The doctor lay dead on the floor of a London bedroom, a Shakespeare comedy open on the table beside him. The line on the page asked a question: “Where is the princess? ” The date was February 1818, and three months earlier this same man had delivered the most anticipated baby in Britain. The baby had been born dead.

The mother had died five hours later. Now the doctor himself was gone: one royal birth, three deaths. So what killed Princess Charlotte? That was hard to answer, because the royal surgeons who examined her body concluded that everything had been done for the best.

Her father and her husband both wrote to thank the doctor. Yet hours before she died, a bulletin had told the country she was doing well. There were four suspects in her death, and modern medicine pointed to some more firmly than others. It all began with something that sounded impossible today.

In the late summer of 1817, Princess Charlotte was twenty-one, pregnant, and in excellent health. She was the only legitimate grandchild of the old king, George III, and the whole kingdom was waiting for her child. Her medical man decided she was too healthy. Charlotte was a big, strong young woman with a hearty appetite, and fashionable medical opinion at the time held that a mother like that should be lowered before her confinement.

Lowering meant less food, less blood, and less strength. The theory promised a smaller baby and an easier birth. So from August, they put her on a strict diet and purged her. They bled her again and again, drawing blood from a pregnant woman about to face the hardest physical test of her life.

Nobody intended harm. This was the best advice money could buy. One man in her household did not like what he saw. Christian Stockmar was a young German doctor who served her husband, Prince Leopold.

Stockmar was asked to join the team caring for the princess, and he said no. His reason was cold and clear: if anything went wrong, the blame would fall on the foreigner in the room. He was right that blame would follow, but it fell on someone else. That was the first suspect: a healthy young woman deliberately weakened by her own doctors weeks before a labor that would last more than two days.

To understand how that happened, one had to know who she was and why nobody around her could say no. Charlotte was born on the 7th of January, 1796 at Carlton House in London. Her parents were the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, and his cousin Caroline of Brunswick. It was a disastrous match.

George had agreed to marry mainly because Parliament would pay off his enormous debts if he did. He was drunk at the wedding. Three days after Charlotte was born, her father wrote a will, leaving almost everything he owned to Maria Fitzherbert, the woman he had secretly married years before and called his true wife. To Caroline, the mother of his child, he left one shilling.

They were already living separate lives. Charlotte would be the only child they ever had together. She grew up between two parents who could not stand each other. Her father limited her mother’s visits.

Her mother used her as a weapon when she could. When Charlotte was eight, she was moved into Warwick House, a smaller building right next to her father’s palace, with her own household. Everyone in it was paid to be there. The governess she loved, Lady Elgin, was replaced.

The story went that she had taken Charlotte to see her grandfather, the king, without her father’s permission. Charlotte learned early that the people she cared about could be taken away. The one warm figure in her early years was her grandfather, the old king. He doted on her, but his mind was already failing, and each breakdown took him further away.

When she was ten, a secret commission looked into rumors that her mother had given birth to an illegitimate child. It became known as the Delicate Investigation. Caroline was cleared of that charge, but not of gossip, and after that Charlotte saw her mother even less. She grew up loud.

She rode fast, laughed at the wrong moments, argued back, and spelled badly. She was more interested in politics and horses than embroidery. Her lessons, supervised by a bishop, John Fisher, and a string of tutors, covered history, languages, scripture, and deportment. She did the minimum and argued about the rest.

At sixteen, she read a new novel by an anonymous lady, Sense and Sensibility, and wrote to a friend that she saw herself in its most impulsive heroine. “I think Marianne and me are very alike in disposition,” she wrote. She was also big-boned and robust, and she loved her food. Five years later, her doctors would treat all of that as a problem to be fixed.

In her early teens, Charlotte found the one person who seemed to be there for her alone: Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, the daughter of an admiral, a few years older, clever, and calm. Charlotte called her Mercer. The letters Charlotte wrote her poured out in long, breathless streams, with complaints about her father and opinions about politicians running alongside worries, jokes, and confessions. Some days she wrote more than once.

Those letters are a large part of how we know Charlotte as a person, and they record the mistakes of a lonely teenager. Her first crush, those letters show, was a cousin, George Fitzclarence, one of her uncle’s illegitimate sons. It did not last. At her mother’s house in Kensington, Charlotte met a young cavalry officer named Charles Hesse.

He was handsome and attentive. Gossip said he was an illegitimate son of Charlotte’s uncle, the Duke of York. Her mother, Caroline, made the meetings easy. By Charlotte’s later account, Caroline would leave the two of them alone and close the door.

