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  During Charlotte’s labour the officers of state crowded into the breakfast room which, like Leopold’s dressing room, also opened directly into Charlotte’s chamber. By 8 a.m. on the Tuesday morning quite a crowd was assembled, including the two archbishops, Mr Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Earl Bathurst, Minister of War and the Colonies, and other aristocrats and political leaders. Naturally, the midwife, Mrs Griffiths, and several ladies of the court were also in attendance. By Tuesday morning Charlotte’s pains had begun to get weaker and Sir Richard sent for a second obstetrician, Dr Baillie, who was his brother-in-law. Charlotte herself was stoical, keeping a promise to Mrs Griffiths not to ‘bawl or shriek’.

  A second vaginal examination was performed at 11 a.m., but the cervix had only dilated slightly, in readiness for the expulsion of the baby. Sir Richard Croft drafted a letter to be carried by hand to a third royal physician, Dr John Simms, a 69-year-old botanist with an uncertain interest in obstetrics. Then vacillating, Croft held the letter back. The officers of state and the bystanders continued their wait. Finally at 9 p.m. on the Tuesday, another examination showed the neck of the womb to be fully open, but by this time Charlotte had been in labour for twenty-six hours and she was almost too weak to push out the baby.

  To add to Charlotte’s problems she was probably also very anaemic. The diet recommended for aristocratic women who were pregnant had little meat and was especially light in vegetables, the two best sources of iron available. In addition she had been bled several times. Three months earlier Charlotte had written to Croft, ‘I am certainly feeling much better for the bleeding’. One month before delivery a press statement announced that, ‘Her Royal Highness submitted to four incisions in the arm without effect in consequence of the veins being deeply buried . . . [therefore] blood was ordered to be drawn from the back of the hand where the operation has been several times successfully performed . . . with great relief to her Royal Highness.’

  The practice of ‘therapeutic’ bleeding was virtually universal until well into the nineteenth century. If, for example, a woman’s periods were too heavy or too light or didn’t come at all, she was bled. Blood was removed either by leeches or by opening a vein. European obstetricians recommended a woman ‘be bled at least three times, in the fifth, the seventh and last month in order to avoid haemorrhage and to prevent the child from growing too large’. If a woman haemorrhaged at delivery more blood was taken from her veins.2

  The labour pains during the second night of Charlotte’s ordeal were irregular and weak. Croft and Baillie had attended enough labours to know that things were going wrong, but it may have been their very familiarity with the dangers of childbirth that made Croft dither. Eventually, Croft sent the letter he had written earlier to Simms, who arrived well after midnight. The doctors consulted in Leopold’s dressing room but Simms still did not see Charlotte directly.

  Obstetric forceps had been in use for well over one hundred years and consisted of two separate blades, much like modern forceps, and a pair had been taken to Claremont in case of a difficult delivery. Each blade could be passed around the baby’s head and then slotted into each other like a pair of tongs. The blades applied traction to the head while protecting it.3 Medicine, however, is a cautious profession, and those who advise royalty are usually particularly conservative. Predictably, Croft did not use the forceps he had brought along. At noon on 5 November some meconium from the baby dribbled from the vagina. Meconium is the greenish-yellowish contents of an infant’s gut and it is an important sign that the foetus is distressed.

  Fifty hours after her ill-fated labour began, at 9 p.m. on Wednesday 5 November Charlotte delivered a stillborn child. The distress after so harrowing an experience must have been doubly painful when it was realized that the baby was the boy every princess yearns for. For one hour, heroic efforts were made to resuscitate the child. Its lungs were inflated and everything possible attempted, from ‘rubbing salt and mustard’ and ‘putting brandy in its mouth’. In retrospect, it seems likely the child had been dead for some hours, perhaps since the middle of the day.

  Although the stillbirth was a great tragedy, Charlotte was young and there was no reason why she should not conceive many more times. Mrs Griffiths, the midwife, wept bitterly and it was the bereaved Charlotte who comforted her, saying it was the ‘will of God’. The officers of state, having been shown the dead body, retired after their long sad vigil.

  Uterine contractions were now too weak to expel the placenta and once again the three obstetricians consulted. It was agreed that Sir Richard Croft should remove the placenta by hand. He wrote afterwards, ‘In passing my hand I met some blood in the uterus but no difficulty, until got to the contracted part [of the uterus]. . . . I afterwards peeled off nearly two thirds of the adhering placenta with considerable facility.’

