A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings

by Stella Tillyard

The young George III was a poignant figure, humdrum on the surface yet turbulent beneath: hiding his own passions, he tried hard to be a father to his siblings and his nation. This intimate, fast-moving book tells their intertwined stories. His sisters were doomed to marry foreign princes and leave home forever; his brothers had no role and too much time on their hands - a recipe for disaster.

At the heart of Tillyard's story is Caroline Mathilde, who married the mad Christian of Denmark in her teens, but fell in love with the royal doctor Struensee: a terrible fate awaited them, despite George's agonized negotiations. At the same time he faced his tumultuous American colonies. And at every step a feverish press pounced on the gossip, fostering a new national passion - a heated mix of celebrity and sex.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Royalty, 18th Century, British Literature, Biography Memoir

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Stella Tillyard is a British novelist and historian. She was educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her bestselling book Aristocrats was made into a miniseries for BBC1/Masterpiece Theatre, and sold to over twenty countries. Winner of the Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Longman-History Today Prize, and the Fawcett Prize, Tillyard has taught at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, London. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her latest novel is Call Upon the Water (published in the UK under the title The Great Level).

Reviews

[Jeanette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a worthy read to grasp the change in monarchy context. In dozens of ways it was a time of great flux. The change was not only in the monarch's conceptions of themselves, but where the moral, economic, law authority began or ended. And if the role in nation was on a par to family or even personal choice human.

Tillyard does an excellent job in research. The Introduction is one of the best for this type of copy I've ever read.

Why I read it was because I am more than average interested in how different European or Asian monarchs were often so attitude or eyes of observation colored nearly completely by their childhoods. Were they in isolation (like Victoria) or were they set apart from even their birth families (too many to list) or were they set into much reduced households of 4 or 5 or 8 siblings (happened just like this George III quite a bit too).

When the son dies before the father, and the grandson or granddaughter reign from youth- the outcomes are so very much altered by the early years living arrangements and/or the ties fact of residing WITH or closely adjacent to a living mother (not always Queen either, in this case the Princess of Wales only). And also being surrounded by numerous siblings.

George III was absolutely a product of all of his early years. Read the book. He thought himself the authority to his sister and her outcomes (family duty widened) as well. This is the story of the youngest sister and her attempt as Queen of Denmark to change societal rules/outlook and individuality as humane. One of the first quirks of humanist as opposed to strict moral codes.

This will not be a book for everyone. But for me it was a tremendous window into the making of a man who lost North American colonies and enabled the Revolution to succeed. His view was limited by the right/wrong scales he held. Narrow in some ways, but encompassing his own place and family more than most monarchs of the period.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This is a very interesting historical biography, though weirdly conceived. The subtitle should be read not as a description of George III’s siblings but a qualification on who the book is about, and it's not George III, despite the cover image. Of the nine siblings, the youngest, Caroline Matilda, gets more than half of this book, and for good reason. Married at age 15 to the young King of Denmark, whose mental health was deteriorating rapidly, she embarked on an increasingly blatant affair with her husband’s doctor, Johann Struensee, and the pair grabbed the opportunity to take over the government of Denmark, dismiss all the old guard, and institute various Enlightenment reforms. Then within a couple of years everything came crashing down.

So, that’s a wild and fascinating story, and if her life had been a little longer maybe the whole book would have been about Caroline Matilda. As is the author fills out the rest of the book with the, by comparison, run-of-the-mill scandals of three of her brothers, Edward, William, and Henry, who being wealthy and privileged young men with no responsibilities, partied a lot and had love affairs and got secretly married. I think even Tillyard was a bit bored with them, especially the latter two, because her writing about their shenanigans tends to focus more on the women in their lives – who come across as more interesting, maybe because they had more to lose or maybe because Tillyard just finds women’s history more interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s entertaining to read about royal princes running about in disguise and being mistaken for highwaymen, but the brothers’ sections boil down to 18th century celebrity gossip, without larger import.

