The Princess That England Lost

Princess Charlotte of Wales was England's grand hope for the future, directly in line for the throne after the infirm King George III and the buffoonish Prince Regent George IV. She fought for her independence, for the ability to choose her own husband, and ultimately succeeded. But her love story was short-lived.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaronminkie. Listener discretion is advised.
Princess Charlotte of Wales, the only legitimate grandchild of King

(00:23):
George the Third of England, the woman who was directly
in line to become Queen of England herself, died in
the early hours of the morning on November sixth, eighteen seventeen,
and plunged the entire nation into mourning. She was the
beloved daughter of the country, the bright light of a

(00:43):
nation that had been battered down by war with Napoleon.
Her grandfather, George the Third, had gone mad, and her father,
the hedonistic and philandering Prince Regent future King George the Fourth,
was hated by the people. She alone, Charlotte had been
their hope for the future. The country had celebrated with

(01:07):
her when she married Prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg selfeld
and eagerly placed bets on the sex of her infant.
When it was announced that she was pregnant, no one
was prepared to lose her. Charlotte was just twenty one
years old and she had been married to her husband
for only a year. She died just hours after giving

(01:30):
birth to a stillborn son, a child that, had he lived,
would have become a King of England. After her death,
stores closed for two weeks, and not just stores, the courts,
the Royal Exchange docs even gambling parlors closed. On the
day of her funeral, Linnen drapers ran out of black

(01:54):
cloth because frivolous decoration was forbidden during official morning at
a sir and point. Ribbon makers had to petition the
government to shorten the morning period to prevent them from
going bankrupt. Poets ranging from Felicia Harman, Letitia Elizabeth Langdon,
Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, they all wrote about Charlotte's death.

(02:17):
In Byron's poem, he wrote a stanza that goes scions
of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou fond hope of
many nations? Art thou dead, could not the grave, forget
thee and lay low some majestic less beloved head. The
physician who had been attending to Charlotte as she delivered

(02:40):
her child, and who had been treating her as she died,
was a man named Sir Richard Croft, a baron. Though
female midwives had traditionally delivered infants. At the turn of
the nineteenth century, it became fashionable to have male midwives,
sometimes called a coucher, deliver one's child. Three months after

(03:03):
Charlotte's death, her loss and the grief of the entire
nation continued to weigh heavily on Dr Croft. While he
was in the home of another patient, with the woman
delivering a child upstairs, Croft went down to their study,
sat in a high backed chair, and shot himself in
the head with a gun. For all of the extreme

(03:27):
heartache that Princess Charlotte's death caused at the time, today
she is rarely discussed. She's a historical footnote, eclipsed by
another bright, romantic young woman, the future Queen Victoria, Charlotte's cousin,
born two years after Charlotte's death, ironically to fill the

(03:49):
gap in succession that Charlotte left behind. Had Charlotte lived,
the course of history would have been irrevocably altered. But
history is all of miss Rhodes and false starts, And
the fascinating, maddening thing about monarchy is that the fates
of entire nations do change with the fates of individuals.

(04:13):
Princess Charlotte was progressive and adventurous and dreamed of becoming
queen and undermining the tired conservative Tory regime of her
father and grandfather. But instead she spent her entire short
life as a pawn, first upon under parents who loathed
each other, then by a government that wanted her to

(04:35):
be a tool of diplomacy, then by men who wanted
to marry her, and then by the political parties who
saw her popularity as a means to their own ends.
In the aftermath of Sir Richard Croft's death by suicide,
investigators on the scene noticed that a book had fluttered
open nearby, purely out of coincidence. It was a copy

(04:58):
of the Shakespeare lay Love's Labor's Lost, and it was
open to Act five, Scene two. On the page, mere
feet from where the slumped body of the man whose
guilt had consumed him, were the words, fair, sir, God
save you. Where is the princess? I'm Danish Wartz and

(05:21):
this is noble blood. To call the marriage of Princess
Charlotte's parents an unhappy one would be a vast understatement,
almost to the point of being misleading. The union of

(05:42):
the future George the Fourth of England and Caroline of
Brunswick was nothing short of calamity. George the Fourth, the
oldest son of King George the Third, was a disastrously
unpopular figure in England at the time, routinely mocked in
the press with character chairs. The perception of him, and

