Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz: The Enlightened Nurturer

Abstract

After Caroline of Ansbach, Charlotte was the second princess of a minor German principality to marry an English king of the House of Hanover. Like her predecessor, she dutifully secured the succession by producing numerous offspring and shared the same keen interest in philosophy, music, science, and medical improvements. However, she shaped her life and image as consort not so much by openly striving for political influence but by subtly supporting the interests of the monarch and promoting her own ideal of marriage and motherhood via patronage and self-fashioning. During her long-standing presence as consort over nearly six decades, she created her own emblematic iconography by adapting it to political and social changes and disseminating it via various media. Against the background of George III’s growing illness, which provoked mocking caricatures and increasing political instability, Charlotte’s self-fashioning became a symbol of domestic, dynastic, and national integrity as well as fidelity.

At the age of 17, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was the next young German princess to become queen consort of Great Britain and Ireland after Caroline of Ansbach. One may wonder what lasting impression this young princess from a minor continental principality could leave in her adopted country, a country that during the reign of her husband George III (r. 1760–1820) was a kingdom with global horizons, spanning not only the American colonies until 1783 but developing into a far-reaching empire including Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, and the West Indies.

Charlotte’s nineteenth-century biographers saw her in domestic terms as a loyal but politically inactive wife at the King’s side and the caring mother of her many children.¹ Olwen Hedley’s biography from 1975 remains seminal, drawing on a wide range of archival sources and shedding new light on the Queen’s person.² Recent scholarship has further reassessed Charlotte, correcting the traditional image of a primarily ‘nurturing figure’ by underlining her inherited as well as acquired cultural influences, which made her part of a wider social and cultural network outside her immediate family.³ Like her predecessor as queen consort, Caroline of Ansbach, Charlotte not only dutifully secured the succession by producing numerous offspring but also had a keen interest in philosophy, music, and science and was a great patron of the arts. Charlotte would shape her life and image as consort not so much by direct political influence but by promoting her ‘public’ and ‘private’ ideals via patronage and self-fashioning her image. She would create her own identity niches: a doting mother with a strong pedagogical influence on the upbringing and education of her daughters, a keen botanist (later honoured with the epithet ‘Queen of Botany’), and a patroness of the fine arts.

The formation of both Charlotte’s ‘public’ and ‘private’ persona is best reflected in her numerous portraits. Not only did her time as a consort coincide with the heyday of British portraiture, but it was the royal couple’s patronage that promoted this fruitful development. In a period of domestic and foreign policy conflicts, marked by the loss of the American colonies, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, following a massive social upheaval with the emergence of an increasingly critical and emancipated bourgeoisie, the monarchy was forced to adopt new means of visual representation. They had to develop new strategies of legitimation, balancing traditionally emblematic royal iconography and enlightened ideals. During her long-standing presence as consort over nearly six decades, Charlotte’s visual image was continuously adapting to these political and social changes. It was disseminated and popularised in various genres, such as large-scale and miniature portraits, prints, and objects of virtue but also on commercial goods like Wedgwood ceramics or Worcester porcelain.⁴ Against the background of her husband’s growing illness, Charlotte’s self-fashioning would underline the moral integrity of the House of Hanover, her fidelity as consort to her husband, the King, and, hence, to the British nation itself.

Early Years and Upbringing

Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was born on 19 May 1744, the eighth child and youngest daughter of Duke Charles Louis Frederick of Mecklenburg (1708–1752) and his wife Princess Elizabeth Albertina of Saxe-Hildburghausen (1713–1761). Her father was a younger half-brother of the reigning Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Adolphus Frederick III (r. 1708–1752), and her mother was a distant cousin of Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719–1772), her future mother-in-law. Charlotte’s eldest brother, Adolphus Frederick (1738–1794), would succeed their uncle in 1752 followed in 1794 by her brother Charles (1741–1816), who was her favourite sibling and confidant throughout her life.

