CHRONIQUES SCANDALEUSES
The circumstances that attended the death of this Princess, to whom the nation looked as their future Queen, were not a little mysterious, and gave rise to many sinister rumours and scandals. Sir Richard Croft, a fashionable accoucheur of that time, was in attendance upon her with other physicians. He was one who signed the bulletins announcing her steady progress towards recovery after the birth of a dead child; but on the following day the news of the Princess’s death came as a sudden shock upon England, whose people had but recently shared in the joy and happiness of her happy marriage, doubly welcome after the sinister quarrels, estrangements, and espionages that marked the wedded life of the Regent. Scarce had the tidings of the Princess Charlotte’s death at Claremont become public property than all manner of strange whispers became current as to the causes of it. The public mind was, singularly enough, not satisfied with the medical explanations which would ordinarily have been accepted for very truth; but became exercised with vague suspicions of foul play that were only fanned into further life by the mutual recriminations of medicos and lay pamphleteers. Even those who saw no shadow of a crime upon this bad business were ready to cast blame and the bitterest reproaches upon Sir Richard Croft, in whose care the case chiefly lay, for his mistaken treatment. And this was not the first occasion upon which Croft’s conduct had been looked upon with suspicion, for, years previously, a scandalous rumour had been bruited about with regard to two of his noble patients,—the Duchess of Devonshire and an unnamed lady of title,—by which it would seem that he was privy to a supposititious change of children at the Duchess of Devonshire’s accouchement, when it was believed that the Duchess exchanged a girl for her friend’s boy.
PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES.
But on this occasion the affair was much more serious, whether blame attached to him solely for mistaken treatment, or whether scandal whispered at criminal complicity. The Princess Charlotte died on November 6, 1817; three months later—on February 13, 1818—Sir Richard Croft, in despair, shot himself. He was but fifty-six years of age.
Years later—in 1832—when Lady Ann Hamilton’s extraordinary scribblings were published in two volumes under the title of “A Secret History of the Court of England, from 1760 to the Death of George IV.,” these old rumours were crystallized into a definite charge of murder against some nobleman whose name is prudently veiled under a blank. The Princess, says Lady Hamilton, was in a fair way of recovery, and a cup of broth was given her; but after partaking of it she died in convulsions. The nurse who handed her the cup noticed a dark red sediment at the bottom, and on tasting it found her tongue blistered! This peer, according to Lady Hamilton, acted with the connivance of the King, George III., and his glorified German hausfrau, and with the approval of the Princess’s father, the Regent, who, it is asserted in those pages, was heard to say some time previously at Esher that “no child of the Princess Charlotte shall ever sit upon the throne of England.” Lady Ann Hamilton, however, was a malevolent gossip, holding the most extreme Radical views, and as a personal friend and uncompromising partisan of Caroline, Princess of Wales,—that silly and phenomenally undignified woman—was eager to believe anything, no matter how atrocious, of her husband and his people.
No member of the Royal Family was present at the Princess Charlotte’s death-bed. She died, with the sole exception of her husband, Prince Leopold, amid physicians and domestics.
The King and Queen were (says Lady Hamilton) a hundred and eight miles away, and the Regent was either at Carlton House or staying with the Marquis of Hertford (or rather the Marchioness, she adds, in significant italics).