  The operation, no doubt, added to Charlotte’s already considerable distress. When it was completed, she felt a final labour pain. Croft speaks of the loss of ‘very little fluid blood or coagulum’. As was the contemporary practice, a broad bandage was then placed round Charlotte’s abdomen, probably by Mrs Griffiths. The princess’s pulse was steady after the removal of the placenta and she showed great courage and stamina; ‘talked cheerfully and took frequently of mild nourishment’ – chicken broth, hot wine, toast and brandy. At one point Charlotte joked that her attendants were trying to make her tipsy. The obstetricians retired to bed but around midnight the princess began to show signs of blood loss, complaining of ringing in her ears. She vomited once and showed ‘extreme restlessness and great difficulty breathing’. Almost certainly Charlotte was bleeding into her uterus but the bandage would have made it difficult to detect any enlargement. If, as we have seen, she was already anaemic due to an inadequate diet and two or more episodes of blood-letting during pregnancy, then her extreme state is easy to understand. Croft was called and noted her pulse had passed the hundred mark and was feeble and irregular.

  Other likely diagnoses have been suggested, including a pulmonary embolus or an attack of porphyria. In the case of an embolus a clot of blood forms in the veins of the pelvis or legs and then breaks off to lodge in the lungs and bring about death. We have noted that Charlotte may have shown symptoms of porphyria earlier in her life and a fatal attack can develop after an otherwise normal delivery. The record of excitement and difficulty in breathing would fit with such a diagnosis. A later writer claimed Charlotte put her hands over her abdomen and cried, ‘Oh, what a pain!’, but this may well be an embellishment to already dramatic events.

  Whatever the correct diagnosis, at 2.30 a.m. on the morning of Thursday 6 November 1817 Princess Charlotte died. Her husband, Leopold, was by her side. Her father the Prince Regent received news of his daughter’s labour and travelled to London from Suffolk, but did not arrive until after her death. Her mother was in Italy and even by December did not really know what had happened. Queen Charlotte was in Bath and heard of her granddaughter’s death late the same day. The old king, George III, now senile and confined to Windsor Castle, never knew of the death of both direct heirs to his throne.

  In keeping with the British royal tradition the corpses were embalmed the next day. Already there was controversy over the cause of death and Sir Everard Home, the king’s sergeant-surgeon, turned the embalmings into post-mortems. ‘The child was well formed and weighed nine pounds. Every part of its internal structure was quite sound.’ The brain and lungs of the mother were normal but, ‘The uterus contained a considerable quantity of coagulated blood and extended as high as the navel and the hour glass contraction was still apparent.’ The stomach and intestines were dilated.4

  The princess and her child were buried at Windsor on 19 November, amid widespread and sincere national mourning. The harvest had been bad, and the victory at Waterloo two years earlier seemed less glorious against rising unemployment and depression. On the day after Charlotte’s death, The Times reported, ‘we never recollect as strong and general an expression
and indication of sorrow’. Later it was said, ‘It was really as if every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child’. The Duke of Wellington called the tragedy, ‘one of the most serious misfortunes the country has ever met with’. Lord Byron heard about the death while he was in Venice and wrote, ‘The death of the Princess Charlotte has been a shock even here and must have been an earthquake at home’. Even Napoleon, exiled to the remote island of St Helena after his defeat at Waterloo, commented, ‘What has happened to the English that they have not stoned her accoucheurs?’

  In fact, Prince Leopold, the Prince Regent, and Baron Stockmar, the prince’s personal physician from Coburg, all wrote to Sir Richard Croft commending his ‘zealous care and indefatigable attention’. Looking back with today’s knowledge, then if Charlotte died from blood loss, her life might have been saved on two occasions; first, by forceps delivery some time earlier on the Wednesday, and second, by more careful management after the manual removal of the placenta. The risk of intra-uterine bleeding following delivery, with few or no external signs, was understood at the time. Unfortunately, the habit of binding the abdomen after delivery interfered with Croft’s ability to follow what was happening.5

  Sir Richard was deeply burdened by a sense of total failure and inadequacy. The press and the coffee gossips of London were less kind than Prince Leopold and the Prince Regent, and Croft remained depressed, sleeping poorly. However, he was still sought after as an obstetrician and in February 1818 attended the wife of one of the king’s chaplains, Revd Dr Thackeray. In a reversal of roles, Thackeray noticed the physician’s depression and entreated him to rest. ‘What is your agitation compared to mine?’ snapped back Croft. A few days earlier, a fellow surgeon said Sir Richard was ‘so melancholy, that it was quite distressing’, adding, ‘his mind was so absorbed that he would not give answers to questions’.

