Sarah Lennox

Lady Sarah Lennox (1745–1826) was a daughter of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, and one of the celebrated Lennox sisters whose marriages, correspondence and social connections placed them near the centre of Georgian aristocratic life. As a teenager Sarah attracted the attention of the young George III, and contemporaries believed for a time that the king might wish to marry her. Dynastic and political considerations prevailed, however, and George married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761.

Sarah married Sir Charles Bunbury in 1762, but the marriage became unhappy and was eventually dissolved after her relationship with Lord William Gordon. In 1781 she married the soldier George Napier and spent much of her later life in Ireland, raising a family whose sons included several prominent officers. Her surviving family correspondence is valuable evidence for aristocratic domestic life, marriage and female sociability in the later eighteenth century. The youthful attachment between Sarah and George III was real, but later retellings have sometimes exaggerated it into a more definite royal love affair than the evidence allows.

Dinah Lampitt’s As Shadows Haunting makes Sarah’s connection with George III central to a time-slip story linking the Georgian past with a modern musician. The novel develops the possibilities of the king’s attraction and Sarah’s later emotional life far beyond what can be documented. Descriptions that call Sarah an established “mistress” of George III should therefore be treated as fictional or promotional shorthand rather than a secure historical status.