Charlotte, Princess Royal: Part 1

A family torn apart. A daughter desperate to escape. An abusive husband with a mysterious past. Not your average Regency romance here…

File Under: Fascinating Royal and Noble Women

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There’s a famous six-word short story often attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” If you think about what those words mean, every interpretation is heartbreaking. But Charlotte, Princess Royal lived those words. This is her story.

Arrested Development

Born in 1766, Princess Charlotte Augusta Matilda was the fourth child and first daughter of King George III of Great Britain and Ireland and his wife, Queen Charlotte. But no one in the family ever called her by her name. They called her Royal, short for “Princess Royal,” the honorary style her proud father bestowed on her when she was born.¹

From day one, George III preferred daughters to sons. When his wife was in labor with her sixth child, one of the doctors told him, “I think, Sir, whoever sees those lovely princes above stairs must be glad to have another.” George snapped back, “…I did not think I could have been angry with you, but I am; and I say, whoever sees that lovely child the Princess Royal above stairs must wish to have the fellow to her.”² The good news for George was he had plenty of chances for more daughters. He and Charlotte had fifteen kids, nine boys and six girls.

What made this family unique in Charlotte’s early years was how normal they were. After the scandalous lives of his Hanoverian ancestors, George was determined to give the country a better example of how a monarch should live. That meant spending quiet nights at home together reading, drawing, putting on plays, or doing handicrafts like needlework.

Her mother ran a very tight ship in terms of discipline and insisted on a quality education for her girls. Charlotte and her sisters learned history, geography, French, German, music, painting, drawing, dancing, and needlework. Charlotte in particular loved history and painting. When her mother hired a new painting tutor who specialized in flowers just for her, young Charlotte wrote, “…I have every advantage and therefore no excuse but my own stupidity if I do not improve.”³

You can already see her discipline and determination emerging.

The subjects she didn’t like were dancing and music. After listening to a concert of Handel’s music, she told her brother, “I think that my dislike for music rather increases.”⁴

Charlotte grew up to be practical and disciplined, but also shy. It nearly paralyzed her in front of large groups, new people, and sometimes, even her own mother.⁵ Part of her longed to go out into society and the world at large, where she felt her rank entitled her to be. She had enormous pride in her family and in her birthright, but at the same time, her sheltered upbringing and her mother’s strict rules limited her social interactions.

In what was both a blessing and a curse, Charlotte’s father was extremely picky when it came to the idea of finding her a husband. When she turned 16, her aunt in Brunswick floated the idea of Charlotte marrying her son. Her father flat-out refused and ignored this snippy comment from his sister in Brunswick: “Your daughters must be very different from all other girls, if they did not feel themselves unfortunate not to be established.”⁶

But his daughters’ feelings were the last thing on George’s mind. He turned down proposals no matter for whom or from whom they arrived. Both of his sisters had been sent out of the country with unhappy arranged marriages, and he was determined to keep that from happening to his daughters.

Later, he wrote, “I cannot deny that I have never wished to see any of them marry: I am happy in their company and do not in the least want a separation.”⁷ He was the king. He was their father. He loved them and he wanted them near him, end of story. But little girls can only stay little girls for so long. Not even a king can stop the march of time. Or can he?

Tales of Ordinary Madness

Not long after his fiftieth birthday, during the week of October 16, 1788, Charlotte’s father began acting strangely. One day, he showed his daughter Elizabeth a rash on his arm. Soon he began skipping meals. Then he walked in wet grass, took off his water-logged boots, and got into his carriage wearing wet stockings. These things were all a little weird, but not overly alarming.

Then, one night, he woke up with piercing, shooting pain in his stomach, side, and back. He had trouble breathing. His legs swelled up and his eyes took on a yellowish cast.⁸ The doctors managed to get these symptoms under control, but something was still wrong with George.