  On the night of 13 February 1818 Croft retired to his rooms in Wimpole Street. The Revd Thackeray and his wife were also sleeping overnight in his house. At about 2 a.m. they heard a noise, like someone falling off a chair, but took no notice of it. A little later a servant girl found Sir Richard ‘on his back, with a pistol in each hand; the muzzles of both were at either side of his head. He was quite dead.’ A post-mortem was held the same day and the jury returned a verdict of ‘Died by his own act, being, at the time he committed it, in a state of mental derangement’. They commented on the fact that just prior to his death he had been reading Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and had reached the page with the words, ‘God save you! Where’s the Princesse?’ The twentieth-century obstetrician, Sir Eardley Holland, who wrote at length about Charlotte’s death, aptly described the whole sad episode as a ‘triple obstetric tragedy’.

  With the death of Princess Charlotte there was once again no British heir to the throne. The old demented George III was still alive but senile and he died three years later. His son, the Prince Regent, was fifty-eight years old and the death of Charlotte and her stillborn son had eliminated his only legitimate grandchild. His numerous sisters and sisters-in-law were all past child-bearing age. George III and his wife Queen Charlotte had had fifteen live born children – the largest brood born to any British monarch – and thirteen of them survived to be adults. The next generation had produced eleven illegitimate children; even one of the royal princesses, Sophia, contributed her quota, but there were now no legitimate grandchildren. With Charlotte’s unexpected death, the succession stakes were in disarray.

  TWO

  DYNASTIC CLIMBERS

  Leopold married Princess Charlotte in 1816. His family dukedom took its name from Coburg in what is now northern Bavaria in Germany. Its ancient and picturesque buildings survived the Second World War and it is still dominated by the Veste Coburg castle, with steep pitched roofs and battlements, on the hill above the town and the later Ehrenburg Palace below. Leopold’s ancestors had a long history in this small picture-postcard town, and thanks to his ambitions and abilities, his descendants and collaterals were to rule, for a while, half the world.

  Like the Habsburgs, the family of Coburg gained more by mating and parenthood than Napoleon or Charlemagne ever did by the sword. In medieval times the lands that are now Germany were divided into numerous small principalities loosely joined together as the Holy Roman Empire, which historians hasten to point out was not in any way an Empire, could hardly claim to be Roman and certainly wasn’t Holy. Coburg was one of the smaller fragments of the Holy Roman Empire – a freckle on the map was one description – and was ruled by the House of Wettin. As the Reformation spread among the patchwork of states, some remained Catholic and others became Protestant. One of the Wettin heirs, John the Constant, gave sanctuary to Martin Luther. Protestant loyalties led to Coburg’s defeat but the family remained staunchly anti-Catholic. In one seventeenth-century siege, they offered to hang anyone thinking of converting to Catholicism over the castle battlements in chains. It was the staunch Protestant tradition of the Coburgs that made them suitable marriage partners for the British monarchy.

  The family suffered alternately from over-fertility and extravagance. In the seventeenth century, Ernst the Pious saw the Coburg lands divided between seven sons. In the eighteenth, the Duke Ernst Francis married Sophia Antoinette, whose high-spending ways contributed to his bankruptcy. Their eldest son, Francis Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld1 (1750–1806), married twenty-year-old Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf in 1777 and proceeded to have nine children. Augusta, like other aristocratic women, used wet-nurses and often became pregnant within a few months of delivery.

  It was this large brood which began the Coburg climb up the European dynastic ladder. The first step was relatively unexpected. In 1795 the Tsarina Catherine of Russia, herself a German, summoned Duke Francis and his family to St Petersburg so she could select a bride for her second grandson, the Grand Duke Constantine. Although it seemed unlikely a Coburg bride would ever sit on the throne of Russia, it was an honour for the small impecunious German family and the household promptly set out on an overland trek and voyage of well over one thousand miles to St Petersburg.

