The sub-title of this book invites the expectation of a rather closer symbiosis between royal patronage and classical scholarship than is subsequently disclosed. Caroline, Princess of Wales and despised wife of the future George iv, was an accidental patron, for when Sir William Gell, fatigued by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis and his royal employer’s protracted continental peregrinations, resigned his office as one of her chamberlains in 1815, it was Caroline’s grant of a substantial pension that (however unreliably forthcoming) encouraged the scholar to take up residence in Naples and begin the most productive phase of his archaeological activities. Neither did Gell enjoy such largesse for long – the pension being rescinded, much to his chagrin, on the death of his patron in 1821. Nor did the princess ever exercise the sort of dedicated support provided by Elizabeth Duchess of Devonshire, who lived for a time in Rome and sponsored excavations together with conspicuously sumptuous publications; Gell’s Le Mura di Roma, published in Reference Gell and Nibby1820, is dedicated to her.

The book occupies a place a little uneasily in a series that sails under the flag of ‘gender analysis’, Palgrave Macmillan’s Queenship and Power series, whose stated purpose is to understand ‘the strategies that queens … pursued in order to wield political power within the structure of male-dominant societies’. Caroline, disowned by her husband, was only very briefly a queen, and one contentiously denied a crown. Despite her strivings for autonomy, she was more controlled than controlling, and it is her essential powerlessness that is poignantly illuminated as she drags her entourage, with its scholarly and increasingly disillusioned chamberlain, around states and statelets in the Mediterranean, sometimes to the pleasure and sometimes to the dismay of their rulers. These travels of the princess, mildly encouraged by the British government as they got her out of the way, were for her at once an extravagant gesture of would-be independence, an expression of curiosity and an evasion of accumulating debts; she was hopelessly improvident.

Part i of the book, ‘A Princess and her Chamberlain’, tells the story of the friendship of the classical archaeologist with his royal benefactor. Cold-shouldered by the Prince of Wales, Caroline compensated for her isolation at court by surrounding herself with artists, scholars and writers, seeking perhaps to be a Queen of Arts rather than a Queen of Hearts. Endowed with a lively mind, she relished the same quality in others. Into her orbit came Sir William Gell: wit, dandy, antiquary, traveller, socialite and brilliant conversationalist, he won Caroline’s effusive affection and the two were soon on familiar terms. A social fixture, Gell was known to everyone; in today’s parlance, he was a great networker. Enjoying a well-established scholarly reputation before he encountered Caroline, Gell became in his Neapolitan years a conduit for new ideas in archaeology, though lauding his adopted kingdom’s ‘jolly despotism’ and its prudent aversion to modish programmes of political reform. With his speed and ease of draughtsmanship (Byron applied to his name the epithet ‘rapid’), and his intuitive comprehension of topography, his skills were of service in the years before the advent of photography and new methodologies in archaeology and classical historiography. When contemplating publication he preferred to eschew the new mass market for books, being happier under the protection of the Society of Dilettanti, ‘which rejoiceth in publications not tangible by the common bookseller’.

The second part of the book contains Caroline’s letters to Gell, which she composed after he left her service, and are here published for the first time; Gell’s letters to Caroline do not survive. Comparing an existing typescript copy of the letters with the originals, now deposited in the Derbyshire Record Office, the author has corrected many errors in the text and appended copious elucidatory footnotes. His was no mean task, since Caroline’s eccentric English is heavily inflected with equally idiosyncratic French and German. The letters are useful source material for historians of the Regency period, but apart from their entertainment value, which is considerable, they are of limited interest to the historian of archaeology.

Jason Thompson has produced in this book an absorbing and enlightening supplement to our knowledge of Sir William Gell and his milieu. Readers who are curious about Gell as an archaeologist will find it a useful background to Edith Clay’s (Reference Clay1976) edition of his letters to the Society of Dilettanti. There is, however, a sprinkling of slips and typos. Both the sense and scansion of the third line of the unpublished stanza from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, printed on page 21, require that the adjective ‘mighty’ be substituted for the noun ‘might’.