In the Introduction, Tillyard offers an enticing rationale for her choice of subject: “Biography . . . rarely dwells for very long on brothers and sisters and the importance they can have in one another’s lives. Perhaps because I am from a large family myself, my work has tended to go the other way, to be horizontal, seeking in the tangled web of brotherly and sisterly relations other clues to what makes us who we are.” But in focusing only on the scandalous siblings, I don’t think she quite lives up to that promise. George III is here for the role he plays in his younger siblings’ lives, but it’s in no way a biography of him; the three siblings who died between the ages of 15 and 20 get barely a mention; and Augusta, the eldest, who survived but was not scandalous, rarely appears. And there's no particular indication that the playboy brothers influenced Caroline Matilda or vice versa; these segments seem totally separate.

But it’s an interesting book nonetheless; Tillyard is a strong writer and storyteller, bringing the scenes of history to life, and seems to have done her research well. It felt a little dense – which may be as much an issue of typesetting as writing – and took longer to read than I’d have estimated from the page count, but for Caroline Matilda’s story in particular it is worth the read.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the epic tale of the children of Prince Frederick, the unhappy, unfairly ignored Prince of Wales, especially George III, Prince Edward, Prince William, Prince Henry, and their beautiful, tragic sister Caroline Matilda. Tillyard's working narrative is that George III saw everything he did in terms of family relationships- including his relationship to his subjects, particularly the American colonists, and had no mental ability to care about anything beyond the relationships of familial loyalty and duty, and that due to him being tried so many times by his rebellious, undutiful, insane siblings, you can't really blame him if he finally lost it when his "children" in the colonies rebelled as well. While I don't believe that the fact that he thought of his rebellious colonists as members of his family and treated them accordingly was adequately proved (she seemed to run out of steam by the time the book actually got to the period of the American Revolution- though with the epic story she had unfolded earlier I can't really blame her), I do believe that it was shown that if this relationship /was/ proved you could certainly see how he would be at the limit of his patience because indeed, his siblings were rather a handful at times. I do think that George III made it harder on himself by being such a stuck up, stiff rumped prig, though.

While each of the above four siblings puts him through some perceived humiliation- Prince William and Prince Henry married "unsuitable" women without his permission (with Prince Henry putting the Crown through a very expensive divorce trial for one of his mistresses before that), Prince Edward ran with a very disreputable crowd and was often scornful of his somewhat slow, ponderous older brother- it was Caroline Matilda's story that took up the majority of the pages, and with good reason. She was married off by the age of 16 to her cousin, the questionably sane King Christian of Denmark, and the ensuing tale is one fraught with all extremes of emotion, and is gripping from start to finish. I got very involved with the story of this woman- who ended up, by the way, divorced and divested of power, in exile in Hanoverian lands by the end of her life. I was also very involved with the story of her lover, a reformer named Johann Struensee who ruled the country for several years, in control of both the king and the queen, and his attempts to break the absolute monarchy and drag the country kicking and screaming into the Enlightenment.

The only things I think that could have made this book better are: I wish that she had broken up the book into fewer chapters. There are only seven in all, and it sometimes seems exhausting reading it, when it wouldn't seem that way if she broke up the tales into more episodic stories. This didn't read as fast as Aristocrats did. Also, I wish that she hadn't made quite so many assumptions for the sake of turning a story the way she wanted it to go. There are endless sentences of Tillyard saying, "so and so must have felt x thing..." when there is no evidence for that statement but what feeling the reader might impose upon this historical character. It didn't bother me at first, but after awhile, it does make one doubt her narrative a little bit. It doesn't make it a less gripping story, it just makes it seem to have a bit less veracity. Which is a shame from a book which is otherwise so incredibly well researched.