(06:03):
not necessarily an incorrect one, was that he was an overindulged, irresponsible,
vain man and not too intelligent. He womanized frequently and
spent extravagantly. When having his portrait painted, he forced servants
to help squeeze him into a girdle several sizes too

(06:23):
small to try to cut a more fashionable figure. In
my estimation, George the Fourth suffered from the tragedy of
being a prince in an era when princes were no
longer considered God's vessels on earth. There was an irreconcilable
disconnect between his own sense of his importance and his

(06:44):
actual abilities, and this just happened to coincide with the
age when it was easier than ever for the population
to draw and distribute mean cartoons about him. The historian
James Chambers, in his book Charlotte and Leopold, describes the
then prince's failings. In almost poetic terms, quote, he longed

(07:06):
to be regarded as the leader of fashion, the nation's
foremost sportsman, and the most eminent connoisseur of art and architecture.
To that end, he had squandered absurd sums on clothes
and horses, and he had lavished fortunes on building and
embellishing his pavilion in Brighton and his home in London,

(07:27):
Carlton House, each of which he had crammed with an
indiscriminate clutter of both exquisite and tasteless pictures and furniture
end quote. As you might imagine, desperately trying to buy
his way into being respected and thought of as smart.
Didn't do much for George except rack up his debts.

(07:50):
By sevento his debt had reached over six hundred thousand pounds,
and his annual allowance from the Privy Purse of sixty
thousand pounds was barely enough to even cover the interest.
The government had already bailed him out once by this point,
and they would not happily do so again. George, who

(08:11):
at this point was Prince of Wales, only had one option.
He needed to get married. If the Prince made a
suitable marriage, the first step to him fulfilling his duty
of providing the kingdom with an air. His allowance would
be increased to one hundred thousand pounds annually in theory
to provide for a larger household. It was the money,

(08:35):
more than any sense of duty, certainly not love, that
motivated George, then in his mid thirties, to get married.
Well a brief but important side note here, technically, George
already was married, or at least he thought he was,
almost a decade before. When he was twenty three, he

(08:58):
had secretly, and without the permission of his father, the King,
had a private wedding with a woman named Maria fitz Herbert,
who just so happened to be Catholic. If that sounds
familiar to you or you're getting deja vu, I did
an episode all about this secret marriage years ago, a
very very early episode of this podcast called What I

(09:20):
Has Wept for George the Fourth. But to the vast
relief of the King's cabinet, the marriage between George and
Maria fitz Herbert was easily nullified. It broke a handful
of laws. First, any royal marriage needed the approval of
the King, but second, and more importantly, Maria fitz Herbert

(09:41):
being Catholic meant that the marriage was invalidated automatically by
both the Bill of Rights of sixty nine and the
Active Settlement of seventeen hundred, and so, needing to make
an appropriate and legal marriage, George selected from among the
small pool of eligible foreign princess is his first cousin, Caroline,

(10:03):
Duchess of Brunswick. The diplomat Lord Malmsbury, came to Brunswick
to escort Caroline to her new home in England, but
fairly quickly Malmsbury realized that the match might be troublesome
for the Prince. Allegedly, Caroline's behavior was rowdy and uncouth,
and Malmsbury reported that she didn't wash or change her

(10:26):
clothes often enough. There were rumors about Caroline being unsuitable
even before the Prince had chosen her, but the prince's
mistress at the time, a woman named Lady Jersey, was
all too happy to encourage the match between her lover
and a woman who was considered unpleasant and undignified, where

(10:47):
there was no risk of him growing to love her
more than her. So George made his choice and then
appointed his mistress Lady Jersey as his new wife to
bes Lady in waiting. The alleged and oft repeated anecdote
about Prince George meeting his future wife Caroline in person
for the first time right before their wedding is that

(11:09):
after greeting her, he went pale as a ghost and
called out for his friend Harris. He said, I'm not
feeling well. Pray get me a glass of brandy. But
some of the English reports about Caroline being unladylike need
to be, in my opinion, given just a little bit
of indulgence. When Caroline first arrived in England after a

(11:33):
long and arduous journey through a Europe besieged by Napoleonic War,
her future husband was not at the port to greet her. Instead,
the only representative from her new home was Lady Jersey,
whom Caroline quickly and correctly gleaned was her fiance's mistress.