  Like a good fairy tale, the grand duke had to choose between three young sisters, Sophia, seventeen, Antoinette (named after their overspending grandmother) sixteen, and Juliana, aged fourteen. All were considered marriageable by eighteenth-century aristocratic standards but none was consulted as to whether they wished to wed a man they had never seen and whose language they could not understand. However, the actual mate selection turned out to be more of a pantomime than a fairy tale. As the princesses alighted from their coach, watched by the tsarina from a window, the eldest princess tripped over her train and fell out of the coach flat on her face. The second princess got down on her hands and knees to help her sister. Fourteen-year-old Juliana, however, had the regal good sense to gather up her long dress and get down from the coach gracefully. She had sufficient poise to impress the tsarina and was chosen as the bride. The grand duke, in a show of hostility that was to characterize the marriage, commented, ‘If it must be so, I will marry the little ape. It dances very prettily.’ Constantine was even more sadistic than most in the Russian royal family and was known to knock out the teeth – and even the eyes – of his soldiers, and to test their discipline by marching them into the river up to their chins before ordering the about-turn.

  Juliana, like many of the Coburgs, was strong willed but after six years of domination by the grand duke, she left and returned to Coburg – still childless. It is unlikely Juliana suffered from primary sterility, that is the inability to bear children due to hormonal or anatomical defects, but it is possible that as a fourteen-year-old she was not fully mature sexually. There is evidence that the age of first menstruation has fallen in western countries from about seventeen to twelve since the early nineteenth century. It is also known that the first few menstrual cycles after puberty may not be associated with ovulation. Perhaps by the time Juliana was ovulating, the marriage relationship had deteriorated and
Constantine was already enjoying the many alternative sexual outlets available to a Russian grand duke. Constantine’s brother, who was then the reigning Tsar Alexander I, allowed Juliana a divorce and Constantine a morganatic marriage with a second wife – a marriage which was legal but which required the grand duke to renounce his claim to the Russian throne.

  Had Constantine and Juliana remained married a Coburg would have reigned as tsarina when Alexander I died without an heir in 1825, but the House of Coburg had to wait another hundred years before one of their members sat on the Russian throne. Nevertheless, Juliana’s marriage did help her siblings on their dynastic climb. Her two sisters, who had fallen from their carriage in St Petersburg, both married minor European noblemen, and Juliana’s marriage gave her brothers Ernst and Leopold access to the Russian Court. They became instant generals in the Russian army, Leopold at the tender age of fifteen. Summoned to fight in the war against Napoleon, they arrived a few days too late to be present at the Russian defeat at Austerlitz (1805).

  The House of Coburg was usually on the losing side in battle and the winning side in bed. In 1806 the town of Coburg was overrun by Napoleon’s army. Depressed by defeat, Duke Francis died of pneumonia, leaving his nine children to recover the family fortunes in marriage. Tsar Alexander took up the cause of his ex-sister-in-law’s family and talked Napoleon into restoring their lands.

  Ernst, who was now duke and ever ready to marry up among the royal families of Europe, became engaged to the tsar’s sister, the Grand Duchess Anna. Unfortunately he also established a sexual liaison with a young and beautiful Greek woman, named Pauline Panam. Pauline, disguised as a boy, followed Ernst back to Coburg and shortly afterwards announced she was carrying his child. The kings and aristocracy of Europe fathered many bastard children, and sometimes they were abandoned, sometimes their mothers were paid off and occasionally they were given titles, as were the children of William IV. Pauline, however, was doubly problematical, now that Ernst was officially engaged to the duchess. Pauline proved to be a spirited lady unwilling to be discreetly put away. As the pregnancy became more visible, Ernst lodged her with his twenty-year-old sister, Victoire, but from her chambers she complained loudly to both Ernst and his mother, the widow Augusta. In one exchange of letters, Augusta chided, ‘No, Pauline, neither you nor your child will ever become objects of hatred or persecution: . . . unless you seek to act the part of a mistress. In such case you would experience my utmost severity.’ And, Augusta added, cognizant of the sufferings of childbirth in the early nineteenth century, ‘Adieu, Pauline, I pray God that he may enable you to meet with fortitude the painful moments that await you’. Pauline called her son Ernst after his father, and sensibly retired to Frankfurt on a small pension from her former lover. Eventually news of the scandal she caused reached the Court at St Petersburg and Ernst’s betrothal to Grand Duchess Anna was broken. Later Pauline wrote some profitable memoirs and married a wealthy husband.