[Wealhtheow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book is ostensibly about King George III of England and his numerous siblings, it is mostly about George and his youngest sister, Caroline Matilda. Tillyard follows their claustrophobic childhood and uneven educations, until they were separated when George took the throne and Caroline Matilda was married to the unstable King of Denmark, Christian VII. Teenaged Queen Caroline Mathilde tried to be a good queen, but her husband was going mad. She fell in love with Struensee, his idealistic doctor, and together the lovebirds ruled the King and the government. In the king's name they pushed through numerous reforms, all very good and necessary laws but very unpopular. Eventually, the king's step-mother and step-brother managed a coup, separating the queen and the doctor and ousting the humanist government. Caroline Mathilde physically struggled against her captors, but to no avail. She was locked in Kronberg slot (aka Elsinore) for months while the conspirators attempted to find proof of her adultery with Struensee. Struensee, like a dolt, confessed to everything and then, going against a lifetime of proud atheism, swore that he believed in Jesus Christ. He was brutally executed soon after. George III almost started a war to get his sister back to England, but after only a few tense months her divorce went through. The new Danish government shipped her away as quickly as they could, afraid of her influence over the king. Caroline Mathilde spent her remaining years with a large allowance from George III and no freedom. Her mail was opened, her servants chosen for her, and her visitors carefully vetted. After three years of this life, and a few desultary attempts to regain her throne, she died abruptly of scarlet fever.

Caroline's brothers, Edward, William and Henry, lead useless lives. Edward died young. William married a woman rather older, whose thwarted ambition made him miserable. Henry and his wife were rackety and seemingly happy, but certainly nothing but a drain on the treasury. And their oldest living brother, George III, was a priggish, rule-bound man who seems to have had little political insight and even less empathy. I didn't like any of the siblings, although I did pity them.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even knowing that I won't be able to read this book in the next few days (I'll be away for a conference), I decided to start it in any case.

In the meantime, some historical background: George III of the United Kingdom

Page 28:
Caroline Mathilde was to become a formidable mixture of Plantagenet passion and her grandmother's wilfulness, and she would bring her brother King George more heartache than any other of his siblings.

Page 116:
Diderot, himself the son of a doctor, repeatedly insisted, more modestly, that health and happiness always went hand in hand, and made one of the three protagonists of his secretly circulated fable Le Reve d'Alembert , written in 1769, the doctor Bordeau. Doctors, Didetot implied, could be standard bearers for thought and experiment about the nature of man and the society that man moved in and created.

Page 146:
Struensee always had a clutch of friends to advice and support him, mainly fellow German-speakers from the south. But in its swiftness and completeness his was a rise to power unparalleled anywhere in Europe. The malady of the King (Christian) and the love of the Queen (Caroline Mathilde) had placed a nation in his hands.

[Jane Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good idea, but in the execution it becomes unsatisfactory. Perhaps Tillyard originally wanted to write just about Caroline Mathilde but decided to include her three brothers; and why so little about Augusta? In the separate stories we lose the sense of chronology.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

George III was about as successful a father to his own breed of scandalous children as he was a surrogate father to his siblings and a symbolic father to the American colonists, all of whom ended up rebelling against his attempts to rule.  The author does not draw the obvious conclusions that one might think from this fact, which helps make this book a little less enjoyable and insightful than it would otherwise be.  As someone with a strong interest in the history of the late 18th century, this book does provide a look at some Hanoverians that I would otherwise not know much about and for that information the book deserves praise.  Taking advantage of the ability to research in in Denmark, the author has done a good job at putting together a story that would otherwise be difficult to tell in an accessible middlebrow format because none of the individual threads of this book is enough for an entire book but together they provide evidence that George III was certainly the most restrained and proper of his immediate family, and also demonstrates how his decency and restraint earned him a great deal of sympathy from the English people in the face of his own personal madness and the revolutionary madness of his times.

This particular book is about 300 pages and it covers in generally chronological fashion the scandalous lives and behavior of George III's siblings.  In seven chapters the author covers the period from when the Prince of Wales Frederick Louis died in 1751 (1), to the general lack of sorrow with his parents, to the period after the American Revolution when George III eventually recognized the independence of the US and was able to deal suavely with future president John Adams.  Between those two points the author manages to discuss the efforts of Augusta and her siblings to obtain money and freedom (2) and also deals with the affair between Queen Caroline Mathilde and her doctor while her Danish royal husband dealt with periodic episodes of mania (3).  After that the author discusses the affairs of the Duke of Cumberland, one of which ended him in legal trouble (4), as well as the fate in exile of the divorced Caroline Mathilde after her lover was brutally executed after a coup (5). The author also discusses the efforts by an English adventurer to restore Caroline to the throne of Denmark before her early death from Scarlet Fever (6) as well as the misadventures of a woman secretly married to Prince William from the Walpole family (7).