(11:53):
At her first dinner with George the Fourth, Caroline made
a number of jokes poking fun at her soon to
be husband, blatant in discretions which he and the rest
of the court were aghast at, but which I personally
feel Caroline was perfectly in her right to do, no doubt,
a tiny attempt at staking out a little bit of

(12:16):
power and a little humor in a very vulnerable and
uncomfortable situation. Meanwhile, Prince George was loudly mocking her to
his friends, calling her ugly and unhygienic, and speculating that
she wasn't a virgin. Not that it matters, but remember
George was most certainly not a virgin himself. And though

(12:38):
most people recount the story of the prince asking for
brandy after their first meeting, it should also be noted
that Caroline wasn't impressed with her future husband either. He's
nothing like as handsome as his portrait, she said as
she was leaving. It was a marriage doomed from the start,

(12:58):
and though on their wedding night the Prince was so
drunk that he slept on the floor, they did manage
to consummate the marriage very shortly after, and nine months
after the wedding and January seven, seventeen ninety six, Caroline
gave birth to a little girl, young Princess Charlotte. Three

(13:18):
days after that, George separated from his wife and declared
that their union was all but over. King George the third.
George's father, Hervard, hoped that the couple would eventually reconcile
and have a baby boy, but fairly quickly it became
apparent that would never happen. George and Caroline despised each

(13:41):
other and their only child, their daughter, Charlotte, was caught
in the middle. For a period during Charlotte's childhood, they
all lived in the same mansion, Carlton House in London,
albeit on different floors, but eventually Caroline moved to Blackheath,
an area of southeast London, and when Charlotte was eight

(14:03):
years old, she moved to another palace, Warwick House, and
was given her own household, and so from eight years
old on Charlotte was surrounded only by people who were
paid to be with her. Charlotte was in direct line
to be queen after her father, and as heir presumptive,
she was incredibly well educated. Although some historians remarked that

(14:28):
Charlotte was not particularly studious or a natural scholar, she
was bright and inquisitive and interested in poetry, politics, and literature.
When Jane Austen's novel Sentence Sensibility came out at the time,
published anonymously, authored only by quote a lady. Charlotte read

(14:49):
and enjoyed it, and even wrote to a friend that
she related to the character of Marianne. Because her father
was a royal prince and Charlotte was a ill air.
Her father had full custody of care. But when she
was young, Charlotte still saw her mother frequently and spent
her summers in Blackheath to spend even more time with her.

(15:11):
But all of that changed after something that came to
be known as the Delicate investigation. Separation hadn't made Charlotte's
parents grow fonder, In fact, living their own separate lives,
each taking on their own extramarital flirtations, their mutual dislike

(15:32):
turned to loathing. Meanwhile, both of their reputations took a
turn for the worst. George was considered frivolous for his
overspending in the time of war against Napoleon, and while
Caroline was popular among the people, gaining sympathy and seen
as a jilted wife among the nobility, she was derided

(15:53):
for her informality and her suggestive and crude behavior. Living
on her own, separated from her daughter, Caroline informally adopted
around eight poor children paying for their education and their
room and board. The rumors started that one of the children,
a boy named William Austin, was actually Caroline's biological child,

(16:19):
an illegitimate son born out of wedlock. The rumor was
likely started by Caroline herself, who found it funny to
laugh at little William's antics and joke that the boy
was actually hers and George's. Of course, the scandal of
the wife of the future King of England bearing a
son can't be overstated. It would throw the entire line

(16:43):
of succession into question. The matter was so important that
the question as to whether or not Caroline had had
another child was actually given over to a commission that
included the Prime Minister, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief
Justice of England and Wales, and the Home Secretary. Members

(17:04):
of Caroline's household staff confirmed that she was sometimes flirtatious
with visiting male suitors, but they had no actual evidence
that she was having an affair, let alone that she
had ever been pregnant or had another child. And there
was also the small matter of young William Austin actually
having a mother who came and visited him at the palace.

