The monarchs we never had
Princess Charlotte (1796-1817)
Who was she?
In exchange for paying his debts, which by then amounted to an enormous £630,000, George, prince of Wales, agreed to marry any woman his father George III approved of – and that woman had to be ‘a Protestant and a princess’ (unlike the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert whom George had already illegally married).
The wedding of the profligate 32-year-old George and his first cousin, the 26-year-old Princess Caroline of Brunswick, duly took place in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace in London on the evening of 8 April 1795. The prince arrived very drunk and was obviously reluctant to proceed. He refused to look at his bride but frequently eyed his current favourite, Lady Jersey.
On 7 January 1796, exactly nine months after her parents’ ill-fated wedding, Charlotte Augusta was born at Carlton House in London. Her birth was something of a miracle as George later claimed that he and Caroline had had sexual relations no more than three times in the whole of their marriage.
… She who is called the Princess of Wales, the mother of my daughter, should in no way be concerned in the education or care of the child, or have possession of her person … to my daughter I leave my jewels, which are mine having been bought with my own money – and to her who is called the Princess of Wales I leave one shilling …
Prince George's 'will', written on 9 January 1796, two days after Charlotte’s birth
By the time she was a few months old, Charlotte's parents were effectively separated, and her mother's time with her was severely restricted by her father. In 1799, Caroline was effectively banished to The Pagoda, a private residence in Blackheath, south of London, where she carried on affairs with a number of notable men.
Charlotte had an extremely difficult childhood, never knowing where she stood with either George or Caroline. Her volatile nature, inherited from both of her parents, made her crave love and acceptance. But her parents were caught up in the war they waged against each other and saw Charlotte as just another weapon.
In summer 1804, George III, who was sympathetic toward Princess Caroline and estranged from his son, expressed a desire to have Charlotte live with him so that he could supervise her upbringing. He may have felt that Carlton House, the hedonistic prince’s headquarters, was not a proper environment for a young girl.
Over the next months. there was a tug of war over who was going to control the raising and education of Princess Charlotte. The prince was willing to accede to his father's wishes, but only if Princess Caroline had no say in her daughter's education. The king wanted his daughter-in-law to be party to decisions about her daughter – so Charlotte remained at Carlton House.
Finally, in late November, a tentative reconciliation took place between the prince of Wales and the king and they reached agreement over Charlotte. She was to remain under her father's care, living at Warwick House (next door to Carlton House) whenever the prince was in London. The rest of the year she would reside at Windsor Castle. Her mother would have only very limited visitation rights. The king would nominate her governess, but only the prince could give final approval. Charlotte was always to be kept under strong guard with attendants of her father's choosing.
Charlotte did not react well to all this. A tomboy and a reckless horsewoman, not at all like a conventional Regency girl, she also had violent temper tantrums when thwarted. She saw her life as deadly dull and thought an evening spent stitching with her grandmother (Queen Charlotte, after whom she had been named) and four maiden aunts was tantamount to a death sentence. It may have been his hatred of Caroline that made her father so unwilling to recognise her as heir to the throne. But she had become aware of her position early, and his attitude towards herself naturally prompted her to take her mother's side in their quarrels.
Charlotte grew into a headstrong and difficult teenager, although the novelist and diarist Fanny Burney thought her quite beautiful. She developed definite Whig tendencies, which made her very popular with the people. This did not sit well with the prince of Wales, who had defected to the Tories. When they drove out together, Charlotte was cheered when her carriage passed, but there was dead silence when the prince’s did. Matters did not improve when George was finally appointed regent in 1811, his father having suffered another mental breakdown.
When Charlotte was 16, the prince regent decided that the best way to deal with her was to marry her off, and a suitable candidate was found in the prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne. Charlotte agreed at first, but then raised objections after hearing of her intended’s drunken escapades at Ascot races. The fact that the marriage contract stipulated that she would have to live in Holland for six months of every year was also probably not an incentive.
