George, Prince of Wales, married Caroline of Brunswick in 1795 but the union was an immediate disaster, and the couple separated after the birth of their only child, Princess Charlotte, in 1796.
When George was declared King in 1820 Caroline claimed her right to be crowned, and her husband turned to Parliament for a divorce, via a ‘Pains and Penalties Bill’ that would have declared her guilty of adultery – the only possible justification.
Though not technically a trial, the Bill was widely perceived as such. It involved public scrutiny of often lurid evidence on Caroline’s behaviour – famously presented in two green bags – but was ultimately more damaging for the increasingly embattled king than for his estranged wife. George was widely viewed as a dissolute spendthrift whose own adulterous affairs were widely known, and Caroline came to be seen as a wronged woman, support for whom could be an outlet for general criticism of the monarchy itself.
Though Caroline’s popularity abated over the course of the trial, and the Bill narrowly passed in the Lords, it became clear it would not pass the Commons and, in the context of widespread public unrest, Lord Liverpool’s government abandoned it.
This portrait, which shows Caroline playing music held by her daughter Charlotte, was itself the subject of scrutiny during the Bill, the assertion having been made that the painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, had been having an affair with Caroline during its production. Its vision of harmonious continuity was, in any case, definitively dashed in 1817, when Princess Charlotte died in childbirth, leaving the British throne without a legitimate heir. Caroline, meanwhile, was physically excluded from George IV’s coronation in 1821, and herself died shortly afterwards.
