Queen Caroline’s bath: A Scandalous Curiosity

Walk to the South West corner of Greenwich Park and you will find a set of square hedges by a brick wall.

Hidden behind the hedges is a very unusual historical oddity: the remains of a royal bath.

It is known as ‘Queen Caroline’s bath’ and the story behind it is one of scandal, salacious gossip and drama.

Who Was Queen Caroline?

Caroline of Brunswick was born in Germany on the 17th May 1768.

In 1795 she was married, by arrangement, to her cousin the Prince of Wales and future King George IV. They had, what has got to be, one of the worst marriages in British royal history (and that’s saying something).

A real bone of contention in the marriage was that the Prince of Wales was already illegally married to his sweetheart Maria Fitzherbert. Secondly, he was hugely in debt due to his frivolous nature and gambling addiction.

Just to top it off he was a very heavy drinker and according to Caroline, spent most of the wedding night ‘under the grate, where he fell, and where I left him’, having had a few too many.

He, in turn, considered her ugly and unhygienic and said he had to ‘overcome the disgust of her person’. So, all in all, it did not get off to a good start.

Either way, they somehow managed to ‘do the deed’ that night and promptly nine months later Caroline gave birth to their daughter Charlotte.

From Bad to Worse

Things then went even more downhill. George wrote Caroline out of his will three days after the birth of Charlotte and the couple refused to live together with Caroline going to live at Montagu House in Blackheath near Greenwich.

Montagu House had been built in the late 1600s by the 1st Duke of Montagu. After moving in, Caroline had a glass bathhouse built adjoining the house, including installing a sunken bath.

You can see below a drawing of what the house would have looked like with the bathhouse circled in red.

Bathhouses and plunge pools were very popular amongst the well-to-do in the Georgian period. Cold baths in particular, were considered a good way of warding off sickness.

Queen Caroline supposedly held wild parties at Montagu House. She was accused of taking many lovers and having an illegitimate child.

An investigation called the ‘delicate investigation’ was launched by the House of Lords to ascertain whether she had been adulterous, but no evidence could be found.

Caroline lived at Montagu House until roughly 1814 when she decided to up sticks and move to France.

In 1815 the house was almost completely demolished on her husband’s orders, presumably as some sort of revenge. The bath was covered over and all that was left was the wall you can see below.

How Things Ended

In 1820, King George III died and the Prince of Wales, became King George IV, thus making Caroline the Queen.

Caroline returned to England against George’s wishes to assume her rightful position. She even turned up to the coronation on the 19th July 1821, uninvited, but was turned away at the door!

Caroline died just a couple of weeks after the failed attempt to attend the coronation, on the 7th August 1821 from, what at the time was understood to be, an ‘intestinal obstruction’.

The Bath Today

The bath was rediscovered in 1909, covered over again in the 1980s, but then re-excavated in 2001.

You can still see a few blue tiles remaining inside and the narrow steps down into the plunge pool.

The hedges mark out where the walls of the bathhouse would have once been.

Who knew a seemingly innocent historical leftover could have such a rollercoaster of a story behind it…

Thank you for reading, you can find more London historical oddities below!