After having her father, George IV, try to railroad her into a bad marriage, Princess Charlotte not only escaped his claws, she found true love. Everyone was happy, except her dad, who still couldn’t resist throwing a party.
The wedding took place May 2, 1816. Carlton House was the venue and everything ran like clockwork. Charlotte had dinner with her grandmother and her aunts at the Queen’s House and it was there that she prepared. Wearing a “shimmering silver wedding dress and a wreath of diamond roses which the Queen had helped her select from the ample stock of Messrs Rundell, Bridge and Co. She was ready just before eight o’clock when she came down the staircase with Princess Augusta and stepped into the carriage that was to take her to Carlton House.”
The road was lined with well-wishers tossing flowers. “Bless me, what a crowd.” She exclaimed as the carriage moved through the throng. During the ceremony, the bride and groom knelt on crimson velvet cushions, enormous candlesticks stood to either side. Everyone was touched by how much the bride and groom obviously cared for each other.
Only one off-note was struck during the ceremony. According to Lady Charlotte Campbell; “When Prince Leopold repeated the words “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” the royal bride was observed to laugh.” No doubt the Prince Regent chalked that up to her mother’s influence.
At the end of the ceremony, Charlotte received “a good, hardy paternal hug.” and with cries of “God speed”, climbed into their wedding carriage for the trip to Claremont Park, their new country home in Surrey.
They quickly settled into the home life of a royal couple, although this may have taken some getting used to on the part of the Prince. Said one historian, “ From the beginning, Princess Charlotte was ideally contented with her husband, though naturally there were occasional differences, as when, for instance, he wanted to go to bed and she did not choose to do so, and he had to wait until she was ready.”
It wasn’t as though HE would be Queen of England some day.
Aside from these minor disagreements, the two got along like…two people in love. They were together almost constantly, doing all those “happy couple” things that everyone likes to rhapsodize about, but actually makes them cringe when they see people behaving that way in public.
Singing duets together, sitting next to each other with their heads nearly touching, reading to each other. “Only when he went out shooting were they apart, and when he returned, she would brush his hair.” One of THOSE happy couples.
Christian Stockmar, a German doctor appointed to the new household, initially formed a somewhat unfavorable impression of Charlotte. She had, he wrote to a friend, “ the most peculiar manners, her hands generally folded behind her, her body always pushed forward, never standing quiet, from time to time stamping her foot, laughing a great deal and talking still more.”
She was, he continued, “ astonishingly impressionable and nervously sensitive.” Although they didn’t hit it off at first, the good doctor found her much too direct, young ladies needed to be more “demure,” they eventually became fast friends and confidants. At one point, while talking about her past, she told him, “ My mother was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she did if my father had not been infinitely worse.”
Although the past could not be undone, the present was moving along nicely. As regarded father, “We are now upon the most comfortable and confidential terms possible.” The rapprochement grew even stronger when she informed dad that she was again pregnant. I say “again” because twice before she had become pregnant and suffered miscarriages. But this time, she knew it would all be different. It was.
On October 9, 1817, Sir Richard Croft, one of London’s most fashionable obstetricians, if one can use that word to describe any doctor of that period, announced that the birth of Princess Charlotte’s baby was only nine or ten days away. Charlotte was very anxious about the birth. Too much had already gone wrong for her to feel safe.
Although Croft told her everything was fine, she remained uneasy. The Queen, who’s own experiences with childbirth bordered on the heroic, was equally uneasy. As well they should have been. According to one historian, “Croft was a highly self-confident, though far from skillful physician. He took upon himself the sole responsibility for his patient’s care, bleeding her regularly and imposing on her a thin, weak and most unappetizing diet, mainly composed of liquids. He believed this treatment necessary because of her “morbid excess of animal spirits.”
If that sounds very nearly medieval, it’s because it was. Despite her misgivings, Charlotte continued to do as she was told.
– Mr. Al
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