholly of her adversaries, not the shadow of guilt could be found in her whole conduct; and that even the mercenary fancies and foul perjuries of the spies had failed to present any probable matter of blame; and yet, instead of at once pronouncing her innocent and unjustly accused, begrudged her the poor satisfaction of an acquittal, and fearful of affording her the triumph to which innocence is entitled, and offending the false accuser, both passed over all mention of her unparalleled wrongs, and left a stigma upon her name, by the vague recommendation that the King should advise her concerning certain levities or indiscretions of behaviour-an allusion so undefined, that any one might fill up the dark outline as his imagination should enable him, or his want of common charity prompt him to do? Every one knew that had there been the least tangible impropriety, though falling far short of guilt, it would have been stated in the Report; but the purposes of the accuser, to which the secret judges lent themselves, were best served by a vague and mysterious generality, that meant every thing, and any thing, as well as nothing, and enabled him to propagate by his hireling favourites, all over society, any new slanders which he might choose to

invent.

If, however, the effect thus produced was most injurious to the character of the enquirers, and irrecoverably ruined that of the Prince in all honourable minds, the proceedings of the Princess's defenders, as soon as they came to be known, excited on the other hand no little surprise. That two such men as Lord Eldon and Mr Perceval-the one at the head of the law-the other Attorney-General, and who now became in effect, though not yet in name, Prime Minister-that those who had ever held the most rigorous execution of the old laws against the press to be absolutely necessary for the safety of the Monarchy, and had been among the chief framers of new measures more rigorous still, should now become the actors in a conspiracy to evade some of those laws, and break others, filled men's minds with unspeakable wonder A secret printing press had been employed at a

private house, for the express purpose of evading the provisions of that act which Lord Eldon had passed, and Mr Perceval had supported, to prohibit, under severe penalties, any one from printing any thing whatsoever without appending to it his name and place of abode. They had written, and in this clandestine fashion had printed, thousands of a work which, though nowadays far less libellous than almost every day's papers that are read one hour and pass the next with impunity into oblivion, was yet in those times equal to the most daring libels; and all this they had done for the purpose of blackening the character of the Heir-Apparent to the throne. This passage sunk deep into the public mind, and was esteemed an illustration on the one hand of the lengths to which party will carry very upright and prudent men, as well as of the hardships under which the law of libel places authors and publishers, and of their effects in fettering the discussion of every question which justice requires to be freely handled. For it was observed that while the defence of the innocent party could not be undertaken without the greatest risk, the wrong doer and all the parasite accusers were altogether safe in their attacks upon her character, through every channel of private communication, and even in these mysterious allusions through the press, too flimsy to be reached by the law, though quite significant enough to be injurious to their object, and the more hurtful for the very reason that they were so vague and so obscure.

The confirmed insanity of the King, three years afterwards, called to the Regency the chief actor in these unhappy scenes. No prince ever ascended the throne with so universal a feeling of distrust, and even aversion. Nor was this lessened when the first act of his reign proved him as faithless to his political friends as he had been to his wife; and as regardless of his professed public principles as he had been of his marriage vows. It added little respect to the disesteem in which he was so universally held, that he was seen to discard all the liberal party with whom he had so long acted, and with whom, after an interval of separation, he had become again intimately united, and among them the very men who had stood by him in his domestic broils; whilst he took into full favour his determined enemies, and, worst of all, the very men who had secretly printed libels against him too outrageous to find a publisher !

The accession of the Princess's friends to the Regent's favour was the period of their intercourse with their former client. Not the slightest communication could now be held with her whose just quarrel they had so warmly espoused while the Prince was their antagonist; and Mr Canning alone of them all, to his transcendent honour, refused to pay the tribute exact

ed by the Court of deserting a former friend, because an enemy had been found placable; and because he, setting too high a value upon his forgiveness, required his new favourites to be as perfidious as himself.

