Long before Diana, Princess of Wales captured the world’s imagination, another British royal princess had already earned the adoration of the British public. Her name was Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, daughter of Prince George and granddaughter of King George III. In the early nineteenth century, she was one of the most beloved figures in Britain. Like Diana, her life was cut tragically short.
Charlotte was born on January 7, 1796, at Carlton House in London. Her father, George, Prince of Wales, was the heir to the British throne, but until his mid-thirties he had remained a bachelor and produced no heir of his own. The reason lay in his long relationship with Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic commoner whom he could not legally marry if he wished to one day become king, as laws barred the spouse of a Catholic from succeeding to the throne. For years, George had avoided the marriage his father demanded, but in the spring of 1795 he finally gave in.
His bride was Caroline of Brunswick, a German princess and his own first cousin. The match was disastrous from the start. George and Caroline detested each other almost immediately. Nevertheless, they married on April 8, 1795.
George later claimed the couple shared a bed as man and wife only three times, during the first weeks of the union. Charlotte was the product of that brief relationship, born almost exactly nine months after the wedding. The day after her birth, Prince George began plotting to separate his newborn daughter from her mother. It was the beginning of twenty years of scheming that would constantly complicate Charlotte’s life.
By then, George and Caroline were already living in separate households, and less than a year after the wedding, the prince had resumed his relationship with Maria Fitzherbert. Charlotte was raised in her own household under the care of the Dowager Countess of Elgin, who served as her governess. This was a conventional arrangement for royal children in eighteenth-century Britain, but unusual in one respect: Charlotte never visited her parents together. Instead, she was sent to see them separately in different homes across London and England.
George did his best to prevent his estranged wife from seeing their daughter, but he did not have a completely free hand. Charlotte’s grandfather, the king, often blocked his son’s efforts to limit contact between Charlotte and Caroline. King George III had leverage over his son because the prince carried a serious gambling problem and frequently had to turn to his father for money to pay his debts. The king used this leverage to protect his granddaughter.
Over time, Charlotte’s father began to largely ignore her. Her appearance increasingly reminded him of her mother, and her presence in London annoyed him. In 1804, the king offered to take custody of Charlotte, but Prince George blocked the move, fearing that if Charlotte became a ward of the king and queen, she would have too much access to her mother. Charlotte continued to be raised at Warwick House.
Her education was entrusted to the Bishop of Exeter, John Fisher, who oversaw a range of tutors in writing, history, religion, literature, Latin, drawing, music, and dance. Her governess and tutors frequently remarked in their correspondence that the young princess was growing into a spirited child who was not afraid to speak her mind. The tortured relationship between her parents mattered all the more because Charlotte was her father’s only legitimate heir. The couple had no other children.
From birth, she stood second in line to the British throne. This was particularly significant because her grandfather, King George III, had suffered from psychological problems for many years. Beginning in the mid-1780s, he experienced bouts of severe mood swings, often manic for days at a time before crashing into depression. He sometimes talked listlessly and referred to people long dead as though they were still present.
The episodes were periodic, and George generally recovered after several days or weeks. Modern assessment suggests he may have suffered from acute porphyria, a liver disorder that causes chemicals to build up in the blood, poisoning the individual and producing psychological instability. The exact nature of his illness remains only partially understood. Although the king recovered from his severe bout in 1788 and resumed his duties, the possibility of another collapse was never far from the minds of the royal family and the British government.
If the king were again incapacitated, Charlotte’s father would become regent, and she would be next in line to the throne. Even as a child, she was a person of enormous significance, and it was inevitable that her marriage would become a matter of political importance as soon as she was old enough. In 1810, King George III slipped into a final bout of dementia that would last until his death in 1820. Prince George became regent, ruling in the king’s name, and the 1810s became known as the Regency period.
Charlotte was deeply upset by her grandfather’s condition. The two had been close, and he had long sought to protect her from her father’s plotting. Once his full regency powers were confirmed in 1810, Prince George restricted his fourteen-year-old daughter’s correspondence and limited her contact with her mother to one supervised visit every two weeks. But even as he tried to control her, Charlotte was developing a reputation for free will.
