A royal affair Book

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.