Charlotte’s birthplace, Mirow Castle (an apanage for the junior branch of the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz), was a modest court. The family favoured a quiet and studious life. There are many ironic and disparaging contemporary comments on its insignificance as a remote backwater location in the far north of the Holy Roman Empire. One of the most famous critiques came from Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who ridiculed that “never in my life should I have taken this for a palace” while visiting Mirow, nicknaming his remote relatives the “Mirokesen.”⁵ But even if the Mecklenburg duchy was not a first-rate principality, it was certainly part of a European cultural interchange, as was common even for small courts within the Holy Roman Empire at that time. The duchy’s strong tradition of intermarriage with Scandinavian and German courts made it part of the cultural network of the “northern republic of letters” in the eighteenth century.⁶

While Charlotte’s upbringing in her early years may have been more similar to that of a daughter of the gentry than a princess from a reigning dynasty, her life changed significantly in 1752, the year of the death of both her father and uncle, followed by her brother’s succession. The family moved to the stately residence of Neustrelitz. Here, under the direction of Friedricke Elisabeth von Grabow, a wealthy cosmopolitan widow and famous poet who was known as the German Sappho, and Lutheran theologian and naturalist Gottlob Burchard Genzmer, Charlotte received a well-rounded education in a pietistic, enlightened spirit that gave her a relatively strong suitability to be a queen consort and laid the foundation for her personal lifelong interests.⁷

Apart from court etiquette, Charlotte was instructed in theology, history, natural philosophy, mineralogy, botany, and geography. She had knowledge of Latin and Greek and was fluent in Italian and French.⁸ She hardly knew any English but would learn it quickly and competently after her marriage. Educated in dancing, drawing, and singing, she was also an accomplished musician and developed a serious interest in literature. Familiar with the Enlightenment and reading Voltaire as early as 1760, she would maintain her enthusiasm for literature and poetry throughout her life. As Queen, she would copy out a number of published texts. After her death, she left a library containing over 4500 volumes in different languages.⁹

At the age of 16, Charlotte became a non-resident secular canoness of the imperial abbey of Herford, in the event that as a younger daughter of a minor house she might have remained unmarried, a precaution that would soon prove unnecessary.

Marriage and Coronation

When George III announced to the Privy Council on 8 July 1761 his intention to marry an unknown German princess, many might have wondered what caused him to choose a bride from such an obscure principality whose location, according to Horace Walpole, one had to search for on a map.¹⁰ The Georgian princes, however, had already established a tradition of marrying princesses from subordinate duchies, as demonstrated by the marriages of George II and Caroline of Ansbach as well as Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. Given the particular situation of the personal union between Great Britain and Hanover embodied in the Hanoverian kings, this strategy may have served to secure allegiances to the Hanoverian Electorate within the power relations of the Holy Roman Empire, while at the same time, seen from the British perspective, such a country would be politically insignificant enough to avoid diplomatic complications. Moreover, as the future queen was supposed to be royal and Protestant, the only other equivalent Electoral ruling house would have been Prussia, with which relations were strained due to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).

The first efforts to find a bride had been hampered by the outbreak of the war and the quarrels between the young Prince and his grandfather, George II. Since his father Frederick, Prince of Wales, had already died in 1751, George III was the heir presumptive to the British throne. The old King favoured candidates such as Princess Sophie Caroline, daughter of Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who the Prince emphatically rejected, stating that he would never marry “whilst the Old Man lives.”¹¹ The death of George II on 25 October 1760 therefore became the date for the 22-year-old George III to advance his nuptial search in which, undoubtedly, his mother, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and his former tutor and royal favourite, the Earl of Bute, were driving forces.

Charlotte was chosen from half a dozen eligible candidates by a process of elimination, orchestrated by the influential Münchhausen brothers Gerlach and Philipp Adolph, who held high offices in Hanover and London and were pursuing their own interests with regard to the position of the Electorate. Charlotte’s Protestant faith, the strategic location of her homeland next to Hanover, as well as the affiliation of her family to the House of Brunswick, made her an excellent choice. Furthermore, as Mascha Hansen has observed, while beauty was not a prerequisite for the bride, Charlotte’s unimpeachable reputation and character were important qualifications.¹² Considering the political conflicts that had been stirred up by his mother’s involvement in potential marriages, George III looked for a bride young enough to be malleable and politically ignorant. These attributes became evident in the report of Colonel Graeme, who went to Neustrelitz in June 1761 to negotiate the nuptials. Graeme describes the young Charlotte as no beauty but amiable, with good qualities and talents that are not very cultivated, but due to her young age “she is capable of taking any impression, or being molded into any form.”¹³

In August 1761 the official escort party, led by the Earl of Harcourt, brought precious engagement gifts for the young bride, including a sumptuous bracelet with the miniature portrait of the King that Charlotte cherished throughout her entire life, wearing it in all her grand portraits.¹⁴ On 7 September the young bride arrived in England and reached London in the afternoon of the following day. Within six hours of her arrival and introduction to her future husband, the marriage ceremony was performed at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace on 8 September by Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury.

