The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians – Review

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In 1812, Princess Charlotte, the granddaughter of George III, told her best friend: "No family was ever composed of such odd people, I believe ... there have happened such extraordinary things, that in any other family, public or private, are never heard of before." Yet George III's chief aim, as Janice Hadlow shows in her fascinating, story‑filled account, was to make his family life "ordinary", a model of domestic virtue that would establish a new style of royalty, a moral compass for the nation.

George's exacting dedication to this project, which went so sadly awry, was born, Hadlow suggests, out of a reaction against the "malign inheritance of emotional dysfunction" handed down through previous generations. His great-grandfather, the Elector of Hanover who donned the British crown as George I in 1714, was a stern figure whose affairs and neglect drove his wife Sophia Dorothea into the arms of the handsome Count Philipp von Konigsmarck. George's reaction was violent: her lover was banished, almost certainly murdered, and she was immured in a remote castle, never to see her children again. Her portraits were stripped from the walls and George's fury was transferred to his son, the future George II and his wife Caroline. In London he persecuted them fiercely, banning them from the royal palaces while keeping hold of their children. The second George never mentioned his mother's name, but when he became king in 1727, his first act was to hang up her portraits again.

His own marriage was famously close, yet he and Caroline were so involved with each other, despite his many mistresses, that their children also suffered. The rift with Frederick, Prince of Wales, was so intense that Caroline raged that she wished the monster had never been born. When he died suddenly from pneumonia, aged 43, his father's comment on the year was: "I have lost my eldest son and I am glad of it."

More: The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians ? review | Books | The Guardian

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