Imagine if Queen Victoria never came to the throne...because her cousin, Princess Charlotte Augusta, beat her to it. Of course this couldn't have happened; Despite being as wildly popular to the England of her time as Princess Diana was to ours, Princess Charlotte never became the Queen she might have been, and by birth, should have been, for the simple reason that she died before getting the chance to. Read on to catch a glimpse of Her Royal Highness, Princess Charlotte --passionate, a sometime pawn of her warring parents, and the Princess of Wales during the regency until her death in 1817. She was a romantic ideal to her subjects, (even Jane Austen loved her) but a doomed daughter. A future monarch who would never reach the throne.

In 1817 when Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince Regent and his estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick, died at the age of 21 (following childbirth), Britain went into mourning such as was not seen again until the death of Princess Diana.

The young princess was a national celebrity of the time, loved for her forthright and passionate nature and because she was seen as the best outcome of an upopular Regent and his even more unpopular and disastrous marriage. If mentioned in the papers, she was most often viewed sympathetically, even reverently. The people loved her. If the Regent was not worthy of the place Providence had seen fit to bestow upon him; if Princess Caroline his wife, was a well-known eccentric, with dubious standards of hygiene and even morals, the young Princess, at least, gave the populace hope.

She was perhaps the more loved for her contrast to both parents, the selfish, hedonistic (though intelligent) father, and her less-than well-esteemed mother. In her own words, the Princess once put it this way:

‘My mother was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she was if my father had not been infinitely worse.’

On my website this article includes a picture of the princess, and she appears, as it always seems to me, a sturdy picture of strength and health; all the more pity, then, that she fell victim to the medical practices of the day, dying after giving birth to a still-born son-- following a horrendous 50 hour labor--from post-partum hemorrhaging. (There is a train of thought which says she died of porphyria; the sickness that afflicted her grandfather, George III. This seems unlikely to me, but perhaps there is a form of acute porphyria that can rise up quickly to devastating effect?)

Whatever the case, her husband, the handsome, formal Prince Leopold, was greatly distraught. (Think of it--In one fell swoop he lost wife, son, and future as Prince Consort.) The nation joined his grief in a huge outpouring of sorrow. Poets immortalized the princess in poetry; the Regent had a large memorial built for her; but he fell under renewed attack by the press and his subjects, not least because it was rumoured he had refused to abandon his hunt, despite the report of his daughter being in labour, until it was too late. In truth, he went to bed the night she delivered fully exhausted himself, hearing that his daughter was doing well, even though his grandchild had not survived the birth. When he woke the next day to find that he had lost his only child as well, he was enormously affected, and took it very hard

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