It appears that at least some of the intention of the author in writing this book was to induce the reader to feel compassion for George III for all the stress his family put him through.  Yet speaking from at least some experience I have seen in my own life that younger siblings often resent the sort of moral example that an older sibling tries to urge on them.  It worked no better for him than it has for most restrained and proper elder siblings.  Indeed, the fact that George III thought he could exercise authority over his siblings does help demonstrate why it is that he was such a failure when it came to dealing with egalitarian Americans who resented his efforts as much as his actual family did.  Indeed, that itself is a subject that the author would have been wise to reflect on, how it is that respect for equality is a requirement for healthy relationships in either families or families of nations, and that its absence can lead to a great deal of rebellion and hostility, whatever power someone else has.  We may not always appreciate others trying to turn their official and unofficial power into bullying and oppression, and the results of such attempts are unlikely to be pleasant for anyone involved.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book that isn't really about King George III but is instead the story of the relationship between George III's sister Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark and the physician Johann Struensee and how they attempted to pioneer a new way of living and reform Denmark's government before they were overthrown in a coup. Caroline Matilda's story is interspersed with chapters about two of her brothers marrying commoners, circumstances that inspired George III to develop the Royal Marriages Act, but the different relationships appear to have had little connection with one another aside from upsetting George III and attracting press coverage in the United Kingdom. The section at the end about George III and the American Revolution is rushed and seems to belong to another book. A good read that doesn't quite match its title and book description.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

No lack of scandal in George III’s life

[Misty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read, laden with detail, one of those history books that reads like a novel. Tillyard's descriptive powers drew me in immediately. The book as a whole dispenses with any real confrontation with the politics of the time and instead focuses on the personalities and domestic concerns of its chief characters, detailing their love affairs, peccadillos, travels, and yearnings.

Tillyard's conception of George III as a fatherly patriarch who felt obliged to keep his family and his subjects under his benevolent control is the anchor of the book, but it also inscribes a circle around the character of George III that doesn't allow for much development. Indeed, though he is the linchpin, his character is the least developed. After establishing the birth of the Hanoverian dynasty in England, the book spends time on GIII's father Frederick, the Prince of Wales who doesn't outlive his father, George II, and then devotes more of GIII's young adulthood to Earl Bute. He, from what I can gather, was a controversial figure, and GIII's adoration of him is clear; the queen mother's reliance on him as well apparently caused great resentment and controversy, though I couldn't tell you how that expressed itself. Political motivations and machinations, as I said, aren't to Tillyard's interest, which removes what might be some essential context to the book and reduces the lives of royals solely to domestic concerns--never mind that, by her own argument, royals were receiving increasing scrutiny, and it might be interesting to contemplate just how much the celebrity of the monarch and his family translated to the broader social sphere.

But, the peccadillos. Prince Edward, Duke of York, skips around being a charming playboy until an untimely end in Monaco. Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland's scandalous affair with Lady Grosvenor and the sensational trial for "criminal conversation" is rehashed in glorious detail, down to retelling the various costumes he devised for meeting Lady Grosvenor at wayside inns as they dallied their way up and down England. Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, is nearly a yawn next to this; after gaining the King's eternal resentment for marrying Maria, Lady Waldegrave, he goes on to abandon his embittered wife for a younger, prettier mistress. Old story.

The real fun of the book, and the story that takes up the most space, is the amazing, tragic life of Caroline Mathilde, GIII's littlest sister and the quondam Queen of Denmark. I won't go into the whole of it here, as it is not easy to summarize; the highlights include (spoiler alert!) a "mad" or incapable husband, a lively lover, apparently some persistent dislike of court formality and pedantry, imprisonment, divorce, exile, and tragic early death. Tillyard is clearly taken by the queen's story, which could in itself occupy an entire book (and maybe ought to have); the author went so far as to learn Danish so she could do the research herself.

At any rate, stories are lively, and Tillyard tells them well. On the whole there's really not a cohesive narrative about the long and eventful reign of George III, how the monarchy changed during and because of him, what effect his scandalous siblings might have had on celebrity culture and the like, or really an overall narrative about the dynamics of this family and how that communicated itself to the rest of the realm. The book, rather, is a fascinating collection of vivid detail and engaging descriptions that tell all-too-human stories of love and betrayal, yearning and loss, thwarted desires and defeated dreams. But in regal dress, so somehow better, and more glamorous, than the version the rest of us ordinary commoners get of same.