He couldn’t sleep. He was irritable and restless. When he spoke, the words all came out in a rush, as if he couldn’t stop them, until he was completely out of breath. One day, he talked for 19 hours straight.⁹ Another day, he yelled at his doctor for three hours.¹⁰ Sometimes obscenities or state secrets spilled out while he was babbling uncontrollably.¹¹ During dinner one night, he shoved one of his sons against the wall in a moment of anger.¹² Another night, he burst into the queen’s bedroom at 1 a.m. and held a candle to her face, paced the room for thirty minutes, then watched her for an hour, all to make sure she hadn’t left him.¹³ He cradled a pillow in his bed and called it Octavius, the name of a son who had died young.¹⁴ He rolled handkerchiefs, sometimes 40 to 50 a day.¹⁵ He howled like a dog.¹⁶ He sometimes hit his servants.¹⁷ He tried to jump out a window.¹⁸ For weeks and then months on end, George didn’t seem to be in control of his body or his mind.

The attendants and royal doctors were all left scratching their heads. Some referred to it as George’s “delirium.” Others called it an “alienation of mind,” a “seizure upon the brain,” or “mania on a different scale.”¹⁹ All they knew was that George had to be isolated until they either cured him or figured out what was causing his illness. They separated him from his family, except for brief supervised visits.

And there were larger questions looming in the background. Was George’s condition permanent? Did the country need a regent? If so, who would that be? The infighting between political parties was already intense, with one party backing the king and the opposition backing his eldest son. Charlotte’s mother was terrified she might be called on to be regent, which would violate a promise she’d made to George to stay out of politics, no matter what.

But that wasn’t all the queen was afraid of. She was terrified of what her husband might say or do next. He’d already said awful things to her – that the kids were all afraid of her, that he’d never loved her, that he wanted to marry another woman, that she was the mad one.²⁰ He blamed her for the torturous treatments the doctors were meting out to him, even though she had no control over them.

One such treatment the doctors thought might help was seeing his beloved daughters in the garden. So Charlotte and her sisters trooped out into the yard beneath their father’s window. But when they looked up, they saw a man they hardly knew – a pale figure in a nightgown, shouting and frantically banging on the windows as he struggled to open them. His attendants pulled him away, and by the time he was calm enough to reapproach the window and call to them, the princesses were terrified. A witness wrote that “they all seemed more dead than alive when they got into the house.”²¹

And then, just as inexplicably, George recovered. By mid-February of 1789, four months after his first attack, he was able to control his speech and his emotions again.²² But for the rest of his family, the damage had been done. Queen Charlotte’s hair had turned white, she’d lost weight, and the experience had traumatized her for good. She no longer felt happy or safe in her own home and she took out her fear and frustration on her daughters, treating them more like servants or ladies-in-waiting than family members.

Because no one knew what triggered George’s episodes, the whole family was afraid to rock the boat. The priority was always keeping him calm, which meant never discussing potentially upsetting topics – like his daughters leaving home. They lived in an artificial time capsule of a world, frozen forever at the age their father most wished them to be. It was hardest on Charlotte, who was 22 during her father’s first episode.

As the oldest, she should have been first in line for a husband and a household of her own, and now there was just…nothing. When her brother Augustus complained that she didn’t write to him enough, she said, “…our life is so much the same…the history of one day, that of every day…”²³

As the years wore on, Charlotte began to despair. According to her brother, their mother kept her under “constant restraint…just like an infant, but what was worse than all, the violence and caprice of her mother’s temper, which hourly grows worse, to which she is not only obliged to submit, but to be absolutely a slave…”²⁴

Charlotte knew that marriage was the only way out, and if her parents wouldn’t help, she would help herself. At age 25, she suggested she marry the Duke of Bedford, a friend of her brother. Unfortunately, her brother didn’t approve, so it came to nothing.²⁵ Her friend, Mrs. Mary Harcourt, tried to convince the widowed Prince Peter of Oldenburg to visit Britain, hoping he would take the hint that there was a good reason for the trip.²⁶ Charlotte enlisted her brother’s help here, too, but once again, nothing happened.

Every disappointment pushed her dream of having a family of her own further away. Of the king’s court in 1795, one English nobleman said, “This is not a royal court – it is a nunnery.”²⁷ A nunnery Charlotte was determined to escape.

Presumed Innocent

Charlotte’s escape route came from a very unlikely source: her uncle by marriage, Duke Karl of Brunswick.

