This year his Royal Highness the Prince Regent went to Ascot races, where he was publicly dunned by a Mr. Vaux-hall Clarke for a betting debt incurred some years before, and left unpaid.
Great excitement was created in and out of Parliament by the complaint of the Princess of Wales that she was not allowed to see her daughter, the Princess Charlotte. The Prince Regent formally declared, through the Speaker of the House of Commons, that he would not meet, on any occasion, public or private, the Princess of Wales (whom it was urged that "he had been forced to marry "); while the Princess of Wales wrote a formal letter to Parliament complaining that her character had been "traduced by suborned perjury." Princess Charlotte refused to be presented at Court except by her mother, who was not allowed to go there. In the House of Commons, Mr. Whitbread charged the Lords Commissioners with unduly straining the evidence by leading questions; and Lord Ellenborough, in his place in the House of Peers, declared that the accusation was "as false as hell." Ultimately, it was admitted that the grave charges against the Princess of Wales were groundless, and £35,000 a year was voted to her, she agreeing to travel abroad. Mr. Bathurst, a sinecurist pensioner, pleading on behalf of the Prince Regent that the House of Commons ought not to interfere, urged that it was no unusual thing to have dissensions in the Royal Family, and that they had been frequent in the reigns of George I. and George II. Mr. Stuart Wortley, in the course of a severe speech in reply to Lord Castlereagh, declared that "we had a Royal Family which took no warning from what was said or thought about them, and seemed to be the only persons in the country who were wholly regardless of their own welfare and respectability."
The Princess Charlotte of Wales was at this time residing in Warwick House, and some curiosity was aroused by the dismissal, by order of the Prince Regent, of all her servants. This was immediately followed by the flight of the Princess from the custody of her father to the residence of her mother, the Princess of Wales. Persuaded to return to the Prince Regent by her mother, Lord Eldon, and others, she appears to have been really detained as a sort of prisoner, for we find the Duke of Sussex soon after complaining in the House of Lords that he was unable to obtain access to the Princess, and asking by whose authority she was kept in durance. Happy family, these Bruns-wicks!