On the occasion of the wedding, Horace Walpole gave a detailed account of the appearance of the young Queen that seems to match her engagement portrait from 1761 by Hanoverian court painter Johann Georg Ziesenis:¹⁵

She looks very sensible, cheerful, and is remarkably genteel. Her tiara of diamonds was very pretty, her stomacher sumptuous; her violet-velvet mantle and ermine so heavy, that the spectators knew as much of her upper half as the King himself.¹⁶

Two weeks after the wedding, on 22 September, the coronation of the royal couple took place at Westminster Abbey. Through her marriage, Charlotte was Queen Consort of Great Britain and Ireland. After the union of the two kingdoms in 1801, she became Queen Consort of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until her death in 1818. Due to the personal union with the Electorate of Hanover, she was also the Electress Consort of Hanover until the elevation of Hanover to the status of a kingdom, meaning that on 12 October 1814 she became Queen Consort of Hanover.

Looks and Appearances

Charlotte’s features have been the subject of many critical remarks and speculations. Based on Walpole’s comment that “her forehead [is] low, her nose very well, except the nostrils spreading too wide; her mouth has the same fault, but her teeth are good” and her alleged descent from King Alfonso III of Portugal and his African mistress Madragana ben Aloandro, she has been called the first modern mixed-race royal.¹⁷ However, as Jeremy Black has stated, there is no real evidence for this assumption.¹⁸

Another contemporary source described her as “certainly not a beauty, but her countenance was very expressive and showed extreme intelligence; not tall, but of slight, rather pretty figure; her eyes bright and sparkling with good humour and vivacity; her mouth large, but filled with white and even teeth; and her hair really beautiful.”¹⁹ She herself seemed to be aware of her lack of beauty, being remarkably sanguine on this topic: “The English people did not like me much, because I was not pretty; but the King was fond of driving a phaeton in those days, and once he overturned me in a turnip-field, and that fall broke my nose. I think I was not quite so ugly after dat.”²⁰ Nevertheless, her features would become iconic, displayed around the British Empire in numerous portraits, strategically employed by the crown as well as mocked by critics in caricatures. Her coronation portrait by Scottish artist Allan Ramsay, referring to the traditional state iconography employed by Caroline of Ansbach and Mary II, was her first official British image.²¹ Although criticised by Walpole as “much flattered and the hair vastly too light,” it became very popular throughout the following decades and was reproduced—together with the portrait of her husband—in numerous copies, satisfying the demands not only of the royal family but also of the nobility, ambassadors, and viceroys around the globe. Thus, the omnipresent visualisation of the Georgian monarchy would build a unifying symbolic realm, creating a virtual bond with the King’s subjects.²²

In addition, during the 1760s, a quite distinctive emblematic shaping of the Queen’s physiognomy was popularised, emphasising her slightly tip-tilted nose in profile as well as in three-quarter-view. It started a royal ‘branding’ throughout all visual media such as prints, paintings, miniatures, or objects of virtue.²³ The often very ostentatious display of the Queen’s youthful and richly adorned body served as a symbol for the fertile and prosperous British nation. The Queen’s known partiality for jewels, however, both initiated controversies over the cost of maintaining the monarchy and was the subject of satirical responses.²⁴

Domesticity, Motherhood, and Self-Fashioning

In certain respects, the royal couple had an affectionate and harmonious marriage. George called his wife “my treasure from Strelitz” while she addressed him in a letter with the “love of her who subscribes herself Your very affectionate Friend and Wife.”²⁵ In 1785, Frances Burney observed that “their behaviour to each other speaks the most cordial confidence and happiness.”²⁶ They shared a companionable relationship and interests in science, art, music, and theatre, as well as a sincere religious faith. Although brought up a Lutheran, Charlotte conformed easily to the Church of England, as required.²⁷

Yet, in the first years of her marriage she struggled to adapt to life in court, due to the strained relationship with her mother-in-law Princess Augusta, who interfered with her social contacts and appointed many of her household staff to report on the behaviour of her daughter-in-law.²⁸ When the King had his first attack of mental illness in 1765, Augusta kept Charlotte unaware of her husband’s health condition to prevent the Regency Bill of 1765 from coming into force, which stipulated that Charlotte would be appointed regent if the King should be unable to rule.

