Queen Charlotte: later married life

The White House at Kew, where George III became ill
(now demolished). Public domain

The royal family: stresses and strains

Historians have often described the marriage of George III and Queen Charlotte as a happy one, and certainly the king believed that he was a loving family man. In fact, he chose not to notice the unhappiness of those around him. He kept his wife isolated in the early years of their married life, he did not appear to notice the strains imposed by her many pregnancies, and from the late 1790s he imposed on her his own love of travelling continually between his three residences. He believed he loved his daughters but he forced them to live extremely restricted and frustrating lives.

The Prince of Wales

George and Charlotte were the first British monarchs since Edward III to have a family of grown-up sons. These sons were notorious for their pleasure-loving lives. However, George was anxious for them to  be useful and this meant that apart from the eldest, they all had military and naval careers.

George, Prince of Wales, was deeply frustrated that he was denied a military career. Deprived of a useful role, he gambled, lived extravagantly and incurred huge debts. Much of his money was spent on two huge architectural projects, Carlton House and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.

Carlton House
Public domain

On 15 December 1785 the prince secretly married the widowed Catholic Maria, Fitzherbert, whom he had met the previous year. The marriage was illegal according to three acts: the Act of Settlement (1701), the Act of Union (1707), both of which excluded a prince or princess married to a Catholic from succeeding to the throne, and to the Royal Marriages Act (1772). Though the couple initially kept separate establishments, the marriage was an open secret in London society, where they were constantly seen together. However the king and queen were ignorant of it.

Maria Fitzherbert (1756-1837), 
by Sir JoshuaReynolds. 
Public domain

The prince further embarrassed his parents by his open support of the parliamentary Opposition. While the king supported William Pitt the Younger, whom he had appointed prime minister at the end of 1783, the prince supported the Whig leader, Charles James Fox. George III detested Fox, not merely because of his radical politics, but because he believed that he had led his son into bad ways. Fox returned the dislike and hoped that the king would soon die. The prince would then become king and make Fox his prime minister. 

The madness of King George

Compared with his son’s, the king’s life was a model of rectitude and frugality. After a difficult start to his reign he was becoming popular and an assassination attempt in 1786 only increased his popularity.

But in 1788 everything began to go wrong. On 11 June 1788 at Kew the king suffered a ‘spasmodic bilious attack’, and was ill for several days. In July, on the advice of the doctors, the royal family spent a month at Cheltenham. This was the first royal holiday and their activities were extensively reported. The family returned to Windsor on 16 August. 

At Kew on 17 October the king had a second attack, coupled with severe abdominal pains and discoloured urine. This was coupled with what was described as ‘agitation’, and ‘flurry of spirits’,  uncontrollable gabbling and mental confusion. From the 1960s it has been argued that he was suffering from porphyria, but modern medical opinion is more inclined to believe that he suffered from bipolar disorder. 

The symptoms worsened. On 25 October the family returned to Windsor. The novelist, Fanny Burney, then in the service of Queen Charlotte, described Wednesday 5 November as a 'dreadful day'. The queen later told Lady Harcourt that the king's eyes were like 

'nothing but blackcurrant jelly, the veins in his face were swelled, the sound of his voice was dreadful; he often spoke until he was exhausted, and the moment he could recover his breath began again, while the foam ran out of his mouth'. Quoted Olwen Hedley, Queen Charlotte (1975), p. 146.

He was persuaded to sleep in the room adjoining her bedroom, but he came into her room with a candle in his hand and terrified her.

Over-riding Queen Charlotte's wishes, the Prince of Wales took over the royal household and called in his own doctor, Dr Richard

'Dr Richard Warren', by
Gainsborough
Public domain

Warren. The king, who had always disliked Warren because of his connection with the Whigs, refused to see him. To Charlotte's distress, Warren reported to the Prince of Wales rather than her. She had lost all authority and Fanny Burney reported her as being in an agony of grief and distress.  On 12 November from hearsay Warren told the Whig peeress Lady Spencer, ‘Rex noster insanit’.  He was telling the Whigs what they wanted to hear.  They were in great hopes that the Prince of Wales would be made regent and they would be in government and they were delighted that the queen's authority had been so completely undermined.  

The king’s condition fluctuated throughout the whole of November. Various remedies were tired, such as blistering and hot baths - sadistic as well as useless. On 18-19 November, after only two hours’ sleep, he talked for nineteen hours. On 23 November, he uncharacteristically spoke ‘indecencies’.

However in late November the atmosphere began to change. The physician, Dr Anthony Addington, one-time consultant to the Pitt family and the former keeper of a madhouse, encouraged Pitt to think that the king might recover. He recommended a move to Kew - away from the prying spectators at Windsor. George was taken their under the false impression that he would be able to see his wife and daughters there. Against her better judgement, Charlotte went along with this deception, but when the king was denied permission to see her, he blamed her. 

'Dr Francis Willis', by John Russell
Wikimedia Creative Commons

On 5 December  Dr Francis Willis, a seventy-year-old clergyman and the keeper of a private asylum in Lincolnshire, arrived at Kew, armed with a straitjacket and three strong assistants. This was a new, and arguably very cruel, way to deal with the king, but Willis introduced order and a sense of optimism that made the queen trust him. This opened up another breach between the king and queen.

