In December 1812, Princess Charlotte was invited to be present for the first time at the Opening of Parliament. This event, which should have been a happy and auspicious one for her, turned out to be a sore disappointment. Ignored by her father on her arrival at the House of Lords (she did not know that he had just had a carriage accident, and may have been a little ruffled), she was ordered to fall back in the procession: her three aunts, by the Prince Regent’s orders, were to go first: ‘so I,’ said the Heiress Presumptive, ‘went into the House the last.’
She refused to show that she minded: according to Lady Charlotte Bury, she talked and laughed animatedly, ‘turned her back often upon papa’, and during the Speech from the Throne, made no effort to conceal her dislike of the Tory complacency which it displayed. ‘I did not admire any of it, I may say,’ she told Mercer.
The Prince, said Lady Charlotte Bury, ‘was much displeased at her manner’, and he was probably even more displeased at her reception by the crowds on the return drive. Charlotte, in the second carriage with the Duke of Cumberland, observed with some satisfaction that her father, gorgeously dressed in the Regimentals of the 10th Hussars, was received in total silence; but ‘they were civil and good-humoured to me,’ she wrote, ‘&cheered as I past, shouting my name.’
[an extract from ‘Prinny’s Daughter: A Biography of Princess Charlotte of Wales’ by Thea Home]
Princess Charlotte of Wales 