It was not easy for a foreign female royal consort to create her own sphere of activity. She had to support her husband officially but was not allowed to show too much of her own public profile and influence. Character and intelligence were necessary to achieve a certain balance, as the complexity of the court system required skilful negotiation between the different and often rival powers. A friendly bond between the married couple certainly could ease this. The courtly ideal of the consort was that of a nurturer and encourager, who had to secure the line of succession and care for the spiritual, social, and economic well-being not only of her family but also of her husband’s subjects.²⁹

Fertility was one of the most important qualities expected of a royal consort, and Charlotte was incredibly lucky in having children without difficulty; she had no known miscarriages or stillborn infants. Within a year of her marriage, she had provided the throne with an heir and secured the direct line of succession. In the first twenty-one years of her marriage she gave birth to fifteen children: nine sons—the future George IV (1762–1830); Frederick, Duke of York (1763–1827); the future William IV (1765–1837); Edward, Duke of Kent (1767–1820); Ernest Augustus I, Duke of Cumberland and later King of Hanover (1771–1851); Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773–1843); Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge (1774–1850); Octavius (1779–1783); and Alfred (1780–1782)—and six daughters—Charlotte, Princess Royal and Queen of Wurttemberg (1766–1828); Augusta Sophia (1768–1840); Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg (1770–1840); Mary, Duchess of Gloucester (1776–1857); Sophia (1777–1848); and Amelia (1783–1810). Thirteen of her children survived into adulthood. The upbringing and well-being of her children certainly determined much of her life. While her sons would be placed in separate households under the tutelage of governors at an early age and later dispatched for military service or studies in Germany, the Queen was directly involved in the upbringing of her daughters. She ensured that they would receive a thorough education. She wrote to her brother Charles on 6 July 1779, “I am of opinion that if women had the same advantages as men in their education they would do as well.”³⁰

Charlotte placed great emphasis on the artistic and linguistic skills as well as the religious instruction of her daughters. They received music lessons from Johann Christian Bach and drawing lessons from Thomas Gainsborough, Mary Moser, and Mary Delany. Charlotte’s library included many contemporary educational treatises such as works by Rousseau, Locke, and Fénelon. According to her diary, she regularly read sermons in German and English to her daughters. Her evident love for her large family not only supported the stability of her marriage but also created the ideal of a stable domesticity that would positively influence the public image of the monarchy. However, she also tended to control her daughters’ lives, restricting their independence. Her court was called the “Nunnery,” as a number of the princesses were still living there in adulthood, unfortunate, as Flora Fraser noted, in having parents who “could not adequately oversee the implementation of the Utopian child-rearing policies they earnestly advocated.”³¹ By the Royal Marriages Act 1772, the King had tried to prevent his children from making ineligible marriages before they reached the age of twenty-five. His deep attachment to his daughters, however, even caused him to turn down suitable marriage proposals. The Queen, meanwhile, may have been deliberately keeping her daughters unmarried, longing for their company as a surrogate for the King’s growing absence due to his ill health.

In 1762, the King bought Buckingham House as the new official residence for the Queen. Known as the Queen’s House, it also became a private refuge for the royal couple, where most of their children were born and they could favour their informal domestic way of life apart from the regulated court etiquette at St. James’s Palace, which was still used for formal occasions such as levées and public audiences. At the end of the 1770s, the King also had Queen’s Lodge near Windsor Castle converted into a country residence, where the family would spend most of their time, apart from Richmond and Kew.

Due to the couple’s notoriously frugal, plain, and pious lifestyle, the British court gained a reputation as one of the dullest in Europe and was widely satirised. The King’s preference for a rural lifestyle earned him the nickname “Farmer George.” The Queen, in contrast, was caricatured not only as an overly domestic, caring mother and wife but also as a penny-pinching housekeeper. Charlotte’s official deportment and visual representation not only had to convey the traditional princely virtues but also reveal personal character traits in terms of a new enlightened approachability, which she tried to achieve by emphasising the ideals of motherhood and education. In contrast to Caroline of Ansbach, whose iconography had been mainly focused on the establishment and consolidation of the Hanoverian dynasty, Charlotte’s self-fashioning as a pious and enlightened mother of not only her own family but the happy nation at large seemed to offer an adequate perspective. At the same time, however, this endeavour made her vulnerable to satire. As Mascha Hansen has stated, “it may have been her very aspiration to be a moral example to the nation that caused the Queen’s descent in public opinion.”³²

