I first became curious about the six daughters of George III when I was researching The Unruly Queen, my biography of their sister-in-law Queen Caroline, in the Royal Archives. The princesses’ close involvement in their brother George IV’s quarrels with his wife led me to wonder why they were not all themselves married to foreign princes and busy with child-bearing, or at least with their own marital difficulties. Rumours of affairs, secret marriages and pregnancies in their contemporaries’journals fuelled my interest. Above all, the princesses’ letters – confidential, conspiratorial, allusive – in the Archives intrigued me. And so I started Princesses.
At first I was unsure of my subject. The princesses’ letters were often difficult to read, sometimes illegible. And others were less inquisitive than I about these shadowy sisters from a Regency past. The conversation with those whom I told of my project tended to be short: ‘George Ill’s daughters? Who did they marry?’ No one in particular. ‘How many were there?’ Six. ‘Any brothers?’ Nine. End of conversation, or a coda: ‘Fifteen children! All by one woman?’
But I was not put off. As the princesses’ story and the extraordinary circumstances of their existence took on form and substance, I grew ever more absorbed. No one could have guessed, when these princesses of England were born, that any particular struggle would be theirs – except to secure a foreign prince for a husband and successfully to bear him heirs. But each of them was forced, by successive strokes of fate that Princesses describes, into subversive behaviour and even acts of desperation. Their letters reveal the transformation of these attractive, conventional princesses into resilient, independent-minded women. The sadness is that this transformation occurred only as a result of spectacular illness that their father George III suffered, and that destroyed their mother Queen Charlotte’s domestic happiness. Earlier admirable, the Queen did not behave well to her daughters in later years. But she had been greatly tried.
Given other circumstances, the letters of these six royal sisters might have been filled only with Court gossip, pomp and fashion. Instead their correspondence makes harrowing reading, revealing the humility with which they met pain and horror, the tenacity with which they pursued their individual dreams, and the stratagems they devised to endure years of submission and indignity. For some but not for all of the princesses, there were happy endings, their letters dwelling more on family news and less on family suffering. For all of them, I developed the greatest respect and admiration, and I hope that readers of Princesses will share those feelings.
I thank Her Majesty The Queen for kind permission to consult and publish the papers of the daughters of King George III. I am also most grateful to Pamela Clark, Registrar of the Royal Archives, her predecessor in that post, Sheila de Bellaigue, and Jill Kelsey, Deputy Registrar. I owe thanks besides to all in the Royal Archives, especially Allison Derrett, Maud Eburne, and Angeline Barker, for generous help and advice during the preparation of this biography. I would also like to thank Oliver Everett, formerly Librarian to The Queen, for his constant encouragement of my project, and Stuart Shilson, Assistant Keeper of The Queen’s Archives, for his friendly professional advice.
The daughters of George III, as inhabitants of many royal residences, as sitters to many artists, and as decorative artists themselves, have left their mark on the Royal Collection. In that context I urge readers of Princesses to study the magnificent catalogue from the 2004 exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery, London, George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, edited by Jane Roberts. I would like myself to thank Jane Roberts, Librarian to The Queen, Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, Hugh Roberts, Director of the Royal Collection and Frances Dimond, Curator of the Royal Photograph Collection, for much generous help. I am in addition grateful to many other curators and members of staff at the Royal Collection, including Siân Cooksey, Martin Clayton, Gay Hamilton, Shruti Patel, Prue Sutcliffe, Bridget Wright and Margaret Westwood. I also record my thanks here to Susanne Groom, Joanna Marschner and their colleagues at Historic Royal Palaces for much helpful advice.
The six daughters of George III corresponded mightily all their lives. So Princesses is a book in which I have drawn heavily on private British family papers, and I would like to thank all their owners for allowing me to make use of them, and many of them for memorable hospitality. Among those I especially thank are: Sir Peter and Dame Elizabeth Anson, the Marquess of Bute, the Earl of Home, Richard Jenkins, the Earl of Pembroke, David Scott and David Smythe. I am in addition indebted to, among others, Robin Harcourt Williams, Andrew Maclean, Charles Noble and Michael Shepherd for their professional advice.
I am also most grateful to the archivists and staffs of all the County Record Offices where papers relating to the princesses are deposited, and whom I visited or corresponded with. Carl Harrison at Leicestershire Record Office, Sally Mason of Buckinghamshire County Archives, and David Rimmer at Gwent Record Office are among others who have given me great assistance.
I owe thanks to Michael Borrie, of the British Library Department of Manuscripts, to Christopher Kitching, of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and to Ian G. Brown, at the National Library of Scotland, for advice about the whereabouts and extent of various collections of papers. I would also like to thank the staffs of the British Library, of the London Library and of the Public Record Office for their help, and John Saumarez Smith of Heywood Hill for much generous advice.