Karl was married to her Aunt Augusta, George III’s sister. Years earlier, the couple had allowed their 15-year-old daughter Augusta to marry Prince Frederick of Württemberg. A month into the marriage, both partners already wanted out, but their parents ordered them to grin and bear it. Easier said than done for Augusta, since Frederick was emotionally and physically abusive. During their time in Russia, while Frederick served in Catherine the Great’s military, the abuse got so bad that Augusta begged Catherine to protect her.

Catherine obliged, tossing Frederick out of the country. He slunk home in disgrace with the couple’s three children. But Augusta’s death under mysterious circumstances while still in Russia meant that Frederick controlled the narrative about the breakup of their marriage. He blamed it all on her, and the infuriating thing is that her own father, Duke Karl, believed him. Her mother, as we’ll see, saw things differently.

Now, seven years after Augusta’s death, Frederick was on the hunt for a second wife. As heir to the small duchy of Württemberg, a member of the Holy Roman Empire, he wanted a wife who would bring some pomp and prestige to his court. But because there was a strong whiff of disgrace attached to his name, he had no luck.

He turned to his father-in-law, who still treated him like family, and Duke Karl pointed him towards England…and Charlotte.²⁸ Now, no one should have been taking marriage advice from Karl. His own marriage was miserable, Augusta’s had been a garbage fire, and his younger daughter Caroline – married to Charlotte’s oldest brother, the Prince of Wales – would have won the gold medal if disastrous royal marriages were an Olympic sport.

But since beggars can’t be choosers, Frederick trusted his marital future to his father-in-law. Karl asked his wife to write to her brother suggesting the match. This was ironic, since she’d been the one to tell George III what kind of man Frederick was in the first place. After the breakup of her daughter’s marriage, she told her brother, “…one needs a background in philosophy to get used to Germany, and there is nothing so terrible as a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.” She blamed Frederick for making her daughter miserable and said he was “jealous of his shadow.”²⁹

So when George III got this letter from his sister, suggesting Frederick as a groom for his precious oldest daughter, he was “astonished…knowing the brutal and other unpleasant qualities of this Prince, I could not give any encouragement to such a proposal…”³⁰

But Frederick didn’t take no for an answer. He wrote to the king himself, insisting Charlotte was the one for him and that this “illustrious alliance” would “assure the happiness of the rest of his days.”³¹ He enlisted his sister, Catherine the Great’s daughter-in-law, as a character reference.

And at his father-in-law’s suggestion, Frederick also sent his best friend, Count Zeppelin, to London to try to repair his reputation and get the marriage negotiations rolling. It didn’t even matter which sister accepted. He told Zeppelin to “…put an end to this. It would be the devil’s work if one of four princesses did not want to marry and become Duchess of Württemberg, which is really all the same to me…”³²

In London, Count Zeppelin hired a lawyer to help prove Frederick innocent in his first wife’s mysterious death. They did it by perpetrating a full-on character assassination on a woman who wasn’t even alive to defend herself. Even so, it took five months for Zeppelin to convince King George III to even consider the marriage. Frederick wrote a grumpy letter saying that if he’d known the process would require so much “begging and antechambering,” he wouldn’t have bothered.³³ Ironically, George III’s oldest son helped convince him to give Frederick a shot.

The Prince of Wales absolutely hated his wife, Augusta’s sister, and told his father that if the older sister was anything like the younger, maybe Frederick was right about everything and not to blame.³⁴

George III finally gave in on July 15, 1796. He agreed to the marriage, but left his daughter a way out. He wrote that it would be “contrary to his duty to not leave [Charlotte] perfectly free in taking the time to reflect before declaring her feelings.” And since the army of Revolutionary France was wreaking havoc in Western Europe at the time, he wouldn’t allow his daughter to move to Württemberg until it was safe.³⁵

In the end, it would take almost a year for the marriage contract to be finalized, but no matter what happened at home, Charlotte knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel. She began wearing a medallion with her fiancé’s portrait – a visible talisman she could cling to.³⁶ She was finally going to have a husband, a family, and a life of her own.

