Page:Interesting letter from Queen Caroline to King George IV.pdf/7

 principles, you had invariably expressed the strongest dislike. The interest of the nation, and even your own feelings, in all other respects, were sacrificed to the gratification of your desire to aggravate my sufferings and insure my humiliation. You took to your councils and your bosom men whom you hated, whose abandonment of, and whose readiness to sacrifice me, were their only merits, and whose power has been exercised in a manner, and has been attended with consequences, worthy of its origin. From this unprincipled and unnatural union have sprung the manifold evils which this nation has now to endure, and which present a mass of misery and of degradation, accompanied with acts of tyranny and cruelty, rather than have seen which inflicted on his industrious, faithful, and brave people, your royal father would have perished at the head of that people.

When to calumniate, revile, and betray me, became the sure path to honour and riches, it would have been strange indeed if calumniators, revilers, and traitors, had not abounded. Your Court became much less a scene of polished manners and refined intercourse, than of low intrigue and scurrility. Spies, Bacchanalian tale-bearers, and foul conspirators, swarmed in those places which had before been the resort of sobriety, virtue, and honour. To enumerate all the various privations and mortifications which I had to endure-all the insults that were wantonly heaped upon me, from the day of your elevation to the Regency to that of my departure for the continent-would be to describe every species of personal offence that can be offered to, and every pain short of bodily violence that can be inflicted on, any human being. Bereft of parent, brother, and father-in-law, and my husband for my deadliest foe-seeing those who have promised to support brought by rewards to be amongst my enemmies-restrained from accusing my foes in the face of