[Andrew Niederhauser · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this book intrigued me. Learning about those adjacent to power during one of the post pivotal reigns of a British monarch seemed fascinating and original. What was produced was certainly original, but I must say far from fascinating.

Of the siblings of George III, only three seem to merit the authors full attention. While those sections are certainly full explored, his remains brothers and sisters are given short shrift. Caroline Mathilde gets plenty of coverage, and it feels as though this is primarily her biography. The absurd amount of detail of those surrounding her court is distracting and wholly unnecessary. Which is all well and good, but is not what I signed on for.

Promising a glimpse into the psyche of George III, the author does little more than restate her thesis repetitively. His later life and his relations to his siblings and their spouses is haphazard at best, providing very little insight.

The lack of footnotes or endnotes is ridiculous. Considering the obscene amount of mostly unnecessary quotations, the lack of notation is absurd. While the narrative style allows one to easily engage with the material, the work comes across as several books combined into one with no central thread running through it. A collection of essays that have been jammed together and sloppily edited is how I would describe this work. Not to mention the literary asides and flourishes the author frequently indulges in, while certainly setting a scene, belongs more fluidly in a work of historical fiction than any type of nonfiction. While the author shows promise, I would confine her talents to a less scholarly field, or at the very least acquaint her with the American Historical Review and the Chicago Manual of Style.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I vaguely remember reading a book like this...but if it's not on goodreads, it didn't happen.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. It is like a recipe in which you like all the ingredients, but you're not all that fond of the dish once it's prepared. There is absolutely no reason for me not to love this book and wax poetic in my glowing review of its undeniable wonderfulness.

Except that I didn't like it that much.

I've read this writer before, and enjoyed her. I like this time period. I find the story of Caroline Mathilde to be fascinating. I think George III's puritanical devotion to the idea of family and his own moral superiority to be one of the most interesting aspects of his reign (and it's failure to affect his siblings or children in a positive direction almost laughable).

I just found myself...well...bored.

It wasn't for lack of detail (there was tons). It wasn't for too much detail (though it did seem like that at times).

Perhaps there was a lack of coherency. I think there were quite a few stories jammed into this one book. And Tillyard, in her attempt to cover all of them, ended up skipping narratives and going towards facts. It dried out some of the excitement in the book.

This book could have been 100 pages longer and seemed 50 pages shorter.

So at the end, I think you should read this book. I just don't think I should have read it (possibly again).

[GoldGato · Rating 3 out of 5]

George III comes across as a middle-class citizen in this book, which echoes history's take on him. His siblings were anything but normal, which caused the family-oriented George some major headaches. Who knows, perhaps it contributed to his later madness. If he lived today, the press would tear him apart for his family hiccups. In fact, George comes across as a decent man who preferred the average Brit over his Germanic-speaking parents and cousins. This is well-written and keeps the reader involved with George and his history.

Book Season = Summer

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, but no more than that. The biggest thing I learned was WHY Friedrich/Frederick was so distant from his parents, the eventual King George II and wife Augusta.

When Elector Georg I succeeded to the British throne as George I, Friedrich was 7, born in 1707. But, presumably because he had the official title of Prince of Wales, rather than remain in Hanover as some sort of regent, George II and Augusta went to London with their parents.

But left 7-year-old Friedrich in Hanover, to be raised by court officials, I presume. (Tillyard doesn't really go into this.)

He doesn't see his regularly for 13 years, and apparently his mother not at all during that time, as I think only George, not Augusta, came over from London. Meanwhile, they'd had a second son, who George focused on by him being in front of him, and Augusta doted on, in part due to "pliability," I think. Then comes 1727, George I's death and Frederich now Prince of Wales. This then became tied up with Frederick, to call him by English name, as his dad had done, pitched in with opposition politics.

But, Frederick wasn't George's sibling, he was his father.

