Charlotte & Leopold

by James Chambers

  The theatre, named after its patrons ‘The Royal Coburg’, opened in 1818. It had a sumptuous interior with a unique ‘looking-glass curtain’, which reflected the entire audience when lowered. But it survived only by producing lurid melodramas, and in 1833 a change of name to the Royal Victoria did nothing to make it more successful. In 1871 it reopened, again unsuccessfully, as a music hall, the New Victoria Palace, and ten years later a social reformer, Emma Cons, turned it into the strictly temperance Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern, where she presented concerts and excerpts from operas and plays by Shakespeare. In 1912, however, after Cons’ death, the building was inherited by her niece, Lilian Baylis, who restored it to the purpose that its original patrons had envisaged. Known by the name that survives to this day, the Old Vic, it became the first theatre in the world to perform the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays.

  At the beginning of December Charlotte and Leopold went to stay with other members of the royal family at her father’s pavilion in Brighton. She did not feel well before she left Claremont, and the journey made her feel so much worse that she was unable to join the rest of the party for dinner when she arrived. But she was able to appear at dinner every evening after that, if only because ‘everybody kept their own hours’ and she had nothing to do all day but stroll around the town with Leopold. On their first outing they were so heavily jostled by an eager crowd that every day after that they had their carriage following, so that they could get away if necessary.

  On 16 December, after their return to Claremont, Charlotte was well enough to hold a large dinner party to celebrate Leopold’s birthday. Next day they gave a servants’ ball, which was attended by as many servants as could be spared from Oatlands as well, and at which, Charlotte told Mercer, ‘I never saw people enjoy themselves more.’

  Christmas Eve was spent at Oatlands, where the Duchess of York held ‘a sort of fete & fair for everyone’. ‘It was the gayest & prettiest sight I ever saw’, wrote Charlotte. Everybody ‘great and small’ was there – the houseparty, neighbours, servants and their children. They were all given presents, and in keeping with a charming German custom that Leopold’s nephew Albert was one day to make popular throughout the kingdom, there was a little pine tree decorated with baubles and candles.

  On 7 January, Charlotte’s twenty-first birthday, the Prince Regent gave a ball at the Royal Pavilion. But, again, Charlotte did not feel well, and this time she could not even manage the journey. While others danced and drank her health in Brighton, Charlotte spent her birthday at Claremont, where all the villagers of Esher, whose houses were decorated with garlands, came up to the house at nightfall and stood beneath rows of torches and lanterns listening to the band that played on the lawn.

  By now Charlotte’s bouts of sickness were arousing suspicion. Many gossips and journalists inferred that she had suffered another miscarriage. But better suspicions were aroused and strengthened in the course of the next four months, during which Charlotte hardly ever ventured beyond the gates of Claremont.

  Then, on 30 April, Leopold drove up to London and called on the Prince Regent at Carlton House. They had not wanted to say anything until they were sure. But now they were. Charlotte was over three months pregnant.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘A Brunswick Heart’

  TWO DAYS AFTER Leopold’s visit to the Prince Regent in London, on 2 May, he and Charlotte gave a ball at Claremont to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Almost all the leaders of London society came down for it. The Foreign Secretary and Lady Castlereagh were there, the Russian Ambassador and Princess Lieven were there, and so too was the newly created Marquess of Anglesey, who had commanded the British cavalry at Waterloo and was unable to dance because he had left a leg there.

  Another of the guests from London was the Hon. Margaret Mercer Elphinstone. It was her first visit to Claremont. But her reception was not quite as it used to be at Warwick House or Windsor. In the past, no matter who else was there, Mercer had always been shown straight in to be with the Princess the moment she arrived. This time, however, to her obvious discomposure, she was asked to wait in line with the other guests and take her turn at being received by her host and hostess.

  A few weeks later, Mercer married Count Flahault. Charlotte and Leopold were not there.