Bride and Prejudice

Eight months after George III accepted Frederick, the 42-year-old groom made his way to meet his 30-year-old bride in England, arriving on April 10, 1797.³⁷ Charlotte met him five days later, in the presence of her father, her mother, and a handful of her siblings in her mother’s apartments in Buckingham House.³⁸ But, like many times before, her shyness struck in the presence of a new person, and she couldn’t bring herself to answer Frederick’s questions. Her mother had to do it for her. Frederick, who could be charming when he wanted to be, said he hoped this was the last time his presence would cause her such a disturbance.³⁹

The rest of the meeting apparently with off without a hitch. Frederick wrote to his father, “… I have every reason to be very pleased…After the first few moments, the embarrassment almost disappeared and everyone chatted very naturally.”⁴⁰ Charlotte’s sister Elizabeth agreed.

She wrote of Frederick, “My sister is very well pleased with him, and I really think that he appears delighted with her. He has a very handsome countenance, is certainly very large – but very light with it and a most excellent manner.”⁴¹ As for Charlotte, she was happy with what she saw. She said that her groom was “certainly not the best looking, but frees her from the threat of lifelong virginity.”⁴²

Unfortunately, then as now, the royal family provided a never-ending source of gossip for the British press, which had a field day with Charlotte’s engagement. Perhaps surprisingly, the jokes had nothing to do with Charlotte’s age or Frederick’s shady past. Instead, they made fun of their size. The famous caricaturist James Gillray poked fun at both of them in a cartoon called “The Bridal Night,” which was banned in Württemberg.⁴³ Gillray also made sure to reference the £80,000 dowry the British parliament granted Charlotte.⁴⁴

When it came time to design the wedding dress, Charlotte’s mother stepped in. Charlotte had never really cared about clothes or appearance, so the queen picked out an iridescent white silk, which Charlotte insisted on embroidering herself.⁴⁵ It was complete in plenty of time for Charlotte to walk down the aisle on May 18, 1797 in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Palace. She wore her white and silver dress with a diamond coronet and the Russian order of Saint Catherine on a red ribbon, a gift from Frederick’s sister. ⁴⁶ Charlotte’s sister Augusta approved of her outfit, writing, “the Queen was quite in the right, for everybody said she had never looked so well in her life.”⁴⁷ At the wedding, guests saw Charlotte, her mother, her sisters, her father, and her brother Clarence all wipe away tears.⁴⁸ Her emotional father gave her an extra £4,000 and told her to buy herself some pretty clothes.⁴⁹ He also supplemented her dowry with an allowance of £5,000 a year from his own funds.⁵⁰ Frederick’s gift to his bride was a string of 42 pearls.⁵¹

The newlyweds spent the rest of May with her family before heading south for the coast to sail for the Continent. Charlotte said her goodbyes on the night before she left, thinking it would be easier. It wasn’t. No matter how much she wanted a home and family of her own, it was still a heart-wrenching experience to leave her father and siblings behind. When it came time for her father to say goodnight, Charlotte fainted in his arms.⁵²

Charlotte and her new husband left England on June 2, 1797.⁵³ She would never see her beloved father again. Her mother breathed a sigh of relief to see the last of her new son-in-law. The queen told her brother that Frederick “…has a vanity which made him detested in England. He did not know how to govern his bad humour in the presence of the women of my daughter’s suite…he displeased us totally and his departure was not regretted.”⁵⁴

It’s a good thing Charlotte didn’t know what her mother had said. She didn’t need anything else to worry about. Stormy waves tossed her ship to and fro on her way to her new home, leading the press to predict it symbolized disaster ahead.⁵⁵

That’s where I’ll pause the story and end part 1. In part 2, we’ll find out what happened when Charlotte began her new life in Württemberg – and what Napoleon remembered about her many years later, when he was in exile on St. Helena. Did Frederick mend his ways? Did she ever see her brothers and sisters again? We’ll find out soon!

The End

About the Author

Jenni Wiltz

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Hi, I’m Jenni Wiltz, an award-winning writer obsessed with little-known royal women. With three degrees, including a master’s in English, I’m using my love of research and storytelling to bring you the stories of fascinating royal women and their jewels. I have two decades of experience in marketing and writing, with awards for my short fiction, romantic suspense, and creative non-fiction.