In December and January, Parliament debated a regency. As some of the discussions centred on the role the queen would play in this regency, she found herself attacked by her son's supporters in the opposition press, accused of denying him what was his due. After nearly thirty years of avoiding politics, she now found herself at the centre of a political storm.  

Even more distressing was the fact that the king was turning against her.  He was now declaring that he had never loved her but instead loved the Countess of Pembroke, a middle-aged court lady who had always been friends with both the king and queen. At a meeting with the queen on 16 January he repudiated her in front of her children.

However, from early February the king began to recover - even though on 2 February he chased Fanny Burney through Kew Gardens, but when he caught up with her she found him quite rational. His behaviour continued to fluctuate wildly, but he was on the mend. On 25 February the physicians announced his recovery, though his progress was still spasmodic.

However, Queen Charlotte was deeply scarred by the whole crisis. Her portrait by Lawrence, painted six months after her husband's recovery, shows a tense and stressed woman. It took years for her to recover her relationship with the Prince of Wales and perhaps the relationship with her husband was never the same again. 

'Queen Charlotte' by Sir
Thomas Lawrence
painted in September 1789.
Public domain
The strains of the Regency Crisis
show very clearly on the Queen's face

On the surface, however, matters were returning to normal. On St George’s Day 1789 the king and queen went in state to a triumphant grand thanksgiving service at St Paul’s. 

In the summer the king made a triumphant journey to Weymouth, where he was greeted by rapturous crowds. Weymouth became the family's regular summer holiday stay until the king's final illness.

Further troubles for Charlotte

Charlotte's iron self-control was put to the test at the end of 1794 when the Prince of Wales announced that he was to marry his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick. She knew of Caroline's bad reputation but kept quiet. Perhaps she would have averted a family and political crisis if she had spoken out, but the king was determined on the marriage, and he would probably not have listened to her.

She took some consolation from the birth of the couple's daughter, Princess Charlotte on 7 January 1796, but was soon deeply distressed by the open breakdown of the marriage. She sided with her son, and Caroline came to hate her deeply. The public sided with Caroline against both Charlotte and the prince.

In 1801 the king became ill again, and once more he turned on his wife. In March he complained of her 'German coldness'. On 16 April the doctors judged him well enough to sleep again in her apartments at Windsor, but that night she suffered great terror from his restless behaviour. To add to her distress, the king was openly siding with the Princess of Wales in her dispute with her husband.

The king had a third bout of illness in 1804. Again, he insisted on siding with his daughter-in-law, Caroline, and again Charlotte bore the brunt of his irrational rages. On 14 February, Princess Mary wrote to her brother, the Prince of Wales about 

'such a day I never went through in my life. The poor Queen keeps up wonderfully but the trial is a most severe one'. Quoted A. Aspinall, The Letters of George, Prince of Wales, vol. 4, p. 496.

One can only guess at the horrors they were going through. 

By the time the king had his fourth and final bout of madness in October 1810 relations between him and the queen seem to have  broken down.

Charlotte and her daughters

In the early years of marriage and motherhood, Charlotte had devoted as much time as she could to her daughters and had taken particular pains over their education. But over the years her once cheerful character soured with suffering and she took her unhappiness out on them. In their different ways, all the daughters had troubled lives.

On 11 August 1800 a baby boy was baptised in Weymouth as Thomas Ward. As Flora Fraser's researches have demonstrated, he was almost certainly the son of Princess Sophia and the equerry, Thomas Garth. Judging from vague hints in her letters, the queen seems to have been aware of this, but the truth cannot be definitely established.

Princess Sophia, by Sir William Beechey
Royal Collection
Public domain

In October 1810 her youngest daughter, Princess Amelia, died after many years of illness. It was this event that precipitated the king's final descent into madness.

Princess Amelia by Sir William Beechey
Royal collection
Public domain

With her husband permanently confined at Windsor under his keepers, Charlotte was determined to keep a tight grip on her four remaining daughters (Augusta, Elizabeth, Mary, Sophia). She argued that with the family circumstances so distressing, they had no right to be seen in public enjoying themselves. In the autumn of 1812 she and Princesses Elizabeth and Mary had a major confrontation in which, goaded beyond endurance, the two princesses told their mother exactly what they thought of her. With the support of their brother, now Prince Regent, they won their independence. Charlotte had to accept that the daughters she had thought so dutiful and obedient had turned against her. However, she achieved a sort of reconciliation when Mary married her cousin the duke of Gloucester in 1816 and Elizabeth married Prince Frederick of Hesse-Homburg in 1818. Only Augusta and Sophia never married.

Conclusion

1. Charlotte died in November 1818, by which time she had become a sad relic of a previous age.
2. She had more than fulfilled the requirement of royal brides to be fertile, though her many pregnancies came at great physical and emotional cost.
3. She was a cultured woman, a patron of the arts and learning and of many charities. Fanny Burney found her a considerate, if demanding employer.
4. Her husband's four bouts of insanity wrecked her marriage and perhaps warped her character. She failed in her attempt to keep control of her daughters.