Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair

Law, Lawyers and the Queen Caroline Trial

Readers who wanted every salacious detail from the testimony in the House of Lords had a number of current works to choose from. John Fairburn, who specialized in publishing cheap, sensational trial accounts, came out quickly with a three-volume report, embellished with “Notes and Comments” and engraved frontispieces of Caroline, her alleged lover, Bartolomeo Bergami, and her attorney, Henry Brougham. The official account was published in a two-volume folio edition by the House of Lords. It included a list of witnesses, shown here, and a verbatim transcript of the proceedings. An early owner “extra-illustrated” his copy with fifteen portraits engraved by T. Wright and published by Thomas Kelly in 1820–1821. Kelly came out with his own two-volume set in 1821, with images of the crowds that turned out to support the Queen.

The pamphlet literature was not all satire.  A good many of the legal issues in Queen Caroline’s trial were debated and mooted in pamphlets and broadsides. The arch-satirist William Hone was first and foremost a journalist: The Queen’s letter to the King and The King’s treatment of the Queen were among several of his accounts that went into multiple editions. The case attracted many of the best legal minds of the day. The author of Substance of the argument before the Privy Council… (1821) was Henry Brougham, the Queen’s chief advocate. The case made him famous and put him on the path to become England’s Lord Chancellor. Another of the authors, Edward Christian, was a judge and Cambridge law professor and the eldest brother of the H.M.S. Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian

In this open letter to her husband (probably composed by the radical William Cobbett), Queen Caroline denounced his treatment of her, demanded a fair trial in a court of law, and issued a veiled threat against “the stability of your throne.”

I cannot refrain from laying my grievous wrongs once more before your Majesty, in the hope that the justice which your Majesty may, by evil-minded counsellors, be still disposed to refuse to the claims of a dutiful, faithful, and injured wife, you may be induced to yield to considerations connected with the honour and dignity of your crown, the stability of your throne, the tranquillity of your dominions, the happiness and safety of your just and loyal people, whose generous hearts revolt at oppression and cruelty, and especially when perpetrated by a perversion and a mockery of the laws.