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The Most Miserable Royal Marriage of All
The weddings of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle and Princess Eugenie to Jack Brooksbank make it clear that marriages in the English royal family are made for love.
It wasn’t always this way.
For centuries, the monarchs of England married to forge alliances with other European countries, with the side benefit of dowries fat enough to fill depleted royal treasuries. For example, in 1662, Charles II’s bride, Catherine of Braganza, was said to have brought with her a dowry of 2 million Portuguese crowns, plus the port of Tangiers.
Many of these marriages evolved into working partnerships within which some affection, and perhaps even love, developed.
But there were very unhappy ones too.
Three of Queen Elizabeth’s four children divorced their first spouses, but this wasn’t easily done in the past. Unhappy kings could imprison their queens, as Henry II did with Eleanor of Aquitaine, or execute them, as Henry VIII did with Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard (he managed to annul marriages to two other queens too).
In the annals of royal matrimony, however, there is nothing quite like the marriage of George IV to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. It kept going from bad to worse, until reaching the nadir of George’s coronation on July 9, 1821, when at the age of…
