The Princess Profession
George III and his children on the terrace of Windsor Castle. Credit https://www.stgeorges-windsor.org/image_of_the_month/the-legacy-of-king-george-iii/
US Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor has recently and famously advised a very cute Muppet named Abby that “pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career.” And one cannot help but feel this is sound advice to the modern young woman, who could be training instead to be a lawyer, a doctor, a stay-at-home mom, or an orthodontist.
But what could we learn from taking seriously the concept that someone might treat being a princess as a career? Could we consider it to be a career? And if so, would we consider it to be fun?
A few definitions are in order. For most of us, “having a career” is something we define as what someone does, not who they are — a career is what happens when a person does specialized work which requires some training.
And what do we mean by “princess?” Notice that this is a “princess” little girls want to be, not “queen consort,” and definitely not “empress.” Very few aspirations to be an empress on view among the tiara’d throng attending the average performance of “Sleeping Beauty on Ice.”
Justice Sotomayor seems to be specifically aware that when a little girl expresses the desire to be a “princess,” she is shooting pretty low on the royal totem pole—a princess gets to be royal, but she doesn’t really have to run anything, except possibly sponsoring a few charities. This is what leads sites like WikiHow to explain that one can behave “like a princess” by “standing tall” and “trying to be a better human being.”
So a “princess” is someone we think of as a person who wears beautiful gowns and has fun precisely because she does not have a career. Very good, we can solidly agree with Justice Sotomayor that this life plan will not pay anyone’s bills.
This is why I think it is funny, or at least ironic, that over most of history, or at least in the part of the eighteenth century I actually know about, “being a princess” has involved as much grit, special training and equipment as “being a skin diver” or “being an astronaut” would today, and that the training has been very directed towards building what we would now call “vocational capabilities.” Like an astronaut or skin diver, the eighteenth century princess had to sacrifice for years, wear specialized and uncomfortable clothing, and master an intricate list of skills and procedures. And in the more extreme cases, a princess had it worse than our modern cosmonauts and argonauts, since the princess who failed to master her craft could suffer not just public humiliation and major physical discomfort but might also, as a side effect, destabilize entire countries and continents.
Let’s start with the equipment. Women’s court dress, as opposed to everyday fashion in the Regency period, was virtually impossible to wear. And that’s what made it specifically “royal.” Court dress across Europe in the late eighteenth century involved wide hoop skirts, heavy fabrics, and mandatory ostrich feathers for the hair. Court dress also required a number of elaborate under garments which required assistance to put on, along with the need to acquire and keep track of a rotating collection of jewels to be worn on successive outings. One also, needless to say, needed to get one’s hair powdered appropriately.
In Britain, Queen Charlotte mandated this pattern of court dress much longer than some of her European peers did — in Britain, these basic elements of court dress did not change between 1764 and her retirement from hostess duties at court around 1810.
photo credit Jane Austen’s World
British princesses did not have to wear court dress constantly. Unlike other aristocratic ladies, however, who could pick and choose their occasions, princesses were obliged to wear these clothes every Thursday and Sunday evening, at an event called the “Drawing Room,” which took place at St. James Palace in London, during every London season (roughly January through June). “Drawing Rooms” were occasions where all attendees chiefly spent their time scrutinizing the behavior and dress of all the other attendees, and then some of them wrote about it the next day in the London papers.
As a terrifying aside, Tsarevna Maria Feoderovna, wife of Russian Emperor Paul I, was legendary at her court for because she did choose to wear court dress all day, every day, and she required all of her ladies in waiting to do the same. Consider what that would have been like!
A quiet evening at home with Empress Maria Feodorovna. Photo credit Wikipedia.
We have also in modern times lost sight of the actual terror we ourselves might feel if we were required at age fourteen to dance a minuet or play the harpsichord solo in front of the richest and most powerful people in our country. Picture yourself at fourteen performing a highly complex and choreographed gymnastics routine in front of Bill Gates and Elon Musk, both of whom would be crystal clear from their own gymnastics experience on the difference between a Jurkowska-Kowalska on beam or a Produnova vault.
I had trouble at that age, personally, creating a 30-second mat routine involving “forward” and “backward” rolls, and performing it for my junior high school peers. Each of the six daughters of George III, however, was expected to kick off her debut ball by dancing a widely observed minuet in front of the whole court, partnered by one of her older brothers. I don’t have an older brother, but I imagine if I did, he would not necessarily be excited about partnering me in a forward roll in front of company.
The “Z” figure of the minuet, illustrated. Photo credit Dance in History.
Even if we dismiss these actual details of the princess career as “oh boo hoo” first-world problems, we need to think very much in terms of a profession when we consider how princesses were educated, and what they did with their educations as they grew up.
While British eighteenth-century princesses were indeed rigidly required to “be kind” and “improve their grammar,” as indicated by WikiHow, they also worked hard to gain other competencies. Princesses were expected to be multi-lingual, with a special emphasis on fluency in French, the main shared aristocratic language across Europe (even though most of the marriage market consisted of intermarrying German princes and princesses). They were expected to know the orders of precedence — who should escort whom into dinner, and who should sit where, and when it is allowed to sit down, and when one must definitely stand. Queen Charlotte began drilling her daughters on European history and literature from quite a young age, and even included educational innovations, like illustrated “history cards,” into the lessons, to ensure the princesses could properly interact with their peers across the continent.
