Chatto £20 pp400
“Courage, Princess, courage,” said the Duke of York to his future sister-in-law, Queen Charlotte, as he hauled her up the aisle in 1761. The princess surely needed it, since she had arrived only that day from Germany and would be bedded with her sight-unseen husband George III that night. Throughout the centuries, there have been a great many princesses who required fortitude to endure arranged marriages to foreign monarchs. Married off for reasons of state, they were expected to support the interests of their native country and at the same time, in complete contradiction, assimilate into the new kingdom; oh yes, and provide a large family of children. Queen Charlotte was one of those who did pretty well despite the trials of her husband’s madness in later years; Princess Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria, married to the heir to the German emperor, was one of those who didn’t.
Certainly, Caroline Mathilde, sister of George III, married at 15 to the 16-year-old king of Denmark, provides a tragic example of a princess whose courage to endure failed her. Her horrifying but fascinating story provides the centrepiece of Stella Tillyard’s latest panorama of the 18th century. The numerous fans of her Aristocrats (in which number I include myself) will not be disappointed: here is the same judicious mixture of intimacy and scholarship. Caroline Mathilde’s short, sad life got off to a bad start: born in 1751, she was the posthumous child of the unhappy Prince Frederick, heir to George II, and 17 years younger than her eldest brother, George III. Her portrait shows a pretty, slightly pop-eyed child with what we would now call Hanoverian looks, which have had remarkable longevity in the British royal family. As she grew up, she shared the family tendency to plumpness, but a lovely complexion made up for a great deal.
In any case, her appearance was hardly the issue. Her marriage to the childlike Christian VII of Denmark was based purely on the strategic importance of his country. Above all, writes Tillyard, Denmark “controlled the ebb and flow of trade in and out of the Baltic sea”. As for the future of Caroline Mathilde, George III made that absolutely clear: the young King Christian was said to be “fearful of being governed”; Caroline Mathilde “cannot therefore . . . too carefully avoid the least appearance of having that weight with him that I hope she will in reality obtain”. These identical words might have been written four years later by the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa about her daughter Marie Antoinette, for the French court and the future Louis XVI.
It all went hideously wrong when Caroline Mathilde fell violently in love with the surgeon-in-ordinary to her husband, Johann Friedrich Struensee, who was treating her for melancholy and subsequently achieved political power. Tillyard, apart from painting an engrossing picture of 18th-century Denmark (she learnt Danish for her research), manages to engage our sympathies in a measure for Strauensee himself. This is important, because when a countercoup resulted in his arrest and trial for treason, he suffered the most frightful, barbaric penalties of hanging, drawing and quartering while still alive. We need to mind about this and we do, even though Tillyard’s fondness for imaginative speculation does occasionally let her down: “Thinking of her dismembered love,” she writes with more banality than empathy, “Caroline Mathilde must have finally known it was time to go . . .”
Poor Caroline Mathilde! She did go, to Celle in Hanover, a disgraced woman, forced to abandon her children, one of whom, a daughter, was actually by Strauensee. She died a few years later, aged 24. Tillyard, however, is not merely concerned to illustrate the painful fact that royal princesses did not and could not marry for love — with frequently disastrous consequences. She has another thesis, to which her book’s subtitle alludes: the relationship of George III with his brothers and sisters. She finds an interesting analogy between his troubles in the family (as he saw it) and his attitude to his rebellious American colonists (as he would see them) in the future.
They were not, with the exception of Caroline Mathilde, an inspiring lot. The most exciting thing to be said about Prince Edward was his attachment to a woman of 32 when he was 18, and then his romance with the actress Kitty Fisher. Besides that, “the fault of his constitution was a tendency to fat”, as the king told the novelist Fanny Burney. Augusta, married off to another unprepossessing European prince, was “boisterous”. Henry, Duke of Cumberland was found guilty of having an affair with Lady Grosvenor and in a notorious case ordered to pay damages. William, Duke of Gloucester defied the king to marry the beautiful widow Maria, Countess of Waldegrave: as a result of his action, the king showed his “resentment” by means of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. By this super-patriarchal measure (which is, unbelievably, still in force), descendants of George II were forbidden to marry before the age of 25 without the sovereign’s approval, and after that had to give 12 months’ notice to the privy council.
There is certainly material for thought here: Tillyard writes that as a member of a large family herself she feels that the influence of sibling relationships is sometimes underplayed. It is true that kings were in general encouraged to present themselves as fathers of their people, part of the notion of royal patriarchy, and that easily spilled over into the family. Louis XIV, king of France at the age of four and a half, was encouraged to sign his letters to his young brother Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, “Petit Papa” — although Philippe was a mere two years his junior.
What George III lacked, Tillyard suggests in her conclusion, was any sense of the need for compromise. “A loving and tender father to young children and to his siblings so long as they remained dutiful and loyal, George had never been taught and never developed any means of negotiating . . . with those in his family, from his brothers to his sons and daughters, who wanted to live in different ways than the ones he thought best for them.” Towards his American subjects, he then behaved in exactly the same way.
If a king is, by virtue of his position, likely to produce a dysfunctional family around him in more than one generation, this is, I suppose, an argument for royal population control. Or maybe royal families should emulate the Abyssinian practice, as described by Samuel Johnson in Rasselas, by which all the younger members of the royal family were kept in a tower until they were wanted for the succession. It’s an idea.
Available at the Books First price of £18 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
