Reign of George III. (continued.) page 8

The only other proceeding of this session was one of a very remarkable character. The boasted morals of George III. and of his queen had not defended his family from the crimes and corruptions which are inherent in courts. Amongst both his brothers, as afterwards amongst his sons, the vices of luxury and libertinism had flourished freely. As we have related, his brother, the duke of York, had died in Italy, from a fever induced by his excesses. But far more notorious was the life of his brother, the duke of Cumberland. Amongst his licentious intrigues was one with Henrietta Vernon, lady Grosvenor, a young and beautiful woman, whom he seduced, following her into Cheshire, when her husband took her from town, and meeting her in various disguises. In 1770 lord Grosvenor brought an action against him for criminal conversation, and obtained a verdict of ten thousand pounds. This was the first time that a prince of the blood had stood defendant in such a trial. In the coarse of the trial the royal duke's love letters were produced, and exhibited the defective education which he had received from the princess dowager, in common with the king and the rest of his brothers. He could not spell, much less punctuate his writing. It was a scandalous exhibition altogether.

Immediately after the royal libertine abandoned the beautiful woman whom he had thus made an outcast from her family and virtuous society, and was seen publicly parading an actress of Covent Garden Theatre. With a rapidity of fickleness almost unexampled, he was immediately afterwards paying suit to Mrs. Horton, the widow of Christopher Horton, Esq., of Cotton Hall, in the county of Derby, and daughter of that notorious Luttrel, lord Irnham, and sister to the colonel Luttrel who had been forced by government into the seat of Wilkes for Middlesex.

So long as the royal dukes only prowled amongst the fair sex, and degraded and ruined them at pleasure, the moral George and Charlotte remained passive; but the gay widow Horton, not consenting to Cumberland's suit, except through wedlock, the offence to royalty became intolerable. Cumberland went over to Calais with Mrs. Horton, and there married her according to the rites of the church of England. The consternation at court on the realisation of this fact was unexampled. That the princes should habitually dishonour private families was little; but that they should contract a marriage with any one but of blood royal was unpardonable. The offence to queen Charlotte was more mortal than to the king. She prided herself on the unsullied antiquity of the blood of the house of Brunswick, and on her common descent from the Guelphs and Estes. She looked down on her husband as of far inferior lineage to her own - one of his ancestors having married a woman of plebeian blood, named mademoiselle D'Olbreuse. On one occasion, when she gave a dinner to the royal family at Frogmore, some one remarked that every guest at table was descended from the electress Sophia, but queen Charlotte indignantly exclaimed, " No, madame, there is nothing of D'Olbreuse here!" pointing to herself.

To crown the calamity of pollution, the duke of Gloucester now confessed to a secret marriage with the countess dowager Waldegrave, who to being merely a countess added the misfortune of being the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole, brother of the great minister. Both royal dukes were instantly forbidden the court; and so deep was the offence given by these acts - really amongst the most decent of their lives - to the king and queen, that for two years neither of the dukes were received there again. But it was not enough to denounce so vehemently this crime of marriage with a commoner, though once committed by George himself- - a preventive to the like acts for the future must be found, and a bill was immediately brought into parliament, since well known as the Royal Marriage Act, by which every prince or princess, the descendants of George IL, except only the issue of princes married abroad, was prohibited from marrying until the age of twenty-five without the king's consent. After that age they might apply to the privy council, and if within a year of such announcement both houses of parliament should not express disapprobation of the intended marriage, it might then be lawfully solemnised. The bill did not pass without violent opposition. Both within doors and out there was much bitter comment on the bill which our princes for eight hundred years had done without, and it was styled " a bill to encourage fornication and adultery in the descendants of George II." It has ever since remained in force.

One of the most remarkable circumstances connected with the passing of this act, was that it induced Charles Fox to resign his post of chief commissioner of the admiralty. Like lord Holland, he was opposed to the marriage act of lord Hardwicke, and he considered this royal marriage act as an extension of it. He therefore resigned, on the plea that he would then be at liberty to oppose both. Gibbon wittily observed that " Charles Fox had commenced patriot, and was attempting to pronounce the words, country, liberty, corruption, and so forth; with what success time will discover." As yet, however, he did not succeed completely; Iiis necessities were too great; his passion for gambling was intense; he swallowed the royal marriage act, and reentered the ministry as one of the lords of the treasury.

