Free Princesses by Flora Fraser

Preface
    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 theircorrespondence 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