In November 1817, Britain’s beloved Princess Charlotte died after giving birth to a stillborn son. The twenty-one-year-old heir to the throne had endured a fifty-hour labor before the tragedy unfolded. The nation plunged into grief so profound that London shops closed for two weeks, and the supply of black mourning cloth ran out. Her physician, Sir Richard Croft, was so vilified that he took his own life months later.
But Charlotte’s death did more than break hearts—it changed the course of the British and European thrones forever. Charlotte was born on January 7, 1796, the only child of George, Prince of Wales, and his wife Caroline of Brunswick. Her parents’ marriage was a disaster from the start. George had been forced into it by his father, King George III, after years of refusing to marry because of his long affair with Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic commoner he could not legally wed if he hoped to become king.
George and Caroline despised one another. They met as husband and wife only three times, and Charlotte was conceived in those first weeks. By the time she was one day old, her father was already plotting to separate her from her mother. Charlotte grew up in her own household under the care of governesses, shuttled between her estranged parents’ separate homes.
Her grandfather, the king, repeatedly intervened to protect her, using his financial control over the deeply indebted Prince of Wales to force concessions. When George tried to limit Charlotte’s visits with her mother, the king overruled him. Still, as Charlotte grew, her father increasingly ignored her, finding her resemblance to his hated wife unbearable. She was raised at Warwick House, educated by the Bishop of Exeter and a team of tutors in writing, history, religion, literature, Latin, drawing, music, and dance.
Her governesses described her as a lively child unafraid to voice her opinions. As the only legitimate child of the heir to the throne, she was second in line to the crown from birth. That position carried enormous weight because King George III suffered from recurring bouts of mental illness. Modern assessments suggest he may have suffered from acute porphyria, a liver disorder causing toxic buildup in the blood.
Whatever the cause, his periodic incapacitation meant Charlotte’s marriage would inevitably become a matter of state. In 1810, the king slipped into a final state of dementia that lasted until his death in 1820. The Prince of Wales became regent, ruling in all but name. Charlotte, barely into her teens, lost her greatest protector.
Her father restricted her correspondence, limited contact with her mother to one supervised visit every two weeks, and tightened control over her household. When he refused to form a government from the Whig party after taking power, Charlotte—who shared her grandfather’s political sympathies—deliberately blew kisses toward the Whig leader, Lord Grey, from her box at the opera, to the crowd’s delight and her father’s fury. He cut her allowance and forced her to sit in a secluded rear seat thereafter. By 1812, crowds cheered the sixteen-year-old princess whenever she appeared publicly.
Her father’s harsh treatment only increased her popularity. With the Napoleonic Wars ending, her marriage became a diplomatic tool. George wanted Charlotte to marry William, Prince of Orange, to strengthen British influence in northwestern Europe. Charlotte reluctantly agreed in December 1813, but by spring 1814 she broke the engagement, fearing she would be forced to live in Holland and leave her mother at her father’s mercy.
George responded by dismissing her household servants, including lifelong companions, and banishing her to Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Forest, where she was allowed only one visitor—her mother, once a week. Then Caroline made a noble decision. She left England for Germany, giving George what he had wanted for eighteen years. Her departure eased Charlotte’s situation.
Released from isolation, the princess went to Weymouth in August 1814, where crowds greeted her with illuminated celebrations reading “Hail to the Princess Charlotte, Hope of Europe and Glory of Britain. ”
The following year, Charlotte fell in love. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, whom she had met at a London party in 1814, began courting her seriously. They married on May 2, 1816, cheered by enormous crowds lining the streets of London.
The young couple settled at Claremont in Surrey in a genuinely happy union, and Charlotte remained as popular as ever. When she became pregnant in 1817, it seemed her trials were finally over. They were not. The pregnancy was complicated, and in early November she went into labor.