Junius did not forget to exult over the royal kinship to the Luttrells through Mrs. Horton. He reminded the people that this marriage of his sister was one of the rewards of colonel Luttrell for pushing Wilkes from his seat. " The forced, unnatural union of Luttrell and Middlesex was an omen of another unnatural union. If one of these acts was virtuous and honourable, 4 the best of princes,' I thank God, is happily rewarded for it by the other."

But these were by no means the total of the royal troubles at this period. The youngest and most beloved of George III.'s sisters, Caroline Matilda, had, as already stated, been married to Christian VII. of Denmark. This young man, who was the son of Louisa, a sister of George II., a queen beloved by the Danes, was, nevertheless, little better than an idiot, and the poor princess was married to him at the age of sixteen. Such monstrous things are often royal marriages, and no one need wonder at their frequently terrible results. Caroline Matilda is described as remarkably handsome - indeed, the handsomest woman of the Danish court; naturally lively, amiable, and affectionate. The marriage of this young couple, and their ascent to the throne, were nearly simultaneous; and, contrary to the usual custom of a monarch, it was deemed advisable that he should travel. In his tour he fell in with the celebrated Struensee, a young physician of Altona. Christian VII., like all weak monarohs, must have favourites. Struensee speedily became the perfect master of Christian's mind and actions, and on their return to Copenhagen he was raised to the rank of count, and soon after was made prime minister. The venerable Bernstorf was dismissed; Holk, the former favourite, removed from court; Ranzau, a former minister, recalled at the instigation of Struensee, who had been joint editor of a paper with him at Altona. Brandt, a disgraced gentleman of the bedchamber, was recalled and ennobled. The brother of Struensee was made a counsellor of justice.

No sooner was Struensee installed in ministerial power, than he began a most sweeping and extraordinary series of reforms. He was a disciple of the new French school, and he attacked the ancient feudal institutions of the country with a vigour which would have delighted Rousseau or D'Alembert. He exhibited in his own person a whole board of administrative reform. He attacked ruthlessly the corruptions and assumptions of the nobles. He abolished not only sinecures and unmerited pensions, but numerous offices that were useless, and placed the necessary ones in the hands of active men of business. He dissolved the privy council, which had gradually usurped all the royal prerogative; took measures for sending the aristocracy from the capital, where they spent their time in dissipation and schemes of self- promotion, to live upon their estates. He abolished serfdom; the torture; reduced the state expenditure; encouraged the arts and literature; gave free toleration to all religions; and, in order to promote and support his reforms, established the freedom of the press.

The execution of such wholesale reforms would have insured the destruction of the most powerful native nobleman that ever lived. The more just, the more necessary, the more admirable the reforms, the more inevitable the destruction of the reformer. But to a stranger, of plebeian origin, they foretold a speedy and annihilating ruin. That which destroyed the Gracchi in Rome, agrarian reform, was certain to do the same for Struensee in Denmark. The landed aristocracy was sure to prove too powerful for him. But, in enfranchising the press, he committed the error of Joseph II. of Austria. It was immediately bought up by his enemies, and turned against him. It denounced him on every side with all the fury of the most diabolical malice.

Meantime, a lowering and lynx-eyed foe was watching his career with secret exultation. Juliana Maria, the queen dowager, stepmother of Christian VII., bent on raising her own son to the throne, and burning with hate to the young queen, who won all hearts from her, entered into conspiracy with the incensed nobles, the disbanded privy councillors, and the military, who were enraged at the dismissal of the royal guards. The gay and unsuspicious conduct of the young queen, who was scarcely more than a child, though she had now two children of her own, a son, and a little daughter still at the breast, gave only too much opportunity to the merciless enmity of this female demon.

