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On the afternoon of April 28, 1818, Elizabeth prepared for her call at Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence. Queen Charlotte was this day’s honored guest for a charity event at the mayor’s palace. Mrs. Fry could not possibly leave her brownstone without the layers and layers of attire required for a woman of her social standing. Fashion dictated that multiples of crinoline and lace measured pedigree. Abundant petticoats signaled affluence for a middle-class lady, although Elizabeth’s were modest and unfussy in the tradition of her Quaker upbringing. Her dark silk gown, light silk cloak, and unadorned Friends’ cotton cap stood out from the brocaded gowns and jeweled tiaras of her contemporaries.

Elizabeth was among the last to arrive at Mansion House, delayed by a bitter dispute with Britain’s home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, over a young woman’s execution outside Newgate. As she entered the Egyptian Hall, filled with princesses, lords, and bishops, “A buzz of ‘Mrs. Fry,’ Mrs. Fry,’ ran through the room.”13 While the guests strained for a closer look, their exclamations were muted ever so slightly in the thick carpet fibers and sumptuous satin curtains surrounding the hall.

At Windsor Castle, a rather miserable, cold, and distant Queen Charlotte prepared for another state function, donning in melancholy silence the sumptuous regalia demanded by her position. At public pageants, her well-practiced detachment helped perpetuate the royal mystique for those outside the inner circle. Quaker daughters in the prominent Barclay family who observed the Queen wrote: “She is vastly genteel with airs . . . truly majestic. . . . Her clothes, which were as rich as gold and silver and silk could make them, were a suit from which fell a train supported by a little page in scarlet and silver.”14

Now a well-publicized humanitarian, Elizabeth Fry was more widely admired within British society than Queen Charlotte and her mad King George. Elizabeth spent her days on the unfashionable tasks of soliciting funds for soup kitchens, setting up schools for impoverished children, and lobbying to change Britain’s tradition of punishing petty thieves with death. Her work at Newgate Prison had become a public spectacle, part of the Dickensian melodrama that ran in the daily newspapers. “The American Ambassador wrote home to say that he had now seen the two greatest sights in London—St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Mrs. Fry reading to the prisoners in Newgate.”15

It was appalling for an upper-crust lady to consider any of the Newgate women worth saving, so shocking that the warden issued tickets for admission to view the fearless missionary who read to the prisoners. Each day, the idle rich flocked to the grey fortress to watch in awe as the gentle voice of hope transformed the “wretched creatures.” A schoolmaster who visited Newgate observed that the features of prisoners were “strongly marked with animal propensities” with “an approximation to the face of a monkey.”16 Newgate had become a zoo of sorts, with the full range of human suffering on display and safely locked behind its iron bars.

On a much loftier stage, the royal family, too, was part of this theater of the absurd. At age seventy-four, Queen Charlotte often focused her attention on her husband, the mentally unstable George III. The king had recently taken to running naked through the palace as his dressers chased him, tackling him to put on his pants. He is today believed to have suffered from porphyria, a genetic disorder with symptoms that include mental disturbance. This may have been triggered by arsenic contained in a medication he was given. Queen Charlotte served as his “regency of the person,” his surrogate. In this capacity, she dispensed funds for the Queen’s Lying-In Hospital and for various orphanages. The queen’s concern for these causes, whether genuine or feigned, was an attempt to promote a favorable image for a monarchy whose political influence was in ruins.

Today, in the center of the Egyptian Hall from her platform three steps up, the aging queen