Notes for Charlotte, Princess Royal, Part 1

1. Fraser, 8
2. Roberts, 187
3. Fraser, 101
4. Fraser, 101
5. Fraser, 42
6. Hadlow, 344
7. Hadlow, 512
8. Hadlow, 357-8; Fraser, 110-1
9. Fraser, 119; Roberts, 510
10. Hadlow, 358
11. Fraser, 113, 119
12. Hadlow, 364
13. Fraser, 115; Hadlow, 365; Roberts, 507
14. Hadlow, 395
15. Roberts, 517
16. Fraser, 117
17. Roberts, 520, 523
18. Fraser 119
19. Fraser, 114, 115, 118
20. Fraser, 131; Hadlow, 399-400
21. Fraser, 120; Hadlow, 380; Roberts, 511
22. Fraser, 124
23. Fraser, 144
24. Hadlow, 437; Fraser, 141
25. Hadlow, 438-9
26. Hadlow, 463
27. Thomsen, 20
28. Sauer, 139
29. GEO/MAIN/52135-52136 Duchess of Brunswick to George III, 1 May 1787; Royal Archives, Windsor
30. Fraser, 160; Hadlow, 464-5
31. RA GEO/MAIN/51398-51399 Prince Frederick of Württemberg to George III, 12 December 1795; Royal Archives, Windsor
32. Sauer, 141
33. Sauer, 142
34. Thomsen, 17
35. GEO/MAIN/51401; Royal Archives, Windsor
36. Hadlow, 466
37. Fraser, 163
38. Fraser, 163; Hampshire Chronicle, 22 April 1797, p 2
39. Fraser, 163; Hadlow, 466
40. Sauer, 144
41. Fraser, 163
42. Thomsen, 19
43. Thomsen, 10
44. Thomsen, 23; Sauer, 148; Fraser, 164; Hereford Journal, 10 May 1797, p 2
45. Thomsen, 24; Fraser, 164; Hadlow 467
46. Thomsen, 24
47. Fraser, 164
48. Roberts, 563
49. Thomsen, 26
50. Thomsen, 23; Sauer, 148
51. Thomsen, 26
52. Fraser, 164
53. Thomsen, 26
54. Fraser, 165
55. Thomsen, 26

Sources for Charlotte, Princess Royal Parts 1 & 2

These are all my sources for both parts of this story. Any URL after the listing for a book is a free, public domain copy you can read online. Yay! Any link in the title of a book is my Amazon affiliate link.

Georgian Papers Online – Royal Archives, Windsor
http://gpp.rct.uk
Accessed February 27, 2025

GEO/MAIN/51401 George III to Prince Frederick of Württemberg, July 15, 1796.

GEO/MAIN/52135-52136 Duchess of Brunswick to George III, May 1, 1787.

RA GEO/MAIN/51398-51399 Prince Frederick of Württemberg to George III, December 12, 1795.

Books

Catherine de Westphalie. Correspondance inédite de la reine Catherine de Westphalie née princesse de Wurtemberg. Ed. Baron A. du Casse. Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1893. (URL)

Fraser, Flora. Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

George III. The Later Correspondence of George III, Vol III: January 1798 to December 1801. Ed. A. Aspinall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Hadlow, Janice. A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of King George III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014.

O’Meara, Barry. Napoleon in Exile; or A Voice from St. Helena. Vol II. London: Jones & Co., 1827.

Roberts, Andrew. The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. New York: Penguin Books, 2021.

Sauer, Paul. Der schwäbische Zar: Frederick – Württembergs erster König. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1984.

Soroka, Marina and Charles A. Ruud. Becoming a Romanov: Grand Duchess Elena of Russia and her World (1807-1873). New York: Routledge, 2015.

Thomsen, Sabine. Die württembergischen Königinnen: Charlotte Mathilde, Katharina, Pauline, Olga, Charlotte – ihr Leben und Wirken. Tübingen: Silberburg-Verlag, 2014.

Newspapers

Hampshire Chronicle
Hereford Journal
The Morning Chronicle
The Morning Post

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Additional Credits

• All images public domain via Wikimedia Commons unless otherwise noted in the caption.
• Header image: Windsor Castle painting by J.R. Allen, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
• Background music in audio post licensed via Envato Elements.

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