Charlotte’s portraits often merged a formal representative setting with a subtle allusion to her private interests, transforming her into not only a proud and doting mother but also an enlightened and learned queen. These qualities were skilfully propagated in Ramsay’s full-length state portrait showing the Queen with her two eldest sons in the grandeur of a classic architectural setting while attributes such as needlework, a harpsichord, and a copy of John Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education allude to her accomplishments and virtues.³³

Charlotte’s ideals are best reflected in two portraits of the mid-1760s by Johan Zoffany and Benjamin West, showing the Queen with her two eldest sons, George and Frederick, and her eldest daughter Charlotte, Princess Royal. They give a seemingly informal insight into courtly domestic life, as if the viewer captures a private moment of the Queen sitting in her apartments with her children playing around her or listening to her advice (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1

Johan Zoffany, Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons, 1764, oil on canvas, 112.2 × 128.3 cm. (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021)

This ‘private’ narrative was part of a continental process of a new enlightened approach in aristocratic portraiture, influenced by French and Dutch genre painting, alluding to Rousseau’s ideal of an unspoiled natural education and character development. Yet it was an image staged to the highest degree, aimed at conveying a new ideal of the monarchy in search of good government. Charlotte is emphasised not only as a decorous wife but also as an accomplished consort and mother. She is the role model for a cultured family, implying moral as well as dynastic legitimacy. Moreover, both portraits accentuate the different perceived roles of male and female princely education. While the rendering of the Prince of Wales in armour connotes the heroic Telemachus myth, popularised by François Fénelon’s educational fable, the focus for the young Princess Royal lies with a valuable piece of embroidered fabric, alluding to feminine domestic virtues such as industria. Attributes like a bust of Minerva, sheet music, and papers underline the Queen’s knowledge and accomplishments, while precious and exotic objects such as Flemish lace, Turkish carpets, or Chinese lacquer figures reflect the richness and prosperity of a modern global monarchy.³⁴

Furthermore, the public display of such portraits engaged a wider audience with these ideals. In Francis Cotes’ rendering of Charlotte with her first daughter Charlotte, Princess Royal, exhibited at the Society of Artists exhibition in 1767, the Queen directly addresses the viewer via her gesture to be silent and not to disturb the sleeping child (Fig. 4.2).³⁵ Like reproduction in print, this was a new way of circulating the royal portrait, bringing the monarch and consort in ‘direct’ contact with the public. A strategy that would be further employed during the next decades and that was quite successful, as a eulogy on Cotes’ painting shows:Verse

Verse How on thy canvas, Cotes, with joy is seen, The tend’rest Mother, and the mildest Queen; Who can her dignity with her meekness blend, And lose awhile the Empress in the friend: Who makes humility her highest boast, For the pious Queen commands the most, The joy of Britain in her bosom lies, What inexpressive sweetness in her eyes! Maternal fondness and maternal grace, Breathe in her air, and beam upon her face. With boundless charity from heaven that springs, The balm of Kingdoms, and the crown of Kings!Footnote

Quoted in Albinson, “Cornucopia,” 100.

Fig. 4.2

Francis Cotes, Queen Charlotte with Charlotte, Princess Royal, 1767, pastel, 93.0 × 78.5 cm. (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021)

In addition, the numerous commissions of family portraits showing the royal couple surrounded by their growing number of children figuratively propagated the image of the prosperous and healthy body politic.³⁷ Whereas Charlotte’s earlier portraits saw a certain youthfulness and splendour dominate, in later years her official images would favour a more unostentatious, domestic, and lyrical approach. The Queen wearing a gossamer lace cap would become the most popular and widely received emblem throughout media, emphasising maturity, domesticity, and motherhood. The epitome of Charlotte’s devotion to her family is the series of portraits by Gainsborough she commissioned in 1782 for her apartments in Buckingham House and which were publicly displayed at the Royal Academy.³⁸

Politics and Philanthropy

George III had given his bride clear advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of politics, as she recalled to her friend Elizabeth, Lady Harcourt:

I am most truly sensible of the dear king’s great strictness, at my arrival in England, to prevent my making many acquaintances: for he always used to say, that, in this Country, it was difficult to know how to draw a line, on account of the politics of the Country; that there never could be kept up Society without party, which was always dangerous for any woman to take part on, but particularly so for the Royal Family, & with truth do I assure you, that I am not only sensible that He was right, but I feel thankful for it from the bottom of my Heart.³⁹

