But ‘Caroline’ turned from exchanging sharp notes with ‘Charlotte’ to addressing her husband. He might, she said, possibly refuse to read the letter, but the world must know that she had written it. In this communication she states she would have exercised her right of appearing at the drawing-room had she not been ‘restrained by motives of personal consideration towards her Majesty.’ She protests against the insult, appeals to her acquittal, to her restoration thereupon by the King to the full enjoyment of her rank in his court, and she adds: ‘Since his Majesty’s lamented illness, I have demanded, in the face of parliament and the country, to be proved guilty, or to be treated as innocent. I will not submit to be treated as guilty.’ There is something, too, of the taunting style which the Queen could manage with so much effect in the succeeding passage. The Prince had vowed that never again would he meet her, either in public or in private. ‘Can your Royal Highness,’ she asks, ‘have contemplated the full extent of your declaration?... Occasions may arrive (one, I trust, is far distant) when I must appear in public, and your Royal Highness must be present also.... Has your Royal Highness forgotten the approaching marriage of our daughter, and the possibility of our coronation.’... The illustrious heir of the House of Orange had announced himself to her, she said, as her future son-in-law; and then she adds, coupling the presence of the Orange Prince with that of the illustrious strangers in the metropolis: ‘_This_ season your Royal Highness has chosen for treating me with fresh and unprovoked indignity; and of all his Majesty’s subjects I alone am prevented, by your Royal Highness, from appearing in my place to partake of the general joy, and am deprived of the indulgence in those feelings of pride and affection permitted to every mother but me.’ It was possible, as the writer remarked, that this letter was never read to the exalted individual to whom it was addressed. It is certain that the letter was not thought worthy of notice. But the presumed writer was determined that, escaping the courteous notice of her husband, it should not escape the more general notice of the world. She accordingly sent copies of her correspondence with the Queen and one of the correspondence of the latter with the Prince to the House of Commons, with an expression of her fears that there were ‘ultimate objects in view pregnant with danger to the security of the succession and the domestic peace of the realm.’