(17:25):
Often the delicate investigation was closed, and though the commission
remarked that some of Caroline's behavior might have been a
little less than seemly, there was no actual evidence of
an affair or an illegitimate child. With the end of
the investigation also came the end of the hope George

(17:47):
had no doubt been carrying that he would finally have
recourse to get an official divorce. Their poor daughter, Charlotte,
was caught in the middle of it all. Kept from
her mother during all of us by her father. She
would write George letters asking for permission to see her mother,
or at least to write to her. At one point

(18:09):
during the investigation, George was so intent on keeping his
wife away from their daughter that Caroline was forbidden from
acknowledging her daughter. When their carriages happened to pass in
the park one afternoon, Young Charlotte wrote about the event
to her father, recounting that she had seen but not
spoken to her mother, worried that if she didn't tell him,

(18:31):
he would be upset at her. Respectful as she was
of her father's wishes, it seemed that something of her
mother had inadvertently rubbed off on Charlotte. People noted that
though she was beautiful, her table manners didn't quite match,
and Charlotte wore ankle length drawers that showed at the

(18:52):
hem of her dresses in a scandalous manner. And even
more scandalous, when Charlotte was a teenager, she began a
little romance with a man named Charles Hess, a captain
of the eighteenth Light Dragoons. Charles had a reputation as
a cad but Charlotte was captivated. He was her first love,

(19:15):
and they exchanged romantic letters back and forth. It likely
went no further than that, although at one point Charlotte
was staying with her mother and Caroline. Ever, the joker
locked the sixteen year old in her room with her
sweetheart and told the pair to amuse themselves. Still, like
most childhood loves, this one faded into the background, and

(19:39):
by the time Charlotte turned seventeen, talk turned in earnest
to finding her a husband. The front runner, at least
in her father's mind, was easy William, the Hereditary Prince
of Orange, son of the newly minted Sovereign Prince of
the Netherlands, a title that their family had reclaimed after

(20:01):
Napoleon's men were driven out of Holland. In George's mind,
tying his daughter, the future Queen of England, to the
future King of the Netherlands was a brilliant strategic move
to secure British influence in the northwest part of Europe.
Charlotte was less convinced. For one, she wasn't too keen

(20:23):
on getting married at all. She was hoping to bide
her time. When the rumors started swirling that she was
already engaged to William of Orange, Charlotte jokingly replied that
she actually favored another suitor, the Duke of Gloucester. The
princess's marital prospects were such a hot topic of conversation

(20:43):
that her off handed remark was spun the way a
celebrity's on the red carpet might be today. There was
breathless coverage as to whether Charlotte would choose the Orange
or the cheese, a reference to Gloucester cheese. The two
and both named William, were dubbed by the popular press

(21:04):
slender Billy and silly Billy. But aside from charlotte antipathy
towards marriage as a whole, there were some actual problems
with William of Orange. For when he was sickly, pale,
and not too attractive. A friend of Charlotte's went to
scope him out when he arrived in England and reported

(21:25):
back an account that politely could be characterized as damning
with faint praise. Charlotte had attended a dinner with her
suitors father and he and the rest of the men
in attendance got blackout, slipped down from the table, fall
onto the floor drunk, which didn't do much to ingratiate

(21:46):
her to the Orange clan. But all that aside her
mother hated the Oranges. There was old European family bad
blood there, and as much as George tried to persuade
his her to marry William of Orange, Caroline was making
herself clear on the position. In the other direction. There

(22:08):
was another small matter that worried Charlotte at this moment
that isn't quite relevant to the larger story, but which
I find I just have to share because of how
absolutely modern it feels. While Charlotte was weighing a possible engagement,
she was preoccupied with terror about the letters she had
sent to her old flame, Captain Charles Hess back when

(22:30):
she was sixteen. She had burnt all of the letters
that he sent her, but he almost certainly had not
done the same. To make matters worse, Captain Has had
already departed for the continent with his regiment. Charlotte begged
her best friend, Mercer elephant Stone, which is incidentally just
a great name, to secure those letters, and Mercer wrote

(22:54):
to the Captain. Captain Has wrote back that no, Princess
Charlotte's letters were not destroyed, but they were safe in
a trunk back in England, and if he died in battle,
he had told a friend to put the trunk at
the bottom of the Thames. It never came to that,
and ultimately Captain Has returned and did destroy the letters.