Even if Charlotte did not show any active political ambition, it cannot be denied that, due to the closeness she shared with the King, she exchanged ideas with him, as can be seen from her diary entries. Her influence was discreet and indirect, managed subtly through the Drawing Room by dispensing appointments, making recommendations, and helping to bind the ruling elite together.⁴⁰ She was well informed of the complexity of the English succession, the Westminster political system, and the current political affairs of her husband’s territories.⁴¹ Her library included a variety of books on history, such as Hume’s History of England.⁴²

Due to her origins and family ties, Charlotte was particularly interested in continental European issues, especially the situation in her homeland, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and the Hanoverian Electorate, where her favourite brother Charles had been appointed by her husband as military governor in 1776.⁴³ She keenly followed dynastic events and elections in the Holy Roman Empire and had a clear moral opinion regarding the extramarital affair of her sister-in-law Caroline Matilde, queen consort of Denmark, with Count Struensee. She corresponded with Marie Antoinette and was greatly afflicted by the news of the executions of the King and Queen of France.⁴⁴ As early as 1789, she had expressed her concerns about the recent developments in France undermining established religion. In a letter to her brother, she noted that “the lack of principle, forgetting all duties to God and Man, and lack of Religion, is seen as the main reason for the distresses amongst our neighbours.”⁴⁵ All the more important was her endeavour to present the British monarchy as an institution of moral authority. Charlotte also observed the struggles of the German states during the War of the Bavarian Succession and through her niece Louise, wife of King Frederick William III of Prussia, she was well informed about the situation in Prussia and would try to enlist Prussian support for Hanoverian interests during the French Revolutionary Wars.⁴⁶ Although Charlotte maintained contacts amongst the royal houses of Europe, she would never undermine British interests or openly meddle in politics.

Like her predecessors, Charlotte also met the expectations of a caring consort interested in public welfare, her charitable activities being part of the orchestrated public image of the monarchy. The German poet Anna Luisa Karsch praised her as “the young dreaming princess, full of Philanthropy and notice.”⁴⁷ She was patron of several London charitable foundations such as Magdalen Hospital, a home for penitent prostitutes, St Katherine’s Hospital, an alms house for gentlewomen, and the General Lying-in Hospital, a hospital for expectant mothers, that was subsequently renamed as the Queen’s Hospital. She founded orphanages as well as a residential home for elderly gentlewomen in Bath. Her deep interest in the education of women is reflected in her support of a spinning school for poor working girls in Windsor and an embroidery school for girls, founded by Phoebe Wright.⁴⁸

Cultural Interests and Patronage

While Charlotte’s early years were dedicated to childrearing, after the death of her mother-in-law in February 1772, she was more at liberty to initiate cultural and philanthropic activities. She became a patron in the fields of education, arts, and science. Her interest may have stemmed from her early German education but was surely enhanced by engagement with the heritage and collections of her predecessors, particularly that of Caroline of Ansbach. Charlotte’s artistic patronage served as a vehicle for establishing an ideological continuity with previous queens, but at the same time intensified the interactions with her continental family. Her close kinship with the northern German and European courts, her connection with members of the Royal Society and the University of Göttingen—such as Joseph Banks and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg—and her employment of learned people like Jean-André DeLuc and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite as French readers, Charlotte Finch as royal governess, and the inclusion of Elizabeth Venable Vernon, Elizabeth Seymour Percy, and Mary Delany in her entourage shaped her household into a centre of elite sociability and made her part of the Protestant, Northern European, Enlightenment.⁴⁹ Her patronage, her enlarged social connections, and her cultural and scientific interests broadened her horizons, enabling her to define new facets of her ‘public’ persona and allowing her to mentally exceed boundaries that could not be crossed physically. This new cosmopolitan approach was best reflected in her botanical collection, her collections of prints and drawings, as well as in her library.

Charlotte was a keen amateur botanist and took great interest in the development of Kew Gardens. Benefitting from the expeditions of Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks, she ensured that the botanical collections at Kew were greatly enriched and expanded. The South African flower, the Bird of Paradise, was named Strelitzia reginae in her honour. In 1799, a homage to Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain, as Patroness of Botany and the Fine Arts was published as a preface to Robert John Thornton’s The New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, which itself was dedicated to the Queen.⁵⁰ In 1781, The Ladies Poetical Magazine published an elegy praising the Queen’s learned mind and virtuous conduct:Verse

Verse Happy for England, were each female mind, To science more, and less to pomp inclin’d; If parents, by example, prudence taught, And from their QUEEN the flame of virtue caught! Skill’d in each art that serves to polish life, Behold in HER scientifick wife.Footnote

Quoted in Campbell Orr, “Queen Charlotte, ‘Scientific Queen,’” 236.

