Hiding in Plain View: the Daughters of George III
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Catherine Curzon’s 2020 biography of the six daughters of George III is by far the most accessible of several such biographies written in recent years. In her introduction, Curzon describes the “pleasure” she has had spending time with these six women, and the book is written in a lively and affectionate style which can’t help but bring pleasure to the reader as well.
The question that came to my mind as I was reading, however, was about trade-offs—what am I giving up when I give in to reading a readily understandable and coherent narrative about these sparsely documented women of the eighteenth century? Have the rough edges been smoothed away to the point that the well-formed fiction is obscuring the weirdness that is part of being human, and that must definitely have been part of being a female child of George III?
Curzon can not in any way be accused of hiding the dark side of what is known about these princesses’ lives. She is quite eloquent in invoking the almost gothic horror these women faced on an ongoing basis, surrounding and protecting their mother, Queen Charlotte, from the ravings and frightening behavior of the king as he lapsed many times into periods of mental instability:
They were obliged to remain at Windsor or Kew, and to be tormented by the sound of the king ranting, his hysterical laughter waking them from sleep or ringing through the palace, uncanny in the stillness. (pp 69-70)
Curzon recounts what is recorded about the illegitimate children the princesses most likely did (Sophia) and did not (Elizabeth) have over the years, as well as providing a hearing for rumors of murder and incest in the family, always providing appropriate evidence for the claims, as well as her assessment of how much weight should be given that evidence. So one cannot complain that the biography is somehow white-washed or turned into an excessively fawning account of do-no-wrong royal paragons.
Curzon is also quite open about the fact that there are quite a large number of things we would like to know about the princesses which simply can’t be known, due to lack of surviving evidence. The second daughter, Augusta, for example, may or may not have secretly married a General Brent Spencer in the 1820s, with the full approval of her brother, George IV. But although a letter survives from Augusta to George IV in which she begs him to approve the marriage, there is no evidence to say whether he did approve or whether they did marry, except for the fact that when Spencer was buried, a miniature of Augusta was removed from his neck with the initials “A.S.” on it — could have been Augusta Spencer, but could equally have been Augusta Sophia — her middle name.
Curzon also strikes a very good balance between her own well-researched summaries and quotations from well-chosen excerpts from primary sources, like the letters of the princesses themselves. The Daughters of George III is supported by a hefty set of endnotes as well as a large bibliography of both primary and secondary sources for the reader’s own further research. Curzon is a canny and experienced historian, and she is not going to give us excessively saccharine portrayals of the princesses, or make assertions which are not supported appropriately by the available evidence.
And yet I think my uneasiness with this extremely accessible book is therefore not that it is too positive or too glib, but maybe that it is too determined to be, for lack of a better word, coherent. On one hand, Curzon’s almost novelistic approach allows her to explore ideas which might otherwise be unavailable to the reader—in the words of James Vicars, Curzon is able to “position the eye of a fictional narrator to provide commentary and express insights that would be unavailable to nonfiction biography.” On the other hand, though, it’s possible that Curzon misses an opportunity to convey the sheer weirdness of these women and their lives. It is a comedic commonplace to intone to one’s friends “…but can any one person ever truly KNOW another?” but as with so many comedic commonplaces, there is an underlying truth here we need to consider.
As an admitted history geek, I listen religiously to the BBC History Extra podcast, and I vividly remember an episode in which Sam Willis and James Daybell, authors of the Histories of the Unexpected books, were interviewed about the Tudor period. When asked what they thought was most surprising about the Tudor period, Sam Willis said something that really stuck with me—that despite all the time he had spent studying Tudor society, it is still so fundamentally “alien” to him, and to support this he provided the example that consuming pieces of dead humans was “part and parcel of Tudor medicine” (eating bits of Egyptian mummies, primarily).
After reading this biography, I find myself wanting to say, “Catherine Curzon, where is the cannibalism!?” I wanted a little more outrage that some things can never be known. It had to be a very weird experience to be a daughter of George III, and somehow the weirdness has been erased a little bit, and I think that is distressing.
But at the moment, I think that this objection has to be whatever the opposite is of “damning with faint praise—” I think in the end I have to advocate this book by praising it through weak complaints! Good job, Catherine Curzon.
