The Brooklyn Rail

Caroline of Brunswick was a royal woman not content to go gently into that good night. Her defiance and demand to receive the title she was owed is at the heart of author Ann Foster’s debut biography, Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Queen Without a Crown, released by Hanover Square Press. This is a solid and engaging read for Foster’s first book. The author brings her patented brand of humor and historical research that listeners to her popular podcast Vulgar History will recognize, weaving a story that’s equal parts fascinating yet utterly tragic.

From the start, there’s a poor little rich girl mentality to Caroline, who Foster explains was kept away from public view and utterly ignored by her parents. Caroline was chosen to marry George IV, the future Prince of Wales, referred to by his nickname of “Prinny” throughout the book. As Foster lays out, this was a marriage of convenience, specifically for Prinny, a profligate spendthrift who needed a serious cash infusion and, he assumed, a marriage would give him the money he needed. It didn’t help that Prinny was already married to one of his mistresses, a slight that, as Foster explains, no one really sought to bring up, meaning Prinny openly committed bigamy.

There’s a light hand that traipses through Rebel of the Regency, no doubt much like Caroline of Brunswick herself. The variety of characters, all with similar names, means Foster utilizes a variety of pet names that make the different characters seem less like stodgy Regency-era royals and more like a high school. (Many of Foster’s footnotes tie back to the 2004 feature film Mean Girls, with Caroline compared to protagonist Cady Heron.) Upon meeting Caroline, Prinny was immediately turned off. As Foster lays out, this was in part because Caroline, able to interact with people for the first time, had few social cues. She was loud, brash, enjoyed dancing and having fun. She generally acted like the teenage girl she was.

Caroline and Prinny were married for twenty-six years though, as Foster documents, only spent their initial wedding together, or at least enough time to have their only child, a daughter named Charlotte. Almost immediately, Prinny tried to find ways to divorce Caroline, and the majority of Rebel of the Regency focuses on his attempts to find proof of her cheating on him while isolating Caroline from her daughter and society. On the surface, this shouldn’t make for compelling reading: the story of a woman left to her own devices for twenty-six years. But the title is illustrated in Caroline’s attempts to maintain ties with society, from throwing parties (that only her best friends attended) to hanging out with a variety of different men, though Foster is quick to emphasize there’s not a ton of proof that Caroline engaged in wanton promiscuity.

And yet for all Prinny’s attempts to divorce Caroline, it only made her more popular (and him more unpopular). Foster tends to leave her personal viewpoints in the footnotes, but the reader will certainly say a few times how dumb Prinny is for trying to abandon the one person that might have made him a more popular king. The future king engaged in two major in-depth investigations of his estranged wife, the first starting in the early-1800s and referred to in the press as the “Delicate Investigation.” Another, taking place while Caroline was estranged abroad, was named the Manila Commission. Spoken with an air of “here, we go again,” even the courts in Prinny’s area were sick of hearing about Caroline for as many times as he tried to divorce her.

But for all Prinny’s attempts to divorce his wife, Caroline was able to live a fairly decent life on her own terms. She engaged in a long-term relationship with an Italian man named Bartolomeo Pergami. Foster alludes to the possibility that Pergami might have had more control over Caroline than most, but it’s never presented as anything malicious. However, because she was never officially recognized as Prinny’s wife, she was often struggling for money and trying to maintain her household. She routinely asked the Crown for more money, eventually having to travel there to ask for more funds.

The fact that Caroline of Brunswick gave no Fs about anything is what makes Rebel of the Regency such a great read. At one point Caroline threatened to crash Prinny’s coronation, and after reading over a hundred pages of what this woman had to endure, it’s hard not to cheer for her. It’s also impossible not to weep for her as she navigated losing her own child while continually searching for security.

Rebel of the Regency is a strong debut by Ann Foster, and if she stays in the royal-biography game, we have a lot of fun women to learn about in the future. As it stands, Foster’s book may seem like a brief read, but it’s chock-a-block with information about a woman whose name the average history nut probably doesn’t know. The story of a true rebel is told impeccably well.