SEX, LIES AND LUCKY ESCAPES

From illicit affairs to assassination attempts, Felicity Day reveals the scandals that rocked the court of King George III and Queen Charlotte, whose relationship is the focus of a new Bridgerton spin-off series

- Felicity Day

It's often said that the court of George III and Queen Charlotte was dull and censorious. "The palace of piety," Horace Walpole called it. The royal couple were famously frugal, and far from having a bevy of buxom mistresses like his grandfather George II, the king had no woman in his life but his wife, mother of his 15 children. He and Charlotte were known to look askance on the adultery and excesses of their aristocratic subjects.

Yet their court was to be rocked by scandals - and the biggest of them were of the royal family's own making.

CRIMINAL CONVERSATION I

t was one of George III's brothers who dragged the family into the scandal sheets in his first decade as king. In December 1769, the papers divulged that an assignation between Henry, Duke of Cumberland, and his lover, Lady Grosvenor (sister of one of the queen's ladies) had been interrupted by her husband's servants. The pair had been caught together in a bedchamber at a busy coaching inn in St Albans, their clothing in disarray. Lord Grosvenor had promptly hauled the duke into court, and during a trial for 'criminal conversation' with his wife, all manner of embarrassing details about the rakish royal were revealed - from the apparent enjoyment he had taken in dressing up in disguise for their secret trysts, to the lamentable spelling in his love letters.