  Charlotte left Claremont at least once during the summer. On 12 August she went over briefly with Leopold to Richmond to attend the party given to celebrate her father’s birthday by the grandmother of another famous cavalry commander, the Dowager Countess of Cardigan. For most of the time, however, she was content to live as she had always lived at Claremont, receiving occasional visits from friends and giving dinner parties for her neighbours.

  Yet despite her seclusion, Charlotte’s name was seldom out of the newspapers. Every rumour about her condition, every anecdote, however unlikely, was seized upon gratefully and elaborated in print by every editor and commentator. It was all part of a happy, hopeful story – the only member of the royal family that anybody cared about was soon to give birth – and in 1817 it was almost the only happy story.

  The rest of the news was always bad. Britain was in the middle of a post-war recession. Manufacturers had reduced production and laid off some of their workers. A very bad harvest had had the same effect in the country. The Corn Law, which was passed to keep the price of corn at a profitable level for farmers and landowners, had put the price of bread beyond the pockets of even those labourers who were still employed.

  Charlotte and Leopold had been doing what they could, distributing food and employing as many men as they could afford to make aesthetic ‘improvements’ to their park. But there were not too many who did the same. Bitter indignation and resentment were widespread. Riots were frequent. The Habeas Corpus Act had been suspended so that the government, which had no effective coordinated policies, could lock up suspected rabble-rousers without trial.

  At the end of August, Stockmar recorded that Charlotte’s condition was even influencing the Stock Market. ‘Bets for enormous sums have been made on the sex of the expected child, and it has been already calculated on the Stock Exchange that a Princess would only raise the funds 2 ½ per cent, whilst a Prince would send them up 6 per cent.’

  The optimism of the press and the market was not always shared by those who saw Charlotte, however. Lady Holland described ‘strange abnormal symptoms’. Several people said the Princess was so large that she was likely to have twins, and the Queen, who had as much experience of pregnancy as almost anyone, said that ‘her figure was so immense (to me not natural) that I could not help being uneasy to a considerable degree’.

  Before setting out on a visit to Rome, Lady Ashbrook, who had grown close to Charlotte while they were both on holiday in Weymouth, called at Claremont and strongly recommended that she should engage Sir William Knighton as ‘accoucheur’. Knighton was a highly qualified physician who had studied at Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He had been made a baronet by Charlotte’s father, whom he had attended on a number of occasions, and he was widely regarded as by far the best ‘accoucheur’ in England.

  When Lady Ashbrook returned from Rome, however, she discovered to her impotent anguish that Sir William had not been appointed. Dr Baillie, who, as the King’s Physician Extraordinary, was to be in charge of Charlotte’s confinement, had chosen his own brother-in-law, Sir Richard Croft, instead.

  Croft was fashionable but not impressive. After first meeting him Stockmar described him as ‘a long, thin man, no longer very young, fidgety, and good-natured; seems to have more experience than either learning or understanding’.

  Besides Baillie and Croft, there were to be two other members of the team. One of them, the nurse, was to be Mrs Griffiths, who had thirty years’ experience of midwifery, and who, unlike most members of her profession in the era before Florence Nightingale, could be recommended as ‘a respectable woman’. The other, the consultant, was to be Dr John Sims, a 68-year-old botanist and physician, who w
as said to have some expertise in the use of instruments, and who was ready to be summoned if any artificial assistance seemed necessary.

  Naturally Dr Stockmar was also invited to join the team. But he refused. To have said yes would have been to push himself ‘into a place in which a foreigner could never expect to reap honour, but possibly plenty of blame’. He wrote:

  I knew the hidden rocks too well, and knew that the national pride and contempt for foreigners would accord no share of honour to me, if the result were favourable, and, in an unfavourable issue, would heap all the blame on me. As I had before at various times, when the physician was not at hand, prescribed for the Princess, these considerations induced me to explain to the Prince that, from the commencement of her pregnancy, I must decline all and any share in the treatment.

  Baillie and Croft had estimated that the Princess would give birth on 19 October, and at the end of August preparations began with the arrival of Mrs Griffiths. When she was introduced to Charlotte and Leopold, they came into the room as they always did, arm-in-arm, and stood talking to her ‘in the most affable manner for half an hour’ without ever letting go of each other.