Shortly after her father became regent, a political battle erupted in London when the prince refused to form a government from the Whig party, the more liberal parliamentary group the king had largely supported during his reign. While attending the opera during this crisis, Charlotte, who shared her grandfather’s political leanings, made a point of blowing kisses toward the Whig leader, Lord Grey. The public largely approved, but her father was furious. He further restricted Charlotte, reduced the money available to her household to barely enough for her maintenance, and insisted she sit in an out-of-the-way back seat at the opera.
News of his harsh treatment became common knowledge and made him even more unpopular. By 1812, Charlotte was sixteen and generally greeted by cheering crowds on the rare occasions she appeared in public. The question of her marriage was becoming pressing. The wars in Europe were drawing to a close, and her marriage was seen as a way for Britain to strengthen ties with another royal house.
Since the 1790s, Britain had been almost continuously at war with France, first against the revolutionary government and then against Napoleon Bonaparte. The royal lines overthrown by Napoleon were being restored, and Prince George wished to establish closer ties with one of them, the princely house of Orange in the Netherlands. Charlotte was to marry Prince William of Orange. At first, she reluctantly agreed in December 1813.
But by the early spring of 1814, she was willfully resisting. Charlotte worried that if she married the prince, she would live in Holland, and her mother, who had few remaining allies in England, would be entirely at her father’s mercy. She broke off the engagement. George reacted characteristically.
He dismissed Charlotte’s household servants and further restricted her finances. This was a cruel blow, as many of these servants were lifelong companions, people like Cornelia Knight, whom she had known since childhood. He then banished Charlotte to Cranborne Lodge in Windsor Forest, where she was allowed only one visitor, her mother, who came once a week. It was in this context that Charlotte’s mother took the noble decision to leave England and return to Germany.
It was what Prince George had effectively wanted for eighteen years. With his wish fulfilled, Charlotte’s treatment improved considerably. She was released from isolation, and in late August 1814, she went to the seaside at Weymouth. Along the way, large friendly crowds gathered to see her.
Once she arrived, there were illuminations with a centerpiece declaring: “Hail Princess Charlotte, Europe’s hope and Britain’s glory. ” The public already thought of her as their future queen. In 1815, Charlotte had formed a new relationship. At some point in 1814, she had met Prince Leopold of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld at a party in London.
He soon began calling on her, and the pair grew affectionate. An engagement followed, and on May 2, 1816, they were married, with huge crowds lining the streets of London. The young couple made their home at Claremont in Surrey. It was a happy union, and Charlotte remained as popular as ever.
When Charlotte became pregnant in 1817, it seemed her past tribulations had finally resolved and a happy future had opened. Then tragedy struck. The pregnancy was complicated, and in early November Charlotte went into labor. It lasted fifty hours and resulted in a stillborn son.
Hours later, it became a double tragedy. Charlotte began vomiting violently and complained of pains in her abdomen. Her postpartum bleeding would not stop. Her physician, Sir Richard Croft, noticing how cold she was, called for Leopold to be brought to her.
But by the time her husband was awakened and reached her room, Charlotte was dead. The beloved princess was just twenty-one years old. Her death met with an outpouring of public grief so profound that linen drapers ran out of black cloth, shops closed for two weeks, and even the poor and homeless tied black armbands to their clothes. Henry Brougham wrote that it was as though every household in Britain had lost a favorite child.
Charlotte was buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle with her son at her feet on November 19, 1817. Her physician, Richard Croft, was so criticized over her death that he took his own life a few months later. Her death also ended the direct line of succession.
Prince George had no other legitimate children, and unless he remarried and produced heirs, the line would fall to George III’s other children. At the time, George III had twelve living legitimate children but no legitimate grandchildren. A race began among the royal dukes to marry and produce an heir. This is why almost all of George III’s legitimate grandchildren were born after Charlotte’s death.
After George III died in 1820, Prince George became King George IV. His reign lasted only until 1830, when his younger brother William ascended as William IV. William had no legitimate heir either, and when he died in 1837, the throne passed to the young Princess Victoria, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. Had Charlotte not died in 1817 and given birth to an heir, Queen Victoria, known as the grandmother of Europe and the monarch whose reign spanned Britain’s rise to global primacy, would never have become queen.
Though Charlotte is not well remembered today, her death remains one of history’s great what-ifs. Had she lived longer, the history of Britain and Europe might have been very different.