Half this book, as other 3-star reviews note, was about George's youngest sister, Caroline Matilda, eventual queen of Denmark. Perhaps scandalous, but with a husband with some mix of schizophrenia and mania, can you blame her?

George's two brothers who lived a reasonable adulthood? Moderately scandalous, yes. But, like his sister, trapped by George's sense of propriety and priggishness.

George's oldest sister, eventual Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, is painted out of the book. I guess not scandalous enough, nor yearly young enough to see Nazi slave labor building VWs at Wolfenbüttel. The dying-young siblings are ignored. Scandalous before death or not? One brother lived to 29, the other to 25, and had chances to be.

There's also one big error and one not big but not ignorable.

Tillyard does push back somewhat against some of the revisionism in Andrew Roberts' very good bio of George. But, and while writing 15 years earlier, she still accepts the then "de novo" idea that George had porphyria, while Roberts establishes well that the classical diagnosis of mania is correct.

Why does this matter? Well, Caroline Matilda's husband, Christian VII of Denmark, was George's first cousin. While mania, schizophrenia and overlapping mental illnesses are not 100 percent heritable, they are enough that this would seem to offer further support to Roberts.

The lesser error? Spa, in today's Belgium, was then in the Austrian Netherlands, which had been what they were, and not the Spanish Netherlands, since 1714.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"George III: America's Last King" (Yale University Press, 448 pages, $35) adds much to our knowledge of the monarch and his reign. I was intrigued to learn about George's reading and how much writing he produced. He was an earnest, if not very subtle thinker. The word often applied to him is stolid. The biographer's research is impressive, but I'd recommend that you clear your calendar and wear a pair of noise-canceling headphones whilst (as the Brits say) you attempt to decipher Jeremy Black's prose.

There is a reason why some biographies are called "academic." In Chapter 19, "Reputation and Comparisons," Mr. Black states:

The British monarchy, or the image of the monarchy, was reconstructed during the later years of George's reign. The strong patriotism of the war with France, and the king's less conspicuous role in day-to-day politics, combined fruitfully to facilitate the celebration less of the reality and more of the symbol of monarchy. In this, the precondition of the creation of a popular monarchy was (ironically but significantly) the perceived decline in the crown's political authority in a partisan sense, at least its use thus in a clear and frequent fashion.

When I got as far as "in this," my eyes began to cross and the question of what to plant in my spring garden suddenly seemed of paramount concern.

Is there any excuse for such writing? Do monarchy wonks thrive on it? The first two sentences quoted above, with their needless repetitions and plethora of prepositions are illustrative of the ponderous locutions that thud throughout this biography. Translation: As soon as George III stopped meddling in everyday politics the monarchy as a symbolic institution began to thrive. By doing less, George actually enhanced the authority of the monarchy, even though it seemed to partisans that he had weakened it. What more needs saying? Did I miss something?

It is with considerable relief that I turned to Stella Tillyard's "A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings" (Random House, 384 pages, $26.95). The title may suggest that this book is historylite, but not a bit of it. In a delightful introduction, Ms. Tillyard describes how together with her assistant she conducted painstaking research in the Hanoverian archives, plowing through towering piles of metal boxes: "Across the faces of other researchers, as we passed, flitted expressions that mixed polite astonishment with just a hint of disdain."

In Hanover, the court kept records of everything: When George II had his son inoculated for smallpox in 1724, "His English doctor wrote a daily report on his condition, recording the prince's mood and temperature and the number of spots on his skin." I can imagine the comic figure Ms. Tillyard cut among her fellow researchers: Was she really going to sift through all this detritus, and to what end?

Already sympathetic to this scholar dredging through the past, I quickly grasped that a certain level of detail was essential to craft a narrative as compelling and colorful as that of a novel. But this is hardly all that Ms. Tillyard accomplishes. She is writing a group biography with George III at its center, and she shows that his overwhelming sense of responsibility for his siblings — most of whom had nothing much to do — is of a piece with his politics, in which the erring American colonists, for example, had to be brought into line in the same way a father disciplines his children or an older brother reads the riot act to the younguns.