  Mrs Griffiths was given a room on the top floor, and Leopold’s dressing room, which led off the bedroom, was equipped with a small bed for Sir Richard Croft, so that he would be close at hand when he was needed. As yet no arrangements had been made for Dr Sims. That could be done later if he had to be called. And there was no need to provide accommodation for Dr Baillie. Since he lived nearby at Virginia Water, he could drive over every day, and he could come quickly enough in the night if he was summoned.

  Sir Richard Croft arrived two weeks after Mrs Griffiths and at once subjected Charlotte to a strict regime which, among other things, was designed to reduce her weight. The accoucheur replaced her usual and favourite luncheon, a mutton chop and a glass of port, with no more than tea and toast. He gave her purges. He bled her regularly.

  Dr Stockmar was amazed and appalled. This ‘lowering treatment’ might still be fashionable in England, but it was no longer regarded as even sensible in Europe. ‘I gave the Prince a long lecture’, he wrote, ‘and intreated him to make my observations known to the physicians of the Princess’. But whether Leopold did or not has not been recorded.

  As Charlotte grew weaker with the regime, she began to have little bouts of gloom. She told Leopold that she thought she might die, and she did not want to see the new clothes that had been made for her baby. She had chosen them eagerly from patterns and samples, but when they arrived she had them put away without looking at them. It was as though she thought it might be bad luck if she did, and it was not something that the experienced Mrs Griffiths had ever seen a mother do before.

  For the most part, however, life at Claremont went on as usual. At the beginning of October Sir Thomas Lawrence came down to paint Charlotte’s portrait and stayed in the house for over a week. Charlotte wanted to wear stays when she sat for him, but Sir Richard refused to allow it. He was not always wrong, although there was no need to make his veto so indelicate. ‘A cow does not wear stays’, he said. ‘Why should the Princess Charlotte?’

  Sir Thomas was delighted by life at Claremont and by the Princess, whom he had not seen since she was a child, and who, he noted, was no longer ‘boistrous’. In the mornings, when she sat for him, Leopold came with her and stayed for most of the session. In the early afternoon she drove round the park, ‘in a low phaeton with her ponies, the Prince always walking by her side’. After that, until it was time to change for dinner, she came with Leopold to sit for him again. After dinner, which was attended by the whole household, Charlotte and Leopold always left the table before the others; and, when everyone else went into the drawing room for coffee, Charlotte and Leopold were always at the piano, ‘often on the same stool’, playing duets or singing together.

  When the newspapers reported that Sir Thomas Lawrence had left Claremont and returned to London, they still expected that, as the doctors had predicted, the Princess would give birth on 19 October. But 19 October came and went and all that they could say was that the Princess was still in the best of health and driving out daily in her little phaeton.

  The Queen was waiting for news at Windsor, hoping to visit Charlotte and her baby as soon as possible after the birth. But she had not been well for some time and on Saturday, 2 November, she went down to take the waters at Bath.

  By then the Prince Regent had gone to stay with his mistress Lady Hertford and her husband at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire.

  Next day, Sunday, Charlotte went for a drive with Leopold, attended the service which Dr Short conducted for the entire household in the chapel and then went out for another drive.

  On Monday, when the labourers returned to work on the ‘improvements’ in the park, Charlotte drove down with Leopold to inspect their progress on the home farm and the ‘Gothick Temple’.

  At around seven o’clock in the evening, the contractions began. As Charlotte climbed into the big bed that stood between the windows beneath a tall chintz canopy, she made a promise to Mrs Griffiths. ‘I will neither bawl nor shreik.’

  Horses were saddled and grooms stood ready to ride off and summon the Privy Councillors who were required to be present as ‘witnesses’ at a royal birth.

  The contractions continued: sharp, soft, painful, but not yet effective. Sir Richard Croft and Mrs Griffiths stood by the bed. Leopold was there as well.