(23:17):
We assume, but I find something very relatable about Charlotte
desperately enlisting a friend to try to get an old
flame to destroy evidence of their possible impropriety. But back
to Charlotte's primary suitor, the Prince of Orange. On December twelfth,
eighteen thirteen, George arranged dinner for his daughter to sit

(23:41):
down and meet the Prince of Orange face to face
at a dinner party. Halfway through, the Prince Regent called
his daughter aside and asked if she had made a decision. Well,
his personality seems fine enough so far from the very
little I've seen of it, she said. Her father reacted

(24:01):
with a resounding cheer and walked back in announcing that
Charlotte had agreed to the match. It took several more
months for the actual marriage contract to be ironed out,
and I'll spare you the exceedingly boring details there, but
the big picture was that they decided that if Charlotte
had two sons, one would be the King of the

(24:22):
Netherlands and one would be King of England, and that
was the end of that. Charlotte, Princess of Wales future
Queen of England, was engaged, or rather that was supposed
to be the end of that. In the two years
that Charlotte was engaged to William of Orange, she grew

(24:42):
less and less excited by the idea of actually marrying him.
It didn't help things that at a large banquet celebrating
the soldiers of the war against Napoleon, Charlotte saw her
well frail and underwhelming fiancee next to far more attractive
men in uniform. One of those men, Prince Frederick Augustus

(25:06):
of Prussia. Charlotte fell head over heels four, and she
often referred to her infatuation with the prince in her diaries,
anonymizing him as f Prince. August even called on Charlotte secretly,
of course, and it took her best friend Mercer, arriving
to Warwick House and bursting in on them to remind

(25:28):
Charlotte that this sort of meeting was not the appropriate
conduct for a princess. But Charlotte was well aware that
the real problem here wasn't her little indiscretions. It was
that she simply did not want to marry William of Orange.
When she and Williams sat together for the first time
after they had gotten engaged, William commented that Charlotte would

(25:53):
need to spend two or three months out of the
year in Holland with him. Charlotte burst into tears and
fled from the room. She didn't want to go to Holland,
and there was a political angle to that as well. Politically,
Charlotte was a Whig, a young progressive. Her father had
been a Whig two in his youth until he became

(26:15):
regent for the mad King George the Third and transitioned
toward the more conservative Old school pro monarchy Tory party,
where Charlotte's father was incredibly unpopular. Charlotte and her mother
were beloved by the people, and the Whigs knew that
having Charlotte and Caroline in the country, the bright young

(26:37):
daughter and the discarded wife, was politically prudent. Wig politicians
whispered to Charlotte that some set her father was eager
to marry her off to a foreign prince because he
resented her popularity in the country, and once Charlotte was
gone it would be easier to get Caroline to move
abroad as well. The English population and began to view

(27:01):
the marriage as a choice Charlotte was making between her
two parents. People would shout at her in the streets,
telling her not to give in, not to abandon her
mother and Mary Orange. Eventually, Charlotte wrote to William of
Orange and told him no, she did not want to
leave England to live in the Netherlands for any period

(27:21):
of time, and she also put to him a question
that she already knew the answer to, would her mother
Caroline always be welcome in their home at court. William
of Orange apologized, but told Charlotte no, given caroline scandals
and the fact that George, the Prince Regent of England,
hated her. He couldn't agree to that, and so Charlotte

(27:45):
made up her mind. She broke off the engagement with William.
Her father, George, was livid. He came to her London
house and berated her for her insubordination, and he declared
that all of her servants would be dismissed and that
she would be sent to live in the remote Cranborne
Lodge in Windsor, without permission for any visitors except her grandmother.

(28:09):
Charlotte was outraged right then and there she ran out
into the street. In architect, looking out the window in
one of the buildings next door, noticed this woman clearly
in distress, either crying or having recently been crying. He
went downstairs and asked the young woman if he could

(28:30):
help her. She asked him for help summoning a Hackney cab,
something she had never done before. The architect helped her
summon the cab, and when it came, he insisted on
escorting her to her destination. It wasn't until they arrived
at her mother's address, where the servants bowed deeply to
the princess, that the man realized who his fellow passenger

(28:53):
had been wouldever rescue Charlotte was expecting at her mother's house.
She didn't find it. She was miserable, disheveled, and angry.
Her mother wasn't home, and so she sent messengers to
summon her back, and she also had several other prominent
whigs joined them in the meeting. In the end, they