Caroline Matilda, who found her husband a hopeless imbecile, had been treated by his favourite, Holk, with great insolence, and the king had been instigated by him to behave in like manner. Struensee not only showed her all the deference which was due to his queen, and was natural towards a young and intellectual lady, but prevailed on the king to manifest equal respect. But it was impossible to make anything but a fool of Christian. In England he had excited the wonder of the courtiers by his ridiculous figure and eccentric manners. But now his mind had sunk under his early excesses, and his delight was to romp and scuffle, and play all kinds of practical jokes, like a great schoolboy, with his ministers and favourites. He insisted that they should not think of him at all as a king. Brandt and his physician, Buger, were constantly with him. They kept him as much as possible in the country, and never, if they could help it, let him go out of their sight. He would insist, amongst other follies, on the young queen riding out in a man's clothes with himself and Struensee. A negro and a little girl of ten years old were his constant playfellows; and not a statue in the gardens, a window in the castle, or a chair in the rooms, was safe from their riotous and boisterous play.

Al! this especially favoured the plans of the base queen dowager, who, in league with the hostile nobles, feigned a plot against the queen; obtained from him, in his bed at midnight, an order for the arrest of the queen, Struensee, Brandt, and others. The queen was seized on half dressed. She endeavoured to fly to the king and was carried off by Ranzau, who had deserted his benefactor, to Cronborg Castle. The vilest calumnies were propagated by the queen dowager and her party against her. She was accused of adultery with Struensee; and Juliana Maria urged not only her divorce, which took place, but that she should be tried for her life, with the purpose of setting aside her children in favour of her own son. In this purpose, which lay at the root of the whole proceeding, the queen dowager was disappointed. Struensee and Brandt were executed with especial barbarities; but the king of England interfered to save his sister, and to procure the succession to her son. The unhappy young queen, however, was separated for ever from her two children, and conveyed to Zell, in Hanover the same castle or prison where the unhappy wife of George I. had pined away her life. She was not allowed to carry with her little daughter at her breast. As the English ship of war bore her away from Cronborg, she remained on deck, with her streaming eyes still fixed on that castle, till its topmost towers sunk beneath the horizon.

At Zell, a little court was found her; but George III., who knew that no real proof of her criminality had been brought forward, and who must have had a denser brain than even his enemies gave him credit for, not to see the palpable motives for her accusation, should have brought her home in proof of his assurance of her innocence, and shamed the miserable court which had thus treated her. As it was, the poor young queen preserved portraits of her children, and fixed them on her chamber walls, and was frequently heard addressing them as present. Her only other consolation was music; but these could not supply the loss of honour and affection, and in three years after her removal from Cronborg she sank of a broken heart, dying on the 10th of May, 1775, only twenty-four years of age.

In her last illness she was attended by Dr. Zimmermann, the celebrated author of the work on " Solitude," and by M. Roques, pastor of the French protestant church at Zell. " Just before she died," said M. Roques, " after I had recited her the prayer for the dying, she said, in a voice which seemed to acquire strength in the effort, 'I am going to appear before God. I now protest that I am innocent of the guilt imputed to me; and that I never was unfaithful to my husband."' The nobility and states unanimously voted an address to George III., as elector of Hanover, to obtain permission to erect at Zell a monument to the unfortunate queen, who had won all hearts there by her amiability and intelligence. In Denmark, it is only just to say, there was a strong party who never for a moment doubted the innocence of Caroline Matilda, or ceased to lament her fate; and it is some satisfaction to know that her son succeeded to the throne, and that the queen dowager and her accomplices lived to see themselves held in unfeigned abhorrence by the whole nation. As for the feeling regarding Caroline Matilda in England, it showed itself when Sir Hyde Parker and Nelson bombarded Copenhagen, sixteen years after her death. Though her own son, the crown prince, defended the town, yet the English sailors did not forget the treatment of Denmark to the English princess when they stormed its capital, and fought all the more determinedly. This fatal occurrence had, no doubt, a disastrous effect on the subsequent relations of the two countries. Though of a kindred stock, of language still closely allied, from maritime position and character apparently destined to league together for mutual strength and benefit, for long years we never showed a cordial regard for each other, and no matrimonial connections were attempted between the royal houses of England and Denmark until that so happily consummated in 1863.