Kathleen Fraser

Lecture

The Trial Of Queen Caroline

In 1820 George the Fourth king of Great Britain brought his wife Caroline Amelia Elizabeth before the House of Lords on a “Bill of Pains and Penalties.”

The new king, not yet crowned, was hoping to divorce his wife through a trial proving adulterous and depraved behaviour during a lengthy estrangement and her five years abroad in Sicily, North Africa and finally Italy.

The prosecution seized on the presence of a male dancer who accompanied the queen’s party to Italy from Jerusalem to perform at her roman villa in a “brutal and depraved manner” to symbolize Caroline’s unsuitability to continue as a royal wife.

The transcript of the trial includes hostile so-called expert testimony on the nature of belly dance and the derogatory eyewitness accounts of “Mahomet’s” dancing.

Because the king was highly unpopular with his subjects, the cartoonists and newspapers of the day made a mock of

the trial itself and the king’s presumptions, and eventually “the dance of Mahomet” became a huge joke in which ordinary English people took a great deal of pleasure.

This conference paper will show how this particular aspect of the trial provides a fascinating glimpse into English manners and customs of the time vis-a-vis the East – and early version of Orientalism – but Orientalism that had many shades depending on how one viewed the legitimacy of the trial.