lf instituted
the Order of St Caroline, with Pergami for Grand Master. Behold now our
ex-courier and adventurer in all his new glory as Grand Chamberlain and
lover of a future Queen of England, as Baron della Francina, Knight of
two Orders and Grand Master of a third, while every post of profit in
that vagrant Court was held by some member of his family!

The Eastern tour ended, which had ranged from Algiers and Egypt to
Constantinople and Jerusalem, and throughout which she had progressed
and been received as a Queen, Caroline settled down for a time in her
now restored villa on Lake Como, celebrating her return by lavish
charities to her poor neighbours, and by popular fetes and balls, in one
of which "she danced as Columbine, wearing her lover's ear-rings, whilst
Pergami, dressed as harlequin and wearing her ear-rings, supported her."

But even here she was to find no peace from her husband's spies, whose
evidence, confirmed on oath by a score of witnesses, was being
accumulated in London against the longed-for day of reckoning. And it
was not long before Caroline and her Grand Chamberlain were on their
wanderings again--this time to the Tyrol, to Austria, and through
Northern Italy, always inseparable and everywhere setting the tongue of
scandal wagging by their indiscreet intimacy. Even the tragic death in
childbirth of her only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, which put all
England in mourning, seemed powerless to check her career of folly. It
is true that, on hearing of it, she fell into a faint and afterwards
into a kind of protracted lethargy, but within a few weeks she had flung
herself again into her life of pleasure-chasing and reckless disregard
of convention.

But matters were now hurrying fast to their tragic climax. For some time
the life of George III. had been flickering to its close. Any day might
bring news that the end had come, and that the Princess was a Queen. And
for some time Caroline had been bracing herself to face this crisis in
her life and to pit herself against her enemies in a grim struggle for a
crown, the title to which her years of folly (for such at the best they
had been) had so gravely endangered. Over the remainder of her vagrant
life, with its restless flittings, and its indiscretions, marked by
spying eyes, we must pass to that February morning in 1820 when, to
quote a historian, "the Princess had scarcely reached her hotel (at
Florence) when her faithful major-domo, John Jac