She then transferred her affections to Prince Augustus of Prussia, a man considered beneath her who was already (secretly) married. When George found out that she had been meeting Augustus clandestinely, he was furious and even her mother refused to sympathise with her. Her father tried to force her compliance: he dismissed her attendants, ordered Warwick House closed and sent her to Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park with ladies-in-waiting who were little more than jailers. But Charlotte refused to give in, and she was kept at Cranbourne from July 1814 to January 1816. Her treatment by her father won her mention in the poetry of both Byron and Shelley, who justified her rebellion and attacked the prince regent for his actions.
At about the same time as her daughter was being sequestered at Windsor, Caroline left England for the Continent. This followed an unsuccessful investigation ordered by Prince George into whether a four-year-old in the princess of Wales’ entourage was actually the offspring of his wife and one of her footmen. Caroline was not to return to England until three years after Charlotte’s death.
Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who had fought at Waterloo, had spotted Charlotte on a visit to London. While she was locked up in Cranbourne Lodge, he lobbied the prince regent for the right to court her. He impressed George’s ministers and made friends with one of his brothers, the duke of Kent, and so got permission to press his suit with the prince’s daughter.
The 26-year-old German was somehow able to tame as well as attract Charlotte. They were married in May 1816 and went to live at Claremont, near Esher in Surrey, a wedding gift from the nation. There is every indication that this was a happy union. But the prince regent, who had always wanted the prince of Orange as his son-in-law, hated it.
How did she die?
In the first nine months of the marriage, Charlotte suffered two miscarriages, then conceived a third time. Despite the fact that her grandfather George III had had seven sons and five daughters, Charlotte was his only legitimate grandchild and thus the only eligible heir to the British throne in her generation. So when, in early July 1817, the newspapers announced that Charlotte was five months pregnant, the entire country began closely following this most important story.
Although healthy at the beginning of the pregnancy, Charlotte’s health gradually deteriorated due to the strict diet and bloodletting prescribed by her doctors. On 3 November 1817, she went into labour. Some 50 hours later, on 5 November, she was delivered of a nine-pound stillborn baby boy. Five-and-a-half hours later, the 21-year-old princess died of post-partum haemorrhage and shock.
‘Two generations gone – gone in a moment!’ wrote Leopold to a friend.
I have felt for myself, but I have also felt for the prince regent. My Charlotte is gone from the country – it has lost her. She was a good, she was an admirable woman. None could know my Charlotte as I did know her. It was my study, my duty, to know her character, but it was also my delight.
Charlotte was buried in St George's Chapel, Windsor, with her son at her feet. Her death was mourned nationally, on a scale similar to that which followed the death of Princess Diana in 1997. The contemporary writer Harriet Martineau described it: ‘Never was a whole nation plunged in such deep and universal grief. From the highest to the lowest, this death was felt as a calamity that demanded the intense sorrow of domestic misfortune.’
Three months after she died, Sir Richard Crofts, Charlotte's obstetrician, committed suicide, unable to bear the burden of responsibility for the death of the heir to the throne. As this event had resulted in the death of the infant, the patient and the physician, it is referred to by medical historians as the ‘Triple Obstetric Tragedy’.
What were the consequences?
As Charlotte's death left the prince regent without any direct heirs, it resulted in a mad dash towards matrimony by most of her bachelor uncles. The marriage of one of them – Leopold’s friend, the duke of Kent – produced an heir: the future Queen Victoria. Charlotte’s father finally became king in his own right in 1820 as George IV. But when he died in 1830, it was his younger brother, the duke of Clarence, who ruled for seven years as William IV before Victoria began her long reign.
Charlotte’s death completely changed Leopold’s life. He acted as principal adviser to his young niece Victoria, and in June 1831, he was invited to become king of the Belgians, after they gained their independence from the Dutch. Fifteen years after he had lost Charlotte, he married Louise-Marie, daughter of Louis-Philippe of France, and they had four children. In 1840, in a curiously fitting act, Leopold engineered the marriage between Victoria and his nephew Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.