(29:15):
all decided that the prudent thing for Charlotte to do
was go back to her father's house and accept his punishment,
and so, miserably, the runaway princess returned, still unwilling to
marry William of Orange, but ready to accept her father's
terms of exile to Windsor. The stunt made the public

(29:37):
love her even more, and word of her father's cruelty
of keeping the princess under house arrest traveled widely. It
was even broached by one of the princess's allies in
the House of Commons, Caroline. The princess's mother wasn't allowed
to visit her, and Caroline soon decided that a life
on the continent would be far more amenable to the

(29:59):
tenth situa wation. With her husband in England, Caroline left
for Italy, never to see her daughter again, and Charlotte,
who had rejected the Prince of Orange at least in
part out of not wanting to abandon her mother, became
the one feeling abandoned. George could only hold out against

(30:19):
the tide of public sympathy for so long. After a
few months of isolation, George allowed Charlotte to go visit
not fashionable Bristol, but at least somewhere Weymouth. Huge crowds
arrived to cheer her every leg of the way, with
people throwing their hats in the air and shouting Hail

(30:39):
Princess Charlotte, Europe's hope and Britain's glory. Her father, George,
still held out hope that she would come around and
marry William of Orange, but Charlotte held fast still she
would need to get married, and by the end of
eighteen fourteen, she herself had picked a front runner, not

(31:00):
a dashing prince f that she mooned over. He was
a cat scandalous, never a real choice to begin with,
and even more heartbreaking, Lee had seemingly moved on to
another woman. No, Charlotte made a pragmatic decision. She settled
on the dashing prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg. Charlotte had

(31:23):
actually met Prince Leopold before in a meat cute that
feels right out of a rom com, when she was
in the process of breaking up her engagement with the
Prince of Orange. She was meeting with the visiting Czar
of Russia at the Pultney Hotel in London. Worried that
she might actually run into Orange, and hoping to avoid
the awkward running, she snuck out towards a back staircase

(31:45):
and ran, actually ran into a man in uniform, Prince Leopold.
He introduced himself and offered to escort her back to
her carriage. If you're a prince, Charlotte asked, why you
not called on me formally like all of the others.
Prince Leopold apologized and promised that he would rectify the error,

(32:07):
and he did formally, calling on the princess a few
days later and writing to her father to state his intentions.
All of it was very much above board. George wasn't
particularly moved by Leopold, who had few connections and less money,
and Leopold eventually left with his regiment for the continent,

(32:29):
but Charlotte's mind was made up. No arguments, no threats,
shall ever bend me to marry the detested Dutchman. She
wrote in a letter to a friend, she would marry Leopold, or,
as she called him, the Leo. Charlotte did the thing
that so many of us do when we have a

(32:49):
crush on a new person. She began casually bringing him
up in conversation, inquiring about him to her friends and relatives.
What do you think of Prince Leopold, you know, just asking,
just curious. She kept telling her best friend Mercer, to
write him, passing hints along that she wanted him to

(33:09):
come back to England. Finally, her father, George yielded, and
in February eighteen sixteen, eighteen months after Charlotte and her
Prince's meet cute at the hotel, the Prince Regent invited
Leopold and Charlotte to invite him for dinner at his
home in Brighton. During the dinner, everyone got along swimmingly.

(33:33):
It didn't hurt things that just a few weeks earlier,
William of Orange had finally moved on and married someone else,
which meant that George's favorite horse was out of the running.
He conceded that Prince Leopold was an appropriate match with
quote every qualification to make a woman happy. Charlotte was thrilled.

(33:56):
I find him charming and go to bed happier than
I have ever done yet in my life. I am
certainly a very fortunate creature and have to bless God.
She wrote, A princess never I believe set out in
life or married with such prospects of happiness, real domestic
ones like other people. Charlotte and Leopold were married two

(34:20):
months later, May second, eighteen sixteen, during a dazzling ceremony
in which Charlotte donned a silver gown that cost ten
thousand pounds. It's address you can still see today if
you go to visit the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at
Hampton Court Palace. The only part of the wedding ceremony

(34:41):
that didn't go exactly as scripted was during the ceremony itself,
when the groom was promising to endow his new wife
with all of his worldly goods, and Charlotte, knowing that
her husband was basically broke and she was the rich one,
couldn't help a giggle. They were a beloved couple, young

(35:02):
beautiful and in love. When they made public appearances at
the opera or theater, people would burst out into spontaneous
applause or singing of God Save the King. They were
enough during a time when the rulers were the infirm,
mad King George the Third and his detested regent George
the Fourth to make people believe in the monarchy again.

