Late on the sultry evening of the 8 September 1761, a crowd of chattering courtiers squeezed into the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace to witness a royal wedding. In the capital city of a country she had never set foot in before, a 17-year-old Princess, struggling with a gown too big and too heavily bejewelled for her slender frame, married a man she had only set eyes on for the first time six hours earlier, Britain’s new King, George III.
It was the beginning of one of royal history’s longest and most eventful unions. What happened to the bridegroom is, of course, a well-known story: countless plays, books and TV shows have chronicled George’s descent into the so-called ‘madness’ which eventually necessitated his retirement from public life. Yet the woman he married that evening
