Janet Howarth

Kate WilliamsHutchinson   414pp   £20ISBN 987 0091 794798  ‘Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead?’ wrote Byron of George IV’s daughter Charlotte (1796-1817) when she died in childbirth at the age of twenty-two. Immensely popular in her lifetime, Charlotte is less well-known to posterity than her mother, George’s rejected wife Queen Caroline, whose trial was among the causes célèbres of the century. A youthful, feminine figure amongst the reactionary and dissolute later Hanoverians, Charlotte paved the way for her cousin Victoria, who became Queen in 1837.