I would like to thank Prince Ernst August of Hanover for permission to consult family papers, and for an illuminating discussion about the House of Hanover in Germany and in England. Two of the princesses married into other German royal families, and I would like to thank Dr Iris Reepen for her great assistance to me on two memorable research trips. We saw castles, collections, archives and curatorial departments from Bad Homburg and Frankfurt to Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg and, on the other side of Germany, to Greiz in Thuringia.
Thanks are also due, for help with manuscripts in Germany, to Eberhard Fritz at the House of Württemberg Archives in Altshausen, to Johann Krizsanitz of the House of Hanover Archives in Hanover, to Anja Moschke of the Thuringian State Archives in Greiz, and to Gerta Walsh and Ursula Stiehler of the House of Hesse-Homburg Archives in Bad Homburg. In addition I would like to thank the staffs of the State Archives in Stuttgart and in Hanover for their help and advice. Thanks also go, again in Europe, to Monique Droin-Bridel in Geneva and to Silke Redolfi at the Fundaziun de Planta, Samedan.
In the earlier part of the twentieth century British royal documents were purchased with enthusiasm by American collectors and bibliophiles, and innumerable letters of the princesses and their circle then found their way across the Atlantic, some of which I have consulted. I am most grateful to Roger Horchow for arranging introductions for me at various American libraries; to Stephen Parks and his colleagues at the Beinecke and Lewis Walpole Libraries, Yale; and to Robert Parks, Inge Du Pont and others at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, for help and advice. I am also grateful to Stephen Crook and others at the Alfred A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library.
I would also like to thank, among others who have shed light on the princesses’ artistic output and on their sittings to artists: Henry Adams, Norman Blackburn, Elizabeth Fairman, Charlotte Gere, Bryony Kelly, Martin Royalton Kisch, Stephen Lloyd, Amy Meyers, Lucy Peltz, Marcia Pointon, Aileen Ribeiro, Nancy Richards, Jacob Simon, Kim Sloan, Kay Staniland, Arthur Tilley and Lord Ullswater. In addition I thank Matthew Bailey and Tom Morgan of the National Portrait Gallery Picture Library for their help in providing images.
For sharing with me their knowledge of places important in the princesses’ story here and in Europe I thank among others: Gotthard Brandler, Kathleen A. Burgess, Dr Fritz Fischer, Kurt Hoffmann, Dr Heinz Krämer, Julian Litten, Sister Manda, Dr Klaus Merten and Christopher Woodward.
Others I owe thanks to are: Maureen Attwooll, Clarissa Campbell Orr, Kate Chisholm, Leo Cooper, Amanda Foreman, Michael Holroyd, Giles Hunt, Rana Kabbani, Linda Kelly, Mark Le Fanu, Lowell Libson, Sacha Llewellyn, Giles MacDonogh, Philip Mansel, David Michaelis, Sir Oliver Millar, Diane Nash, Michael Nash, Mimi Pakenham, Robin Piguet, Andrew Roberts, John Rogister, Francis Russell, Carlos Salinas, Stephen Simpson, Paul and Daisy Soros, Gina Thomas, John Wardroper and Edmund White.
For professional aid during the researching and writing of Princesses I am, as ever, grateful to Leonora Clarke for typing my work. I owe thanks also for research or help at different times to: Georgie Castle, Georgina Gooding, Linda Peskin, Carole Taylor and Otto Wilkinson. I thank Katarina Ardagh for translation from the German, and Barbara Peters for checking printed sources at the British Library. And I am most grateful to Lesley Robertson Allen, to Rowan Yapp of John Murray and to Diana Tejerina of Knopf for their professional help with the production of the manuscript and illustrations. I thank Reginald Piggott for providing the family tree, and it gives me great pleasure to thank Douglas Matthews for compiling the index.
I am fortunate beyond words in my agent, editors and publishers here and in America, and they are all too distinguished to need my praise. Nevertheless I wish to thank Jonathan Lloyd, my literary agent, for his rock-solid encouragement of this project. I thank Peter James for his steely editorial work. I am grateful to Bob Gottlieb for, among much else, crucial advice during narrative crises. I thank Sonny Mehta of Knopf in the US for his steady support. And I am delighted to be publishing once more with Roland Philipps and with John Murray (Publishers) in England.
I am grateful for good conversation and stimulating professional advice from my mother Antonia Fraser and, until recently, from my grandmother, the late Elizabeth Longford. I thank Sheila de Bellaigue, Christopher Hibbert and Jane Roberts for reading the manuscript at different stages and for their valuable comments. I thank also Jane Birkett for reading the proofs with such care. Finally, I have, throughout the writing of this book, had the unflinching support of my husband Peter Soros, to whom, with my children, I dedicate it.
June 2004
Note to Paperback Edition
I am grateful to John Murray for the opportunity to make some small corrections here. I am also delighted by the news that a ‘baby house’ or dolls’ house belonging to the Princesses has been acquired by Historic Royal Palaces. It will form part of a new Georgian display at Kew Palace in Kew Gardens, I am told, when that odd and atmospheric Royal house re-opens to the public in 2006 after many years of closure.