now we are six; Flora Fraser's Princesses is a fascinating look at the claustrophobic upbringing of George III's daughters.(book)(Book Review)

Byline: Hamish Bowles

With the flamboyant prince of Wales at their head, the sons of King George III were a famously disreputable lot who proved a sore disappointment to him. But the king and his wife, Queen Charlotte, doted on their daughters: Charlotte (the Princess Royal, known simply as "Royal" to friends and family), Augusta, Elizabeth, Mary, Sophia, and giddy Amelia, the family's pet. That said, while the royal parents married their sons off over the years to a gaggle of German princesses, they kept their daughters on tight reins at home. George III dismissed battalions of potential suitors-European princes all-with a brusque finality that weighed heavily on his increasingly frustrated girls. Thus deprived of the dynamic dynastic matches that would have ensured their places in history, the sisters have remained ciphers. But in her compelling and poignant study Princesses (Knopf), Flora Fraser investigates their sequestered world, uncovering the gossip, trivia, and scandals that filled the lives of the six women whom spiteful niece Princess Charlotte once dismissed as a "parcel of old maids."

The three eldest at least had the attentions of their exemplary if imperious mother, who summoned the famed actress Sarah Siddons for lessons in declamation, invited fashionable artists and musicians to nurture the girls' considerable creative talents, and, unusually, had them taught languages, classical literature, and geography. But with the onset of her husband's madness-it was in 1788 that he suffered the first of his attacks, addressing courts of imaginary subjects for days on end-she more or less abandoned the education of her three youngest.

At Frogmore House, moments from Windsor Castle, the queen created what was essentially a flowering prison for all six. Having their days filled "with walks, reading, work, and a collection of engravings," she wrote, "our time passes, if not joyously, at least reasonably, and that is all qu'il nous faut." For the princesses this life was stultifying. "We go on vegetating as we have done for the last twenty years of our lives," Elizabeth wrote pitifully. ". . . How I long to be married, married before my beauty decays." In her Windsor cottage, she pathetically put pieces of friends' wedding cake under her pillow in the forlorn wives'-tale hope that a bridegroom might come her way, too. At 48, the improbable happened when she was allowed to marry Frederick of Hesse-Homburg, a gargantuan "reeking warrior prince," in Fraser's memorable phrase, with a penchant for meerschaum pipes. Her mother grudgingly conceded that she was old enough to make up her own ...