Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was born on 17 May 1768, the second daughter of Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and his wife Augusta Charlotte. The bride's mother was the sister of the English king George III and the aunt of the current prince of Wales, whom she was to marry – with disastrous results.
The marriage began hopefully as part of the closing of ranks within the royal family in the wake of the French Revolution. In return for the settling of his debts, the prince agreed to George III's urgent wish that he should marry and father an heir. German custom, however, dictated that his bride should be royal, too – that is, she could not be one of the eligible females of the British aristocracy. The best of a bad bunch of available Protestant princesses seemed to be his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick.
It was the prince's calculating mistress Lady Jersey who chose Caroline, 'selecting a woman 'with indelicate manners ... and not very inviting appearance'. George, who hadn't taken the precaution of meeting his wife before marrying her, was suitably disgusted when she arrived in England: coarse, ill-educated and none too clean.
After his marriage in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, George got extremely drunk on brandy and spent his wedding night with his head in the hearth. The following morning, he recovered sufficiently to get Caroline pregnant, and a daughter, christened Charlotte Augusta, was born in January 1796.
The couple had sexual intercourse only three times (within the first two days of their marriage), and in 1797, just three years after their marriage, they separated. George wrote to his wife that 'our inclinations are not in our power, nor should either of us be held answerable to the other.' Caroline took him at his word and proceeded to live exactly as she pleased, departing for Europe and a life of scandalous associations and debauched parties.
She was still on the Continent when, on 6 November 1817, her daughter, the 21-year-old Charlotte, who had married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, died in childbirth. In fact, it was only news of her husband's accession to the throne in 1820 that compelled her to return to Britain, refusing bribes to stay away.
Rumours of Caroline's lifestyle had reached George, and although he was hardly a stranger to scandal himself, he was determined that she would never become queen. To the shock of the nation, he demanded that Caroline, whose informal manner had long made her popular in England, face a trial for adultery in the House of Lords, as part of the introduction of a Bill of Pains and Penalties, designed to strip her of her title and dissolve her marriage. The voice of the popular press, raised in anger for the first time in Britain, roared in disapproval at her humiliation, and Caroline's unlikely role as the radicals' heroine was assured.
Because of this strident support, the Bill, although it passed the Lords, was never submitted to the Commons: George had failed. However, he made sure that Caroline was absent from his magnificent coronation on 21 July 1821, because he had had the doors of Westminster Abbey locked against her.
That night, the 53-year-old queen took to her bed with vomiting and an erratic pulse, sure that she had been poisoned (it may have been an intestinal blockage). She died three weeks later. She is buried, not with her husband, but back in her childhood home of Brunswick, beneath the inscription: 'Here lies Caroline, the Injured Queen of England.'
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 The Divorce Trial of Queen Caroline: Contemporary responses and social attitudes
www.loyno.edu/history/journal/Mouledoux.
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Scholarly article on the divorce case of George IV and Queen Caroline in 1820, which remains one of the most dramatic and scandalous sagas of English history.
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A Correct, Full, and Impartial Report, of the Trial of Her Majesty Caroline, Queen Consort of Great Britain: Before the House of Peers; On the Bill of Pains and Penalties , edited by John Adolphus (William S Hein & Co., 2001)
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The Unruly Queen: The life of Queen Caroline by Flora Fraser (John Murray, 2004)
Caroline's story – of a long, courageous fight by an extraordinary individual to see justice done in the face of overbearing authority – culminates with the queen's trial in the House of Lords for adultery and exclusion from her bigamous husband's coronation.
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