(35:25):
When Charlotte announced less than a year later that she
was pregnant, it's impossible to overstate how delighted the public was.
There was betting in halls about the sex of the child,
and economists at the time predicted that the stock market
would raise by two point five percent if she gave
birth to a princess and six percent if it was

(35:47):
a prince. November three, eighteen seventeen, Charlotte went into labor
overdue at forty two weeks. The baby was lying horizontal
in the womb, and the physician, attending, a trendy male
midwife named Sir Richard Croft, made the decision, in line

(36:09):
with the popular school of thought at the time, that
using forceps would be more harm than good. Doctor Croft
also determined that a cesarean section would be too dangerous,
whether or not he made the right or wrong medical decision,
it's impossible to know. After being in labor for two days,

(36:30):
Charlotte gave birth to a stillborn boy, nine pounds by
all accounts, the baby was beautiful and looked just like
his royal parents. The doctor tried chest compressions and water
baths on the baby and mustard rubs, but the baby
never breathed. Charlotte seemed to recover, at least well enough

(36:52):
that her frantic husband, who had been by her side
for the entire ordeal, was willing to take an opiate
to get some sleep but side her. But just five
hours later, Charlotte began bleeding heavily. She was cold to
the touch and whispered of pain in her abdomen. Before
her husband could even be woken up. Charlotte was dead.

(37:17):
My Charlotte is gone from the country. It has lost her.
Leopold cried when he saw his wife's body, gone cold
and white. Two generations lost in an instant. The nation
mourned with him. Charlotte's father, the Prince Regent George, was
so distraught that he couldn't even bring himself to attend

(37:38):
her funeral. Charlotte's mother Caroline, who had been out of
the country and hadn't seen her daughter since eighteen fourteen,
passed out when she heard the news. Though Leopold and
George had both assured that doctor Croft that he had
made the correct medical decisions. A few months later, doctor
Croft shot himself in an armed share, unable to shake

(38:01):
the grief of an entire nation from his shoulders. Even
though King George the Third had had incredibly fifteen children,
thirteen of whom had reached adulthood, he had no more
legitimate grandchildren. His younger sons had seemed happy just to

(38:22):
enjoy the company of their mistresses, but with Princess Charlotte's
death there was a succession crisis. George the Third's middle
aged children were now in a frantic race to be
the first to have a legitimate heir. The winner was
his fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent, who married a

(38:43):
young German princess in May eighteen eighteen, the year after
Princess Charlotte's death. The year after that, the German princess
gave birth to a baby girl at Kensington Palace, whom
they named Alexandrina Victoria, Although she's better known by the
name she would have when she ascended to the throne

(39:03):
at age eighteen, Queen Victoria. That's the story of Princess
Charlotte of Wales, her marriage, and her death. But keep
listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little

(39:24):
bit more about the men in her life after she
was gone. Prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg had only been
married to Princess Charlotte, the woman who had fought and
advocated to marry him, for a short time, but he

(39:46):
never forgot her. He would eventually become King of Belgium
and he would marry again, and he and his second
wife would have living heirs. Leopold would insist on naming
their only daughter, Charlott It in honor of the woman
he once loved. Unfortunately, Little Charlotte has a slightly tragic end.

(40:08):
She would marry a man named Maximilian and they would
go to Mexico as Emperor and Empress, where she would
change her name to Carlotta. If you want to hear
more about her, you can listen to another very early
episode of this podcast called Today we Leave for Mexico.
Princess Charlotte of Wales's other former Paramore. William, Prince of Orange,

(40:31):
also went on to live a fascinating life. He was
allegedly bisexual, and he was blackmailed about it in eighteen nineteen.
Now I want to be on the record blackmail is
always bad, but there are actually theories that he was
blackmailed into signing constitutional reforms that actually led to Netherlands

(40:52):
becoming a parliamentary democracy. So what can we say except
history truly is a rich tapestry. Noble Blood is a
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from

(41:14):
Aaron Minky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz.
Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
The show is produced by rema Ill Kali and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I

(41:36):
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M