sewer with the dushers The Queen. THE CONSPIRACIES Of 1806 and 1813, AGAINST THE PRINCESS OF WALES, LINHED WITH THE ATROCIOUS CONSPIRACY of 1820, AGAINST THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND? ALSO, Some Correspondence Held with His Majesty's Ministers in 1812 and 1813, BY WILLIAM CAREY. "Wherever indirect means are resorted to against an accused person, a LONDON: PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR, No. 37, Mary-le-bone Street, Piccadilly; ERRATUM. Page 64, ninth line from the bottom, for " is proved;" read, “is legally proved." B. CLARKE, Printer, Well Street, Londou. INTRODUCTION. DRIVEN from England, by every species of cruelty and insult, and by the open encouragement given to the conspirators against her life and honor, Caroline-Amelia of Brunswick, the Princess of Wales, quitted this country, for peace and safety, in 1814. During six years, she passed in exile, from place to place, from city to city, a princess without royal state, a wife without a husband, a mistress surrounded by suborned traitors in her own servants, a mother without a child. History has no example of a spirit so noble in unmerited suffering, a fortitude so meek and so immoveable. During these six years, the bloodhound vigilance of conspiracy pursued her steps, by sea and land, in Germany, Italy, Greece, Asia, and Africa. The spies of an English faction, and the taxes wrung from the distressed English people, the shameful intrigues of English ambassadors and consuls, and the power of foreign sovereigns, were employed to renew the vile practices of the Douglas plot in 1806, by forging materials from her most innocent words, looks, and actions, for her dethronement and degradation. Whether the Treasury bank notes and guineas had not power to corrupt the Turks and Moors, or other barbarous Infidels of the rude countries through which the Princess passed; or that the witness-brokers, who speculated on her destruction, feared to trust the relenting humanity of wild and savage hordes, may be a question. But, certain it is, that hitherto, no Arab, no Ethiop, nor Disciple of Mahomet, has taken their hire, to depose against Her Majesty. The white Christians of Italy, the preachers of morals, law, and order, in England, have, as yet, had all the black and appalling infamy of this atrocious plot to themselves. At length, in 1820, George the Third, her friend, and paternal protector, expired; and, even before his funeral had taken place, the very day that her natural protector ascended the throne, was chosen, to commence, by the evidence of hired foreigners, that work of her destruction, which her enemies had failed to accomplish in 1806, by the perjury of the Douglases and their suborned accomplices. The formidable levies of so many years were hastily put in motion. The colonels, counsellors, solicitors, and Vilmarcaties, the discarded lacquies, and scullions, and chambermaids, the sailors, and bricklayers, white-washers, and ostlers, the filth and offal, and scourings from the lowest dregs of the populace, in the various countries through which the Princess had passed, were bandied in array against her, with the potentates of Austria, Naples, Germany, France and Holland, the police constables of London and Westminster, and the Downing Street members of this UNHOLY ALLIANCE, at their head. The green-bag board of ordnance put their trained bands on full pay, for the opening of the campaign. After having hunted their devoted victim with calumnies, premeditated insults, and inhuman cruelty, until they had left her, like Noah's dove, without a resting place abroad, when she approached England, they sent forth their right trusty and noble ambassador, leaving her no choice between £50,000. a-year, and the branded name, which they hoped to fasten on her in perpetual banishment, or the threat of prosecu tion on setting her foot in England, implying a certain trial, a sure sentence, and an ignominious death upon the scaffold. The prospect, indeed, was appalling. The smooth, dark craft of statesmen, who scruple not the accursed maxim, “to do evil that good may come;" the dangerous hypocrisy of canting moral-mongers, whose holiness is as a fruit fair and tempting without, but all rottenness and worms within; the deadly malice, which had been accumulating since the first wrongs heaped upon Her Royal Highness in 1796; the whole paramount influence of the Powers that be," lined the British shores to oppose her landing. They would have had a Princess of Brunswick to become an accomplice against herself, and to sign an instrument for her own destruction; a Queen of England to barter her state and dignities for perpetual exile and degradation! But this magnanimous Heroine proved herself worthy of empire, worthy of the English Throne. With the conscious elevation of a Queen, she, at once, indignantly and proudly, rejected all terins, but a fair and open trial, or a full and immediate restoration to the rights and royalties of her crown and dignity, with an open acknowledgment of her unspotted innocence. It is in the greatness of her own souf we are to look for the grandeur of her determination. She did not take this resolution, in the midst of a circle of lords and courtiers, nor with a formidable army at her back, prepared for the invasion of England. But she had, at her side, a treasure, which kings often want even in the hour of prosperity. In a British merchant, in Mr. Alderman Wood, she possessed "the noblest work of God, an honest man." The independent spirit, the manliness, the temperate zeal, and unshaken loyalty of this faithful subject, have endeared him to all honest men, and given his name a shining place in the page of history. The Queen landed, and reached the capital, amidst the love, and prayers, and joyful acclamations of her faithful people. The panic of conscious guilt, the cold paralysis of a premeditated atrocity, seized her enemies. Dreading their hired witnesses, apprehensive of discovery and defeat, startled by the prospect of impeachment and the block, they would have capitulated; and, again anxious for their own escape, they offered terms. But, heaping oppression upon oppression, and wrong upon wrong, these inhuman and merciless persecutors, at the end of twentyfour years of unmerited conjugal injuries, would have the weaker party, the sufferer and the innocent, to consent, herself, by a public act, and a fresh sacrifice, to a last surrender, incompatible with her honor. At that moment, when humanity wept and trembled, and simulation, cloaked in the outward sanctities of religion, had marked her fall, a deep prayer ascended to Heaven in her behalf, from the fire-side sympathies of England; from the chaste wives and mothers, the true husbands and fathers, from the hearts and souls of the whole of her faithful subjects. Her noble nature rose superior to this last hard trial: she stood firm, and rejected the insidious and dishonorable proposition. With the commanding ascendency, which God has so largely blessed her with, she calmly braved the crisis. London was surrounded, and entered, by forty thousand troops; trains of artillery paraded the streets; and fortifications were erected, as if the capital was about to stand a sack or siege immediately. Thus entrenched, steeled against the feelings of nature, deaf to the voice of the public, the managers of the tragedy opened their green bags; the grave actors entered upon the stage; and the examination of the foreign witnesses, hired for the degradation of a CROWNED HEAD,* began. In 1806, the conspirators swore to such a long, conti From the moment of King George the Third's death, Queen Caroline-Amelia was virtually crowned. |