What’s so hard about getting an excellent liberal arts education, you ask? Well, all of this training was in the service of a specific economic and political goal, which was to give the princess all the skills she would need in order to eventually run a kingdom or principality of her own, as a wife or even a consort. And precisely because they were princesses, and not empresses or queen consorts, these highly trained professionals could do what they were trained to do only by getting married first. Granted, for better or for worse, most princesses did not have to find or attract a husband on her own. In fact, the princess typically did not even get to choose her husband at all, although she might get a veto. But in all cases, princesses had to ensure that once the right husband was picked, he would not resist negotiations.
Princesses were born into the most competitive possible marriage market.
The market, in turn, was not solely competitive because everyone in it was rich. The fundamental driving force behind eighteenth century royal treaties was a desire we can sympathize with even today, which was to reduce frictions that might prevent a peaceful transfer of power between successive government administrations.
In most European monarchies of the time, orderly hand-offs of power occurred through the long accepted practice of having one monarch die, and that monarch’s heir take over. The best practice to avoid complications during this peaceful transition was for the royal heir to have been born to two monarchs who were married to each other at roughly the time of conception, and for one of those monarchs to be a princess with a well documented pedigree and a public record showing no extracurricular reproductive activities. Suddenly one begins to see a pragmatic benefit to structuring a career where one is constantly dressing, having one’s hair powdered, or learning minuets.
Another extremely important detail about this peaceful transition of power concept is that in the case that the heir was not yet “of age” upon the death of the previous monarch, it was typically the heir’s mother—our princess!!—who would be named “regent,” and who would run the country on behalf of the heir until he or she was ready to take the reigns at 14, or 21, or whatever the law said.
A properly prepared professional princess needed, in short, enough training to allow her to govern an entire country solo for several decades, or even longer. Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, for example, inherited the Habsburg Empire in her own right from her father, but once she bore a son, she was technically demoted to serving as his regent. This did not stop her from ruling as an absolute monarch for forty years while brushing off her son’s opinions.
Flavors varied across Europe in terms of how the inheritance process would work — in Poland and Lithuania, a ruler would be chosen out of a pool of appropriate candidates from the right families, for example, to avoid the problem of the “idiot oldest son” which could result from the intense intermarrying among monarchs. In France, on the other hand, the heir always had to be the eldest male in the line of succession, with no women allowed to inherit outright. But regardless of local inheritance variance across Europe, the bloodline and behavior of the heirs’ mothers had to be unimpeachable.
A full analysis of the causes and results of the British Glorious Revolution of 1688 might be beyond the scope of even this one long blog post, so suffice it to say that in Britain, George III and Charlotte, even though they had a male heir and six living male “spares,” erred on the side of caution in choosing consorts for their children by insisting that all fourteen of them — prince and princess alike — had to choose not only a royal spouse, but a Protestant one, and one who met with George III’s written approval, in the form of an actual signed treaty. George, in fact, authored and enforced a law called the “Royal Marriages Act,” and used his lack of prior written approval to literally annul the marriages of one of his brothers and one of his sons who had gone through actual witnessed ceremonies conducted by Church of England clerics. Both marriages were to non-Catholic aristocrats, not nameless commoners, but they did not meet his standard.
George III and Charlotte did not just think it would be nice if their daughters would marry a Protestant prince — they required it.
And this is where we would not be overstepping when we say that excessive regulation impeded the career productivity of five out of six daughters of George III. George and Charlotte did not stop with requiring a Protestant and royal spouse who they personally hand-vetted—they also required that the daughters be married in birth order. These parents rejected all offers for the younger daughters until the older ones were settled. Then George III began to have debilitating periods of mental instability, and when war broke out in Europe, the parents ran out of time.
In 1797, George III approved the marriage of his oldest daughter, Charlotte, Princess Royal (then age 31!), and after that, all approvals stopped until his death in 1820. The other five daughters, Amelia, Mary, Sophia, Elizabeth, and Augusta, were doomed to be princesses indefinitely, but not to be allowed to professionally execute what they had been trained to do as their standard princess career.
It is no wonder they referred to the castles they lived in at Windsor and in London as “the nunnery,” although of course I would be quick to point out to them that “being a nun” is a legitimate career choice for some people. Another post entirely, though.
Princess Sophia contemplates the unmarried life. Photo credit Rebecca Star Brown.
Before you get horribly depressed about the princesses’ stunted career growth, let me hasten to assure you that the five princesses were very ingenious about how they worked around their enforced spinsterhood, and several of them got married later in life—more on that topic in yet another blog post!
To return to our initial question, however, which was “could we consider ‘being a princess’ as a profession, and if so, would we think it was ‘fun?’” My answer would be that during the realm of George III, the irony is that being a princess was not fun, and it was not fun, precisely because it was a profession.
Dictionary.com defines “career” as an occupation or profession, especially one requiring special training, followed as one's lifework.
When we look at the lives of Augusta, Elizabeth, Sophia, Mary, and Amelia, we have to admit that we see a lot of effort and training, and then a long deferment at best, before each princess was able to perform in the professional way for which she had been prepared.
One final note—when I was researching this post I was reminded that princessing is still a profession in the twenty-first century, although some of the concepts have changed. So if you are interested, you can still plot out a career strategy around becoming and remaining a princess, up until the point where you might optionally become a queen or queen consort. The web site What would Kate Do lays out a completely not tongue-in-cheek strategy for planning a princess career, and putting that plan into action.
You can read more about the British princesses related to George III in Flora Fraser’s exceptional book Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, (2006), or in the more recent, but lighter weight, The Daughters of George III: Sisters and Princesses, by Catherine Curzon (2020)