The King and Queen strongly admired and supported German-speaking artists and composers, like Zoffany, Handel, and Mozart, and held weekly concerts with their family. Johann Christian Bach was the Queen’s music-master from 1764 until his death and gave her singing and cembalo lessons. However, their patronage of artists and craftsmen such as portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough, cabinetmaker William Vile, silversmith Thomas Heming, or entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood also reflected their support of the British art and economy.

Even though the royal couple shared a common taste in art and regularly attended the Royal Academy exhibitions, there were certain differences between their patronages shaped by the male and female spheres at the time. George III strongly favoured artists trained in the classic style of the art academies like Benjamin West, who received influential posts in court. His patronage was based on a preference for the Van Dyck style in the tradition of the Stuart court.⁵² In contrast, Charlotte showed specific interest in the decorative arts and was responsible for the interior design of Windsor Lodge and Frogmore.⁵³ Even before the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, she supported female portraitists such as Catherine Read and the later Academy founding members Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser.⁵⁴ In a portrait commissioned by the Queen herself, Kauffmann celebrated Charlotte as the guardian of the fine arts. It was popularised via Thomas Burke’s mezzotint Her Majesty Queen Charlotte Raising the Genius of Fine Arts.⁵⁵

In later decades, the Queen’s patronage increasingly focused on female artists and less-esteemed genres, such as miniature painting, embroidery and needlepoint, botanical illustration, engraving, and wax modelling. Among the female artists she sponsored were the miniature painters Mary Benwill, Anne Foldstone Mee, and Anne Jessop; the embroiderers Mary Morris Knowle and Mary Linwood; wax modeller Patience Wright; and engraver Caroline Watson, who was appointed her official engraver in 1785.⁵⁶ Her relationships with these artists were often longstanding. Especially for female artists, the Queen’s patronage could provide a gateway to professional success. She clearly transferred her interest in art to several of her children, especially the Prince of Wales, the future George IV.

Regency Crisis and Loyalty

The second half of Charlotte’s life was overshadowed by the crisis caused by the King’s mental and physiological decline, beginning in October 1788 with the renewed outbreak of the metabolic disorder porphyria that would last until his death in 1820.⁵⁷ The King’s derangement not only involved a certain hostility towards his wife, including sporadic accusations of her adultery and madness, but provoked a severe government crisis as the need of a regency government became evident, which led to a severe break in Charlotte’s relationship with her eldest son.⁵⁸ While the political opposition under the Prince of Wales’ confidant Charles James Fox tried to gain the Prince full regency powers, Charlotte trusted in William Pitt the Younger, who favoured a regency where the Prince of Wales could only take over with the consent of parliament. Pitt prevailed and with the drafting of the Regency Bill of 1789 the Prince of Wales’ power was severely restricted, while the Queen was allowed the control of the King’s person and household. Blamed by the opposition as a ‘power monger’ who wanted to assume the regency for herself, nevertheless, after the King’s recovery in February 1789, Charlotte’s popularity increased. Due to her unwavering loyalty to her husband, she was publicly acclaimed as “a pattern of domestic virtue which cannot be too much admired.”⁵⁹ Nevertheless, the physical impact on Charlotte of this stressful period is best captured in Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait from the same year, which revealed how much the personal crisis had affected Charlotte’s looks. It matches the account of her Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe, Mrs Papendiek, who described her as “much changed, her hair quite grey.”⁶⁰

The instability of the political situation in the 1790s and first years of the nineteenth century, the threat of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the concern for the well-being of her sons who served in the armed forces, and the deaths of both her sister Christiane and her brother Adolphus in 1794 certainly increased her worries. Furthermore, the King’s health deteriorated over the next decade, causing the couple to live apart from 1804. After 1811, he was so mentally unstable and almost blind that he was confined to his apartments at Windsor Castle. The Regency Bill of 1811 restated the Queen’s charge of her husband’s person and household, assisted by a council. Her aim was not to negotiate power for herself in conflict with the regency of her son but to secure the option for her husband to resume his duties, should he recover.