George III took himself very seriously as the father of his nation, the one figure who could rise above factions and self-serving institutions to represent and guide his people. But as one court observer noted, it was all very well if George III was on the side of right, but what if he mistook wrong for right? To whom does one appeal a father's decisions? Curiously, George III (sometimes accused of being a closet Jacobite!) came near to believing he ruled by divine right.

By describing and assessing how the king dealt with his own family, Ms. Tillyard also makes her contribution to the genre of biography:

Biography tends to be a vertical genre, going from parents to children, explaining its subjects by virtue of their childhoods and their relationships with their mothers and fathers. It rarely dwells for very long on brothers and sisters and the importance they can have in one another's lives. Perhaps because I am from a large family myself, my work had tended to go the other way, to be horizontal, seeking in the tangled web of brotherly and sisterly relations other clues to what makes us who we are.

Has a biographer ever so elegantly conjoined in a compact paragraph the nature of biography, her research interests, and her own biography with the reader's interests?

George III had one sister, Caroline Mathilde, who married a mad Danish king and suffered the horrible consequences of an affair with a radical young court doctor. George III's brothers led scandalous, dissolute lives on the royal dole. And yet he refused to give up on this family, just as he would not relinquish his claim on the American colonies. To do so would strike at the heart of his paternal values.

George III's father, Prince Frederick, who died in his 30s (making his son George next in line to Frederick's father, George II), had suffered the neglect of both mother and father and thus decided that the future George III ("a serious boy," Ms. Tillyard calls him) would know what it meant to have a warm heart and would come to regard loving family relations as the basis for a ruler's values. Frederick, in fact, left specific instructions for his son, emphasizing: "Tis not out of vanity that I write this; it is out of love to You, and to the public. It is for your good, and for that of my family, and of the good people you are to govern, that I leave this to you."

To speak of love and family and the nation, combining in such a tender way the personal and the political, surely marks a new development in British history. The monarch as person and symbol fused. But at what cost to George III, Ms. Tillyard shows. The burden of representing and unifying the British world was too much for one man — any man — who could no more keep his empire together than he could make peace among his own family.

[Sarah W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 18th-century Hanover dynasty had more than its share of scandal, but I knew little about George III's sister Caroline Mathilde, the Queen of Denmark, prior to this book. While George III and each of his siblings who survived into adulthood are covered, Caroline Mathilde definitely steals the show - she was unhappily married to the Danish king in her teens, had an affair with her husband's doctor as her husband descended into madness, practically ruled Denmark with her lover for a brief period before a coup forced her to flee, and she spent the remainder of her days plotting a comeback before dying of scarlet fever at the age of twenty-three. A truly fascinating woman and one certainly in good company with her scandalous brothers, even if she gave King George III plenty of headaches. This is certainly both fun reading and a good way to highlight a lesser-known 18th-century figure.

[Heather Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected this book to cover more about George III than his siblings, since his name is in the title. But it actually tells the story of four of his siblings (some in more detail than others) and how George as king and brother reacted to their various predicaments. I was hoping it would cover information about his marriage to Charlotte and their children as well, but it is focused on the siblings. The stories are fascinating, and the most time is spent on Caroline Matilde, his sister who was married to the King of Denmark when she was 15. It is interesting to see what was going on George III's family life as the American colonies were starting to break away, and how that may have impacted him.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this fascinating book about George III’s siblings in a used bookstore on vacation and ate it up.

Great backstory on not only George III’s childhood and adolescence but also his father’s experience as the neglected and unappreciated Prince of Wales who died young, leaving behind his wife and children.

Tillyard spends the most time on George’s youngest sibling, Caroline Matilda, who was married to the mentally ill Christian VII of Denmark. She and her lover pursued a course of legal and social reforms that didn’t last long, but show how the Enlightenment was shaping thought about religion, marriage, and rank.

4.5 ⭐️

[Christina Marta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers of this sort of history will be familiar with the rackety love lives of George III's children. But, did you know that George's *siblings* were no less irregular? Adultery! Mistresses! Secret marriages! A cross-dressing queen! Tragically early deaths, too. We forget that infectious disease killed a *lot* of young people.

I wish there were more pictures so you could put faces to the names, but we all have the internet.

