Caroline was hardly romantic queen material. She wasn't a looker and let's face it, the pretty princesses always seem to be more popular than their uglier royal sisters. She was reported to have a distant relationship with her bathroom and rarely changed her clothes. Not keen on education or culture, she had little conversation. And just like her husband, she seemed to prefer the charms of people she wasn't married to.
The Prince got married because Parliament wouldn't give him any more money unless he found a wife. And nabbing the heir to the throne of England was a pretty good deal for a princess from the remote German principality of Brunswick. It was all going so well until they actually met and got married.
From that moment, they hated one another. Some estimates put their total time together as man and wife at three days. However long it was, it was enough to produce a little girl called Charlotte who became heiress to the throne. When the little princess was around nine her parents indulged in a proper marital ding dong, played out in the courts, as the future king had his wife investigated after rumours emerged she had had a son with another man. Desperate for a divorce, he dragged his wife's name and reputation through the mud but not enough of it stuck to prove she had produced an illegitimate child and his poor treatment of her only added to her growing popularity. By the time he became king in 1820 his spending had taken any gloss off the gorgeous George of his youth while his wife's down to earth nature and humiliation at the hands of her royal husband made her an unlikely heroine for many.
Caroline faced the problem that many queens had encountered - once the heir was in the nursery, what should the mother's influence be? The crown nearly always went to a man because of primogeniture meaning, unlike most other families, a royal baby's mother and her relatives weren't as important in the child's upbringing. Queens like Eleanor of Aquitaine retained control because they were important politically. But women like Caroline or her predecessor as Hanoverian consort, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, were excised from their children's lives when their marriages broke down even if their husbands were as keen on extramarital affairs as the royal women involved.
No wonder Caroline looked so annoyed in this portrait from the end of her life, her time as princess and queen had been pretty hard going
Even today, there is much debate about the influence the family of the future Queen of England should have on the royal baby due in July. The Duchess of Cambridge is reported to want her mother and sister in the delivery room with her leading to heated discussion about whether the Middleton family should have such a major role at the beginning of a new monarch's life. While other women in their early thirties are almost expected to have a gaggle of family members supporting them during labour and birth, Kate Middleton is criticized by some for doing what comes naturally for thousands of others.
Nearly every other Queen of England found that royal babies, from the very beginning, were state matters with rules and regulations beyond her control and little room for her influence when it came to their upbringing. In any other modern marriage, we'd be horrified if the wife was expected to take a backseat and only allow her family in when it suited the inlaws. I hope that this future Queen of England gets a fairer deal in that regard than her predecessors.
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