For the rest of her life, Charlotte continued her public role as a model of moral conduct. After her reconciliation with the Prince of Wales in 1791, she supported him to enhance his popularity that had suffered severely because of his high debts and his secret marriage to the Catholic divorcée Maria Fitzherbert in 1785. His marriage to Caroline of Brunswick in 1795 was supposed to help the monarchy’s reputation but ended in a scandalous separation. The King had favoured his niece as a bride for his son, and although Charlotte was unhappy with the choice in view of unfavourable reports about Caroline’s character, she accepted her as a daughter-in-law. “How many unpleasant things have passed … I hear all Sides & know so many things which must not be revealed that I am most truely wore down with it,” she confided to Lady Harcourt on her son’s marriage.⁶¹ It required Charlotte’s advice and skills to protect the Prince from renewed public disregard. In 1796 the Queen’s first legitimate grandchild, Princess Charlotte of Wales, whom she called “the little beauty,” was born.⁶² She would tragically die in 1817 after giving birth to a stillborn son.

The Retreat: Sentiment and Civic Idealisation

Against the background of the King’s progressing illness, the Queen searched for a retreat for herself. In 1790 and 1792 she purchased Little Frogmore and Great Frogmore, two estates near Windsor Castle, on which she had Frogmore House built in the midst of an idyllic landscape garden. Charlotte was actively involved in the architectural planning and commissioned both male and female artists in the decoration.⁶³ Here, she could devote herself to studying botany and reading. In a letter to her brother Charles, she wrote:

I’ve been spending the mornings in the company of my daughters at Frogmore, my little Earthly Paradise, amusing ourselves with a good read, working there around a large table in the garden under the shade of some beautiful trees, and marvelling that the time goes by much more quickly than we would have wished.⁶⁴

At Frogmore, Charlotte gathered a circle of intellectual men and women, one of which was the novelist, diarist, and playwright Frances ‘Fanny’ Burney.⁶⁵ The Queen’s simple way of life and her interest in welfare, schools, hospitals, and industry served as “a moral compass and conscience for the nation.”⁶⁶ By 1792 she had her print and drawing collection removed from Buckingham House to Frogmore House, which was also the site of her huge botanical collection as well as a printing press to create pedagogical tools for her children.⁶⁷ Her library led directly into the garden “so that visually and architecturally her two main loves, books and flowers, flowed together.”⁶⁸ The relaxed and bucolic atmosphere of Frogmore has been well captured by artists Henry Edridge and Sir William Beechey, showing the mature Queen enjoying the open country side sitting under a tree or walking with her pet dogs (Fig. 4.3).⁶⁹ Other artists, especially miniaturists, converted these descriptions into lyrical renderings of a youthful queen as the epitome of sentiment and civic idealisation.⁷⁰

Fig. 4.3

Sir William Beechey, Queen Charlotte, 1796, oil on canvas, 250.8 × 159.1 cm. (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021)

Death and Legacy

Since 1817, Charlotte had suffered from hydrothorax causing severe respiratory problems.⁷¹ She withdrew more and more from public life and only attended family events, such as the wedding of her daughter Elizabeth on 7 April 1818 in the private chapel in Buckingham Palace. In June 1818, her health declined further, and she retired to Kew Palace. There, in her Drawing Room, the double wedding of her sons William and Edward to the princesses Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen and Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld took place on 11 July 1818. After five months of ailing, Charlotte died on 17 November 1818, in the presence of her eldest son, the Prince Regent. She was buried on 2 December 1818 in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Her husband survived her for over a year, probably unaware of her death.

After her death, nearly all of Charlotte’s books and personal possessions were sold by auction to clear her debts. Her jewels were mainly left as heirlooms to the House of Hanover. Regrettably, most of her private papers were destroyed. Of her diaries, only several notebooks from 1789 and 1794 are preserved. Whereas but a dozen letters to her husband have survived, over 300 letters to her eldest son, George IV, and over 400 letters to her brother Charles II, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, remain extant, giving insight into her innermost thoughts, intellectual interests, piety, artistic endeavours, and sociability.⁷² As Fanny Burney remarked on the occasion of Charlotte’s death, she was an “exemplary queen.” A consort who tried to shape her image within the scope of her options via patronage and self-fashioning, she was also an enlightened Protestant wife and mother who “will live in the memory of those who knew her best, and be set up as an example even by those who only after her death know, or at least acknowledge, her virtues.”⁷³