The delivery ended in a stillborn son, and within hours Charlotte began vomiting violently, suffering abdominal pain and unstoppable postpartum bleeding. By the time her husband was roused and brought to her room, she was dead. The grief was staggering. As Henry Brougham wrote, it truly seemed as if every family in Britain had lost a beloved child.
Charlotte was buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on November 19, 1817, her son at her feet. Her death ended the direct line of succession. The Prince Regent had no other legitimate children, and the crown would now pass to the other sons of George III.
At that time, the king had twelve legitimate sons alive but not a single legitimate grandchild. A frantic race began among the royal dukes to marry and produce an heir. Nearly every legitimate grandchild of George III was born after Charlotte’s death. When George III died in 1820, the Prince Regent became King George IV, reigning until 1830, when his brother William took the throne as William IV.
William also had no legitimate heir. When he died in 1837, the crown passed to eighteen-year-old Princess Victoria, daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. Had Charlotte lived and produced an heir, Victoria would never have become queen, and the long Victorian era—during which Britain rose to global dominance—would never have occurred as it did. Charlotte’s story is one of history’s great hypotheticals.
But she was not the only princess whose life was shaped by tragedy. Two centuries earlier, in the fifteenth century, Catherine of Valois faced a different kind of sorrow. Born in Paris on October 27, 1401, she was the daughter of King Charles VI of France, who suffered from severe mental illness that plunged his kingdom into political weakness. By the time Catherine was growing up, the Hundred Years’ War had been raging for generations.
In 1415, the English king Henry V won a crushing victory at Agincourt, and within a few years he was strong enough to dictate terms. The Treaty of Troyes in May 1420 arranged Catherine’s marriage to Henry, and on June 2, 1420, they wed in Troyes Cathedral. The treaty made their future son heir to the French throne, bypassing Catherine’s only surviving brother, Charles. Catherine was crowned queen of England on February 23, 1421, and nine months later gave birth to the son Henry hoped would unite the two crowns.
But Henry V died of dysentery on August 31, 1422, at just thirty-five. Catherine, not yet twenty-one, was a widow, and her infant son became King Henry VI of England before his first birthday. As a French princess, Catherine was distrusted by many English nobles and marginalized by her brother-in-law, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. After her father died in October 1422, her brother Charles claimed the French throne despite the Treaty of Troyes, and with the help of Joan of Arc, he eventually won the Hundred Years’ War by 1453.
Catherine’s marriage had failed to unite the crowns. In 1428, she defied tradition by secretly marrying a Welsh nobleman named Owen Tudor, despite parliament’s threats to strip him of his lands. Their union produced at least four children, including Edmund and Jasper. Edmund later fathered Henry Tudor, who seized the English throne in 1485 as King Henry VII, founding the Tudor dynasty and making Catherine the grandmother of Henry VIII.
She died on January 3, 1437, at thirty-five, likely from complications of childbirth. What followed was a strange saga lasting 440 years. The English nobles, furious at her marriage to Owen Tudor, had him prosecuted and imprisoned. They deemed it unfitting for Catherine to lie beside her royal husband, so she was buried in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, not with Henry V.
A wooden effigy of her was placed beside him instead. Decades later, her grandson Henry VII began rebuilding the abbey, and Catherine’s tomb was opened during construction. Her coffin was simply moved to open ground within the abbey, where it was abandoned. For nearly 280 years, it lay there, broken and exposed.
Visitors came to see it. Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, wrote in 1669 that he lifted the upper part of the body in his hands and kissed her mouth, noting with wonder that he had kissed a queen. By the eighteenth century, schoolboys were playing with the exposed remains. Finally, in 1778, the Dean of Westminster ordered the coffin moved to the Percy family vault.
In 1877, under Queen Victoria, Catherine’s remains—by then only bones and dust—were at last placed in the vault of King Henry V, beside the husband she had lost 440 years earlier. A similar fate of displacement and sorrow marked the life of Christina of Norway in the thirteenth century. Born around 1234 in Bergen, she was the daughter of King Haakon IV, whose powerful fleet made Norway a major Atlantic power. In the 1250s, King Alfonso X of Castile sought an alliance with Haakon, needing ships for a crusade into North Africa.
