I have always been fascinated by history. I studied it at university, where I was taught by some exceptional and inspiring teachers. As a television producer, I have made many history programmes, covering all aspects of the past – from the ancient world to times within living memory. I have worked with some of the most eminent British historians, witnessing at first-hand their knowledge and passion for a huge variety of subject areas. But it was always the eighteenth century that had first place in my heart. I had immersed myself in the politics of the period at college, but its appeal went far beyond what my reading delivered for me. Like so many others, I was drawn to it partly by the wonderful things made in it: the incomparable architecture that created austerely elegant palaces for the great, and airy, comfortable homes for the ‘middling sort’. I coveted the objects that went into these houses, from the sturdily beautiful furniture to the delicate blue-and-white coffee cups intended to sit proudly on all those much-polished tea tables. I admired the art of the period too, especially the portraiture, whether it was the clear-eyed intensity of Allan Ramsay, the bravura gestures of Joshua Reynolds, or the tender luminosity of Thomas Gainsborough. Those eighteenth-century men and women rich enough to afford it never tired of having themselves painted. If I had been one of them, I would have chosen Thomas Lawrence for my portrait. Who wouldn’t want to see themselves through Lawrence’s humane yet flattering eye, which infused even the most unpromising sitter with a sense of spirit and passion? I would have worn a red velvet dress, as both princesses Caroline and Sophia did when they sat for Lawrence, and hoped for a similarly impressive result: both women gaze directly out from their pictures, proud, commanding and smoulderingly bold. The portraits do not quite capture their true characters, at least as revealed in their letters; but what an image to look upon when your spirits needed a boost.
But much as I responded to the things the period produced, my real desire was to understand the people who lived in it. It was the men and women of what is often called the long eighteenth century – which runs from the accession of George I in 1714 to the death of George IV in 1830 – who really captivated me. Caught between the religious intensity of the seventeenth century and the earnest high-mindedness of the Victorians, this was a society in which I felt very much at home. I enjoyed its bustle and energy, and liked being in the company of its garrulous, argumentative and emotional inhabitants. The contradictions of their world intrigued me. On the one hand, they loved order, politeness, restraint. On the other, they were loud, forthright and often violent. The sedate drawing rooms of the rich looked out onto streets where passions could and did run very high. The poor, in both town and country, had a tough time of it, although they too seem to have shared something of the assertive confidence of the wealthy. For most of the middling sort, however, and especially for the rich, there was good reason to be bullish. This was a period in which there was money to be made, and a new kind of life to be lived. It is the experiences of these people – those who built the houses, big and small, laid out the gardens, commissioned the pictures, bought the furniture – that I have come to know best.
I knew them first by their books, and above all, through the work of Jane Austen. My earliest encounters with the authentic voice of the time came through her novels; the first eighteenth-century people I felt I really knew were the Bennetts of Longbourn, the Elliots of Kellynch Hall, Admiral and Mrs Croft, Mr Elton and his dreadful wife.
From fiction, it was a short jump to the world of real people. I think I began with James Boswell’s London Journal. That was my introduction to the vast and compelling world of eighteenth-century diaries and correspondence in which I have been happily immersed ever since. There are two reasons why I love nothing better than a collection of letters or a lengthy journal. Firstly, I’m gripped by the unfolding human story they capture, the narrative of real life as it is actually lived, the biggest events pressed hard up against the small details of the everyday round, matters of love and marriage, birth and death interspersed with accounts of dinner parties and shopping trips, the ups and downs of relationships, the likes and dislikes, triumphs and failures that are the stuff of all human experience. I always want to know what happened next, how things turned out. Did the marriage for which everyone had planned and schemed take place? Was it a success? Did the baby that seemed so sickly survive? Did the business venture prosper? Was a husband ever found for the awkward youngest sister, or a profession for the lacklustre youngest son?
Secondly, I so enjoy the way the letter- and diary-writers tell their stories. The eighteenth-century voice, in its most formal mode, can be stately and remote; but in more relaxed correspondence, the prevailing tone is quite different. Letters between family and friends have an immediacy and a directness that rarely fail to engage the reader. Educated eighteenth-century writers were extremely candid: there were few subjects that they considered off limits. They were intensely interested in themselves and their own concerns, thinking nothing of filling page after page with detailed analyses of their health, their thoughts, and the nature of their relationships, marital, professional or political. They were tremendous gossips. Some of them were also very funny, caustic, satiric, masters (and mistresses) of an ironic tone that feels very modern in its knowingness and is still able to raise a smile after so many years.
It is very easy, reading their letters, to feel that the people who wrote them are just like us. For me, that is part of the appeal of the period, and it is, to some extent, true. But in other ways, the reality of their lives is almost impossible for contemporary readers to appreciate. In the midst of a world that seems so sophisticated and so recognisable, eighteenth-century people encountered on a daily basis experiences which would horrify a modern sensibility. Outside the well-managed homes of the better-off, extremes of poverty and the brutal and degrading treatment of the powerless and vulnerable were everywhere to be found. Even the richest families lived with the constant spectre of sickness, pain and death and could not protect themselves against the disease that decimated a nursery, the accident that felled a promising young man or the complications that killed a mother in childbirth. There is a drumbeat of darkness in all the correspondence of this period that makes a modern reader pause to give thanks for penicillin and anaesthesia.
Many of the letter-writers who so assiduously chronicled the ebb and flow of family life were women. Then, as is perhaps still the case now, it was women who worked hardest to cement the social relationships that held scattered families and friends together. One of the ways they did this was by writing to everyone in their social circle, passing on news, advice and scandal, describing their feelings and speculating on the motives and emotions of those around them. This sprawling world of the family, especially the lives of women and children, is the territory I have always found most compelling. I am fascinated by the inner life of this intimate place and am endlessly curious about how it worked. I always want to find out who was happy and who was not, how duty was balanced with self-interest, and how power worked across the generations.
It was via these paths that I eventually came to fix upon the grandest family of them all as a suitable subject for a book. I had always been interested in George III, that much-misunderstood man, in whom apparently contradictory characteristics were so often combined: good-natured but obstinate, kind but severe, humane but unforgiving, stolid but with the occasional ability to deliver an unexpectedly sharp and penetrating insight. At first, however, it was the story of his wife and daughters that most attracted me. Queen Charlotte’s reputation was, both in her own time and afterwards, equivocal at best. In her lifetime, she endured a very bad press, excoriated by her critics as a plain, bad-tempered harridan, miserly and avaricious, interested principally in the preservation of rigid court etiquette and the taking of copious amounts of snuff. The real story, as her letters and the diaries and correspondence of those around her reveal, was rather different. Charlotte was never easy to love or, in later life, to live with, but she had a great deal to bear. She was a very clever woman in an age that found clever woman unsettling. Her intellectual appetite was unequalled by any of her successors, but could never be expressed in a way that threatened established expectations about how queens were supposed to behave. She spent nearly twenty years of her life in a state of almost constant pregnancy. In public she embraced this as the destiny of a royal wife; but, as her private correspondence makes clear, she resented the decades spent in child-bearing. Before it was crushed by the horror of the king’s illness, from which she never really recovered, and the pressures of her public role, which she sometimes found almost impossible to endure, her personality was much more