  At midnight Charlotte began to feel nauseous. At 3.30 Croft decided that it was time to send for the witnesses. One groom galloped across to Virginia Water to fetch Dr Baillie. The others headed off into the dark towards London.

  At 5.15 the first to arrive was the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, who lived in Putney. The next, at 5.45, was the Home Secretary, who lived in Richmond. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who was staying with the Bishop of London in Fulham, because it was closer than Lambeth, arrived at six o’clock. The last were the two who lived in central London: the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who arrived at 7.30, and the Lord Chancellor, who arrived a quarter of an hour later.

  Dr Baillie, despite living at Virginia Water, no further away than Richmond, only just made it before the Lord Chancellor.

  The witnesses and Dr Baillie assembled in the breakfast room, which stood beside the bedroom and led into it through a large, thick door on the other side from Leopold’s dressing room. There was nothing to report, and there was nothing to be heard. Apart from their own whispers, the only sounds were the discontented chattering and occasional squawk from Coco, Charlotte’s parrot, whose stand was in the corner.

  Down in the village, the gentlemen of the press, who had heard the news from the witnesses’ servants, began to assemble at the Bear.

  In the bedroom at Claremont, Charlotte’s sporadic contractions continued ineffectively throughout the day. By seven o’clock in the evening she was tired and hungry. She had had no sleep for thirty-six hours and nothing to eat for twenty-four. But pain and Sir Richard would allow her neither. Sometimes she walked up and down in front of the fire, leaning on Leopold’s arm. Sometimes she lay on the bed. Sometimes Leopold lay beside her. And sometimes she reached out and absent-mindedly played with his hair, as though no one else was there.

  In the breakfast room, Dr Baillie, who had not yet been allowed to see the patient, received regular reports, reassuring him that all was going well. But at ten o’clock Croft came out, took him into the bedroom and told him that he might need to use forceps.

  A groom was sent galloping up to London to fetch Dr Sims. He arrived at 2 a.m. on the following morning.

  At 8.15 Croft and Sims came into the breakfast room and informed the witnesses that the Princess was making good but gradual progress and that they now hoped it would not be necessary to risk the use of forceps.

  The hours went by. But now Charlotte was always in bed.

  At around six o’clock in the evening, meconium, a child’s first faeces, which usually appear aft
er birth, oozed out onto the sheets. It was the first sign that the baby was in distress.

  In the course of the next three hours Charlotte gave birth to a boy. He was, as suspected, dead. The doctor and the accoucheur tried every trick they knew to revive him. They plunged him in a bath of warm water. The rubbed him with mustard. They rubbed him with salt. But it was to no avail.

  Charlotte had kept her promise. She had neither bawled nor shrieked, and now, heartbroken and exhausted after fifty hours of labour, she kept it still. She bore it all, said Baillie, ‘with a Brunswick heart’. While Mrs Griffiths and the maids around her wept, it was Charlotte who tried to comfort them.

  At 9 p.m. the witnesses were informed that Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte had been delivered of a still-born son. In keeping with custom, Mrs Griffiths carried in the little corpse for their inspection.

  Charlotte was still bleeding. Her uterus had not fully contracted after the birth. It was now shaped like an hour-glass, and it looked as though it was not going to contract any further. Rather than wait for the placenta to be expelled naturally, Croft and Sims decided to remove it by hand. When that was done, apparently successfully, the bleeding stopped.

  At last Charlotte was given some nourishment – chicken broth and toast washed down with barley water. She was also given camphor julep to stimulate her heart, and soon afterwards she became animated and began to chatter a little hysterically.

  Mrs Griffiths, who had been awake and in the same dress for three days and two nights, went away to wash and change.

  ‘How smart you are, Griffiths’, said Charlotte merrily when she returned. ‘Why did you not put on the silk gown, my favourite?’

  Two hours later, when they had been reassured that the Princess was doing well, the sad and weary witnesses went home. Leaving Charlotte to sleep and Mrs Griffiths to watch over her, everyone else in the house went to bed.