#METOO in the Georgian Court: Mary Hamilton and George IV
In the early summer of 1779, Mary Hamilton was in a sticky situation. The 23-year-old bluestocking, who was working as sub-governess to three of the daughters of George III and Queen Charlotte, found herself bombarded with dozens of secret love letters from their brother, the 17-year-old Prince of Wales and future George IV. In an age when reputation was everything for a young woman, and she had no parent, guardian or workplace support to protect her, the stakes could not be higher. Should Hamilton risk offending her current monarchs by giving too favourable a response to the Prince’s advances, or risk insulting her future one by rejecting them too forcefully?
In recent years, academics from the research project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers have been piecing together, transcribing and editing the extraordinary corpus of 139 letters which ensued between Mary Hamilton and the Prince of Wales. In the past, historians and biographers have largely focused on the Prince’s side of the correspondence, seeing the episode as a semi-comical love story or crush which shows a softer side to the young man who would later become the depraved Prince Regent and unpopular monarch. But this approach only tells half the story. If we take Hamilton’s distinctive voice and evolving perspective into account, the pursuit looks remarkably like unwanted sexual harassment. The letters she wrote, and the diaries she kept later in life, contain evidence of her frustration, fear, distress, and ambivalent feelings about her future monarch. They reveal the resourceful strategies she adopted to keep him at arm’s length and preserve her precious reputation intact. They can tell us an enormous amount about gendered court politics of the late eighteenth century, and the ways that women in such an environment might have coped with unwanted attentions from male superiors. In this talk, Sophie Coulombeau guides the audience through the correspondence, makes her argument for a case of #MeToo in the Georgian Court, and explains why Mary Hamilton’s voice still matters today.
Dr. Sophie Coulombeau is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York, and Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers. She is the author of Reading With the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2024), editor of New Perspectives On The Burney Family (special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, 2018), and co-editor of Mary Hamilton And Her Circles: Gender, Manuscript, Sociability (special issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, forthcoming in 2025). She is General Editor of the Burney Journal. She is also a published novelist, a regular broadcaster for BBC radio, and a contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, and History Today.
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