ABSTRACT
When Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818) arrived in England in 1761 to marry George III of Great Britain and Ireland, Horace Walpole (17171797), taste-maker and letter-writer, marvelled at the fantastic quality of this story of a princess from a minor branch of a north German ducal family being plucked from obscurity to marry the ruler of one of Europe’s richest powers, conqueror of the French in the Americas and India during the Seven Years War. She arrived in the week bringing news of a flurry of British victories: the fall of French-held Pondicherry in India; the defeat of the French Marshals Soubise and de Broglie at Waldinghausen in the Westphalia region of north-west Germany; and the capture of Santo Domingo from the Spanish Bourbons in the Caribbean. Thinking of the French neo-chivalric romances of the reign of Louis XIV, with their heroic deeds and impossible geographies, still avidly read when he was a young man and when his father Robert Walpole (1676-1745) was Prime Minister, Horace Walpole joked:
…it is all royal marriages coronations and victories; they come tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe, that it looks just like the handiwork of a lady romance-writer, whom it costs nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Moghul in love with a Princess of Mecklemburg [sic] and defeat two Marshals of France as he rides past on an elephant to his nuptials. I don’t know where am! I had scarce found Mecklemberg-Strelitz [sic] with a magnifying glass, before I am whisked to Pondicherri [sic]...How the deuce in two days can one digest all this? Why, is not Pondicherri [sic] in Westphalia?1