In 1813, the Princess, unable any longer to bear the separation from her daughter, who was now grown up, and of whom she was daily allowed to see less and less, addressed to the Regent that celebrated Letter which the silly and ignorant author of the contemptible, but malignant work before us loads with praises, while wholly unable to understand it, and then publishes at length, with the most absurd and misplaced censures; being perfectly ignorant that the letter which she thus reviles as being all it should not have been, is the self-same letter she had, a few pages before, held up as the universally admitted model of what the occasion required, and as the very perfection of all it should be. The reception of this Letter by the Prince was singular, and it was every way characteristic of his little mind. He directed Lord Liverpool to notify, that he could not receive nor read it, and that all communications of the wife to the husband must be addressed to the Minister, as if that Lord were the servant of the Consort as well as of the Prince. Thus it was supposed that a cunning way had been devised of avoiding the difficult task of giving the Letter and remonstrance any answer. The people, however, eagerly read this document, and greedily devoured its contents. But one opinion of reprobation was expressed-one feeling of disgust entertained-and one voice of indignation. raised against the new and unheard-of cruelty, by which a wife, forcibly ejected from her husband's house, only because her presence was a reproach and an interruption to his libertine life, was now to be farther deprived of her only child's society, without the shadow of a reason being assigned; and the sympathy thus universally excited with the mother's feelings was powerfully awakened in the daughter's behalf also; when it became certain that neither the high rank of the parties, nor the pains taken to estrange them from each other, had stifled in the breast of Princess Charlotte the strongest feelings of her nature. She all her life, indeed, had been and continued sincerely attached to her mother, and soon after showed how little industrious slander had prevailed over her unalterable confidence in the probity, as well as the tender affection of that parent. She was a person of great abilities, tolerably well cultivated; to the quickness of her mother, she united more deliberate judgment; and she inherited her resolute courage and determination of character. She had a temper violent and irascible, which neither her own efforts nor those of her preceptors had been able to tame; but

there was nothing mean, spiteful, or revengeful in her disposition; while her mother's easy nature, her freedom from all pride and affectation, her warmth of affection, her playfulness of manner, though such severe judges as those of the Whig Secret Tribunal in 1806 might have termed them the overt-acts of levity, and visited them with a reprimand only capable of provoking laughter in its object,—were yet calculated to shed a singular lustre over so exalted a station, and made the character of her whom they adorned, peculiarly attractive. These two great ladies were not more united by mutual attachment than by the similarity of their tastes-both fond of reading-cultivators of the fine arts-and in one, that of sculpture, no mean proficients.

But they were doomed to be separated, that the caprice of their common tyrant might be gratified; and the Letter which he had, with unparalleled folly, refused to read, or rather to answer, being suffered to circulate through the whole country unanswered, produced the strongest effect in their favour, and against him. Accordingly, the mistake which had been committed was discovered too late. Any answer of an ordinary kind would have proved altogether unavailing; defence there was none, nor was any justification whatever attempted of the treachery universally cried out against. The resolution was, therefore, taken to try the effect of recrimination, and it was determined to bring out against the Princess as much of Mr Perceval's book against the Prince as contained the particulars of the evidence which had been given before the Invisible Tribunal in 1805. The fate of this odious manoeuvre was sufficiently striking; never was spite and falsehood visited with more speedy or more complete discomfiture. For three days the whole of the newspapers were filled with the most offensive details of a pregnancy and delivery -the public taste was outraged—the public mind was disgusted -but the public feelings were roused, and they were found, as usual, to be pointed in the right direction- the whole charges were pronounced an absolute fabrication, and the accused stood higher than before, though it was not possible for any thing to sink her accuser lower. It may be observed, that in the interval between the secret printing of Mr Perceval's work, and this new attack on the Princess of Wales, the affair of the Duke of York had materially obstructed the execution of the law of libel; and had made almost any discussion, however free, of the Royal family's conduct, much more safe than they had formerly been. That affair had also at one time produced a salutary effect upon the demeanour of the family itself. The King had, it is said, called the members of it together, and pointing out to them the dangers of their situation, loaded, as they now were,