Her moral world remained that of her parents and grandparents, in which obligation was more important than personal happiness, and religion was the only meaningful expression of faith. She was a conservative, politically, morally and spiritually, most at ease in the confines of the established order, and unsettled by any attempts to undermine its power. These were qualities which would have appealed very strongly to George, who prized them in himself. Nor would he have been necessarily dismayed by her literary interests. It was not so much intellectual capacity itself which he distrusted in women, as the desire to give it a public, and above all a political, meaning. Charlotte never sought to build a reputation for herself as a clever woman; hers were private passions, pursued with decorous and entirely characteristic self-effacement. Indeed, when Colonel David Graeme, sent by the king to Mecklenburg to begin the formal negotiations for her hand, first met her he was underwhelmed by her accomplishments. He thought she spoke French ‘but middling well’, and was surprised that she had no knowledge at all of English. He saw too, as Munchausen had warned, she possessed little of the social polish that more urbane girls of her age and status could usually command. That Charlotte had talents, Graeme was sure; he just did not believe they had been fostered as they deserved. Only one of her skills truly impressed him: he was intrigued to discover that she had taught herself to play the glockenspiel, an instrument of which Graeme had never heard. It produced, he explained, ‘a bright and agreeable sound’.23
Two weeks after George had made his decision to ‘fix here’, he had instructed Graeme, a friend of Bute’s, to set out for the duchy, taking with him the formal offer of marriage. It was a slow journey, the roads ‘either overflowing with water or deep sand’, and it took Graeme more than a fortnight to get there. When he arrived, he was horrified to find that the widowed Duchess of Mecklenburg, to whom he had been told to explain his mission, was seriously ill. A series of ‘violent cramps’ had, he wrote to Bute, confined her to bed and ‘deprived her of speech’.24 Graeme carried with him a letter from the Dowager Princess Augusta, proposing her son as a husband for Charlotte. Unable to carry the document directly to the duchess, he entrusted it to Charlotte’s sister Christiane, who read it to her sick mother. When Graeme met the rest of the family at dinner later that night, it was plain that everyone now knew about the offer of marriage except the person most concerned by it. They had decided to tell Charlotte nothing, so that ‘by having no disturbance in her mind, she would converse more freely’, and Graeme could observe her natural behaviour. Unconscious of his scrutiny, Charlotte clearly acquitted herself well and some time after dinner was informed of the possible future that awaited her.
How she responded to this extraordinary announcement is not known. The story that she sat stoically silent, unmoved, without looking up from her sewing, is probably apocryphal. Her family were certainly far less restrained. They recognised what an unlooked-for opportunity had fallen into their laps, and were desperate to grasp it with both hands. Only Christiane must have found it hard to join in the general rejoicing. The terms of the marriage treaty forbade any other member of Charlotte’s family from marrying an English subject; having been thwarted in his own desire to marry ‘a countrywoman’, the king wanted no ambitious British in-laws intriguing from the sidelines. This put an abrupt end to Christiane’s romance with the Duke of Roxburghe, who had met her whilst travelling in Germany, and ‘had formed an attachment to her which was returned’.25 Unable to marry each other, neither Christiane nor the duke ever married anyone else. He dedicated his life to the collection of rare books; she became a cloistered royal spinster, an unacknowledged casualty of her younger sister’s marital good fortune.
Christiane’s fate registered not at all on the rest of the Mecklenburg family, who hastened to reply to a list of questions posed in Augusta’s letter. Alongside the formal declarations of the princess’s age, religion and availability – her brother eagerly confirmed that she was engaged to no one else – Graeme sent back to London a more intimate report of his own. Intended for the king’s eyes, this was in effect a candid, first-hand portrait of Charlotte. Inevitably, it began with an assessment of her looks. No one ever thought Charlotte a beauty, and throughout her life her supposed plainness was remorselessly and woundingly satirised. In middle age, she was depicted in cruel caricatures as a crow-like hag, or a bony, miserly witch, an emaciated spider, all arms, legs and chin. Even as a young woman, she was often described as plain and charmless. Recalling her first arrival in England, the diarist Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, thought Charlotte presented a very unappealing figure: ‘She was very ill-dressed, and wore neither rouge nor powder … her hair used to be combed tight over a roller, which showed the skin through the roots, than which nothing can be more frightful.’26
Graeme’s pen portrait of her was more kind. She was very slender, he wrote, and of medium height; her complexion was ‘delicate and fine, with an abundance of red, not to be called a high bloom but as much as, in my opinion, there should be at her age, and sufficient to relieve the lustre of a very fine white’. Her hair, one of her best features, was a pale brown. Her nose was acceptable in shape and size, but her mouth, later to attract the delighted attention of the caricaturists, was, he admitted, ‘rather large’. She had a little growing still to do. She was just seventeen, and ‘the appearance of her person is not quite that of a woman fully formed, nor may it be expected at her age, though the bosom is full enough for her age and person’. She was, he had been told, healthy, and carried herself well, ‘the whole figure straight, genteel and easy, all her actions and carriage natural and unaffected’. In conclusion, he declared, as so many others were to later do, that ‘she is not a beauty’, but ‘what is little inferior, she is amiable, and her face rather agreeable than otherwise’.27
If Graeme was cautious in his careful evaluation of Charlotte’s looks, he was far more effusive in his description of her character. The more time he spent with her, the more he grew to like her. He warmed to her artlessness, and was delighted when she sent him a bowl of cherries as a present. When her sick mother died only days after the marriage offer had been received, Graeme was moved by Charlotte’s ‘flowing tears’; she confided in him that the duchess’s last words had been a wish for her happiness, and declared herself ready ‘to render herself worthy of that station … before tears again stopped her utterance’. Throughout her grief, he noted with approval, she showed ‘not the least spark of hauteur’. Her unworldly rectitude amused him. He was amazed to discover with what detail she had researched the services of the Anglican Church before solemnly assuring him that she would have no difficulty in conforming to them. He could not imagine that she could be so seriously attached to ‘some inessential points’ that they would prevent her ‘paving the way to a throne’.