He proposed marrying Christina, but he was already married to Yolanda of Aragon. When Christina arrived in Castile in early 1258 after a long journey, she discovered Alfonso’s wife had finally borne a son, and he no longer planned to divorce her. Instead, she was married to Alfonso’s brother, Infante Philip of Castile, on March 31, 1258. Philip had given up his position as archbishop of Seville to marry her.
Despite being granted extensive estates, Christina grew unhappy in the heat of Seville, longing for her homeland. She died in 1262 at about twenty-eight, possibly from illness, though legend claims she was poisoned by the jealous queen. She and Philip had no children. In 1952, her decorated coffin was opened during church repairs, revealing the skeleton of a young, tall woman in good health.
In 2011, a small chapel dedicated to Saint Olaf was consecrated in Covarrubas, fulfilling the wish Christina had expressed centuries earlier, and she was reburied there. Another princess whose life was consumed by political tragedy was Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Born at Versailles on December 19, 1778, she grew up in the splendor of the French court, but the revolution shattered her world. Her father was executed by guillotine on January 21, 1793, and her mother in October of that same year.
Marie-Thérèse and her younger brother Louis-Charles were held captive by the revolutionary government. Her brother, only ten when he died on June 8, 1795, had been abused in captivity. Marie-Thérèse was allowed to leave France in December 1795, the only member of the royal family to survive imprisonment. She went first to Vienna, then to her uncle Louis XVIII, who had proclaimed himself king of France in exile.
In 1799, she married her cousin Louis-Antoine, the son of the future Charles X. After Napoleon’s fall in 1814, the Bourbons were restored. When Charles X became king in 1824, Marie-Thérèse was married to his heir. But Charles X proved so unpopular that revolution erupted in July 1830.
He abdicated on August 2 in favor of his son, and for exactly twenty minutes, Louis-Antoine nominally reigned as Louis XIX, making Marie-Thérèse queen of France for that brief span. He then abdicated in favor of his young nephew, who was also rejected, and Louis-Philippe took the throne instead. The royal family fled into permanent exile, eventually settling in Austria. Marie-Thérèse died of pneumonia on October 19, 1851, at seventy-two.
Her gravestone bore the inscription “Queen of France,” honoring the twenty minutes she had reigned. Long before all of these, in the third century BC, another woman met a more violent end. Sophonisba was born around 225 BC in Carthage, daughter of Hasdrubal, a general of the Barca family. During the Second Punic War, after the Carthaginians were driven from Spain in 206 BC, her father and the Carthaginian senate decided she should marry Syphax, the powerful king of western Numidia, rather than Masinissa, the eastern Numidian leader to whom she had reportedly been promised.
Syphax, charmed by her beauty, abandoned his alliance with Rome and joined Carthage. But in 204 BC, the Roman general Scipio invaded North Africa with Masinissa as an ally. Syphax was defeated and captured at the Battle of Cirta in 203 BC. Masinissa entered the city in triumph, and according to the Roman historian Livy, Sophonisba fell at his feet, begging him not to let her fall into Roman hands.
Struck by her beauty, Masinissa married her on the spot to protect her. The Roman commander Laelius was furious, and the captured Syphax convinced Scipio that Sophonisba would turn Masinissa against Rome. Scipio ordered her handed over as a prisoner. Masinissa knew what awaited her.
He sent her a cup of poison, telling her he could not save her. Sophonisba drank it and died rather than become a Roman captive. She became a symbol of Carthage’s defiance—a city that, in the end, chose destruction over submission when Rome finally annihilated it in 146 BC.
Though largely forgotten today, Sophonisba’s story inspired poets and playwrights for centuries, from Virgil’s Dido to the tragedies of the Renaissance and seventeenth-century stage.