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written account of not just the life and times of George III (before birth and to his death) but also of Europe, European Royal Families and the beginnings of the American War of Independence. Includes beautiful colour and black & white photographs of paintings completed during the lives of the people within the storyline.

[Mary Vilarino · Rating 3 out of 5]

A massive amount of detail which at times felt unnecessary and burdened this reader at least. At other times information was included that was superfluous as it did not add anything to the history. What I did get out of this was a strong feeling that George III was a tyrant to his family and to those that did not toe his line. Edward perhaps would have been a better choice for king.

[Ian Racey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging biography of three siblings of George III: two brothers, who each secretly married inappropriate English widows behind their brother’s back, and Caroline Mathilde, the neglected Queen of Denmark who had a love child with her husband’s prime minister.

[Katy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unexpectedly emotional and saddening.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book. Although it was about all of the siblings, it seemed to spend an abundance of time on Caroline Mathilda and her facinating story.

[Claire Biggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and interesting read into George III and his siblings, how he ended up having a fraught and fractious relationship with all his siblings that lived to adult hood

[Kate Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Read it because Dan Savage talked it up on the Ezra Klein podcast. He overplayed Caroline Mathilda’s import on Danish progressive politics, and also her relationship with- which was less “polyamorous” than “a committed extramarital relationship that her husband overlooked because he didn’t care about her anyway.” Historical soap opera vibes, but super well written.

[Ingela S A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readable and knowledgeable without becoming indigestable (yes I know it's not a word)

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is at its best when it develops the characters, be they the principals, their spouses, tutors, ambassadors, in-laws. Tillyard's description of the parental situation and upbringing of George III is an excellent prelude to his responses to his family's challenges.

George III was true believer in the monarchical system. For him, it was an unchallenged law of nature: his brothers and sisters were his diplomatic pawns. Other generations of a king's siblings had been more compliant. Other monarchs didn't face such a free press or such a powerful parliament. George, by his temperament and training, would and could never understand that the world had fundamentally changed.

The story of Caroline Mathilde is both sad and exciting. Tucked away in Denmark at age 16, what was she to do? George's condescending letter and attitude provide no preparation for a normal monarchical role, let alone the one she's thrust into. It would only be human for her to seek companionship, mentorship and comfort.

The princes, according to George, must also sacrifice their lives for dynastic marriages. Having more say in their future, they respond in quite predictable ways. Their choices are complicated by not only their brother the King, but a society that has largely bought into the monarchical system.

I held back a star, because many times details interfered with the flow

(I think biographers who work with original material, are often disposed to include something in order to document/preserve it whether or not it is interesting to the reader or germain to the larger story) and that the US Revolution is treated separately and briefly at the end.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stella Tillyard is an absolute master at the narrative historical biography: she literally makes the people she writes about pop off the page. Although "Aristocrats" will likely always remain my favorite of her works, this picture of another powerful family of the same era - the royal family itself - is just as well done. Although we all know about Mad King George, the villain in the American Revolution, we don't generally know a whole lot more about him, & certainly not how the difficulties he had with his strong-willed siblings caused him to view his rebellious subjects across the Atlantic. One feels an equal amount of frustration with him for forcing his siblings into unfortunate & sometimes quite literally horrible situations (the tale of his younger sister Caroline Mathilde was particularly devastating) simply because that was what was expected of them, & appreciation of his feeling like the whole lot of them didn't take him seriously as either a king, a father figure, or a brother. It's a unique look at the story of George III, & a very fascinating one.

[CJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the connection between the characters is King George III, most of the book is about his youngest sister Caroline Matilda. She was married to the Danish Crown Prince Christian at 15. Christian suffered madness similart to that which later affected George III. Caroline Matilda apparently modelled her response to her unhappy marriage on Catherine the Great: she took a lover and the reins of the government. However, she was unable to hold on and was eventually exiled in Hesse. Her lover was executed.

Seemingly a book about Caroline Matilda was too short because short chapters about her older brothers William and Edward were added - they both married without George's permission and below their station (Englishwomen rather than froeign princesses). The material on these marriages is not nearly as in depth and has a "filler" feeling.

Tillyard is clearly sympathetic to her subjects and presents a lot of information and anticdotes, but the flow of the narrative is choppy.