King George III, beloved of the American Colonies, and his Queen Consort Charlotte, after whom the state of Georgia and a city in Virginia are named, had 15 children. They didn’t meet until their wedding day, but got right down to business.George III had a pronounced stutter and was more than a little hard to understand, as John Adams would later discover after the revolution, as he presented the credentials of the new country to the Court of St. James's, but talking in bed wasn't required, apparently. 15. Count 'em - 15.
George’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, (later King George IV for 10 years) only had one child, a daughter, and she died rather unexpectedly in 1817. Suddenly all the remaining unmarried sons of George III scrambled to get married and start having children to secure the House of Hanover’s meal ticket.
So it happened, at the ripe age of fifty, the Duke of Kent (fourth son of George III) married Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-saalfeld, and they begat an only child, and they called the child Alexandrina Victoria, and she became the Queen Mother of all Europe. Or so it sometimes seems.
This bit of information will take you up to the first post of this series.
George III was reputedly very devoted to Charlotte, except, perhaps, when he was having one of his bouts of "madness," and was also quite fond of his children (from what I've read), at least when they were young.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot to mention that, before this spate of Duke marriages, those same brothers, who were forbidden to marry without approval, had fathered any number of children often to mistresses they were devoted to for years.
I saw "The Madness of King George" III.
ReplyDeleteI guess I missed the first two parts.
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I didn't forget it. I didn't KNOW it. :)
Sorry, one of my favorite authors wrote a series of well-researched books during the Regency. I know tons about that period of time.
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