Nobody can say how serious it was, though Charlotte certainly wrote him letters and gave him small presents. Then Hesse left to fight in Spain. He kept the letters. For years they hung over her: a future queen’s love letters in the hands of a young officer abroad.

Through Mercer, Charlotte asked for them back. According to Hesse’s own reply, some were locked in a box with a friend; if he was killed, the box was to be sunk in the Thames. The rest, he said, he carried himself. When Charlotte finally confessed the whole affair to her father, she admitted she was not sure whether Hesse had been courting her or her mother.

That was the family she had: a mother who used her as cover and a father who saw her mostly as a problem. In February 1811, the old king’s mind gave way for good. Charlotte’s father was sworn in as Prince Regent. From then on he ruled Britain in all but name, and he ruled his daughter too.

On the morning of the ceremony at Carlton House, the great men of the kingdom were inside. Charlotte was not invited. She had her horse brought out and rode back and forth through the garden, trying to catch a glimpse through the windows. The heir to the throne stayed outside the glass and found other ways to make herself heard.

Her father had abandoned his old friends, the Whigs, once he came to power. At the opera one night, Charlotte stood up in her box and blew kisses to the Whig leader, Earl Grey. It was a small, deliberate act of rebellion, and the whole of London society talked about it. By the time she was seventeen, she had become the most valuable unmarried princess in Europe, and her father meant to use that.

His choice was William, the hereditary Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne. The match would tie Britain to the Netherlands and move a difficult daughter out of London. In December 1813, after a dinner at which she met the young prince, Charlotte agreed. She did not much like him, but princesses were not raised to expect to like the men chosen for them.

William was twenty-one, thin and eager, and had served on the Duke of Wellington’s staff in Spain. The British Army nicknamed him Slender Billy. Charlotte found him unimpressive. By one account, he was noticeably drunk in front of her at the races that summer.

Then she looked at the terms. As Princess of Orange, she would be expected to spend part of each year in Holland. On that point she would not move. She was the heir to Britain, and she meant to stay in Britain.

For months she argued over the wording. Then she found a way out. She insisted that her mother must always be welcome in her married home. The Prince of Orange, knowing the Regent would never accept it, refused.

In June 1814, Charlotte broke the engagement herself. Her father’s answer was to lock her up. He dismissed her household, the few attendants she trusted, and ordered her to Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park, where she would see almost no one. One July evening, the order reached her at Warwick House.

She ran. Picture Warwick House that evening, with servants in the corridors and her father’s order lying open. At its center was a young woman who had never gone anywhere alone in her life. She went down the stairs and out into the street alone.

She had never had to hail a cab before. By one account, a passerby helped her stop a hackney carriage. She gave the driver her mother’s address, and the heir to the British throne crossed London in a hired cab, running away from her father. Her mother was not even home.

She had to be fetched. By nightfall the house was full. Whig politicians arrived to advise the runaway. Her uncle, the Duke of York, came too; he had a warrant in his pocket allowing him to remove her by force if he had to.

They talked through the night. The law, they learned, gave the king, and so the Regent, near total authority over the royal children. Charlotte listened to one adviser after another. Every one of them told her the same thing in different words: there was nowhere in England she could go that her father could not follow.

The lawyer and politician Henry Brougham told her in fact that she could not win. In the small hours she agreed to go back. She was taken to Cranbourne Lodge after all, with new attendants chosen by her father. She lost, but London watched her lose.

The story of the flight was everywhere within days. Brougham summed up the public mood in a single line: “All are against the prince. ” That summer she was sent to the seaside at Weymouth. People lined the roads to watch her carriage go by.

At night, one building in the town was lit with lamps spelling out a greeting to “Europe’s hope and Britain’s glory. ” The crowds adored her. It changed nothing at home. And before she left for the coast, she lost her mother too.

Caroline was going abroad. They said goodbye briefly. It was the last time they would ever see each other. Caroline sailed from England in August 1814 and would spend the next six years wandering the continent.

By now Charlotte understood that she could not run from her father. The law would always bring her back. There was only one door out of his house that the law would respect: a husband. But a husband would also bring the one duty no princess could escape, a child, and a birth in a room full of men who were sure they knew best.

She had already met her future husband, though she did not know it yet. In the summer of 1814, London was full of kings and generals celebrating the defeat of Napoleon. At a gathering at the Pulteney Hotel, among the officers was a tall, quiet prince in a Russian cavalry uniform. His name was Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.

He came from a small, poor German duchy, had a good war record, beautiful manners, and almost no money. He had fought against Napoleon with the Russian army and ridden into Paris with the Allied forces that spring. Nobody thought of him as a serious match for the heir to the British throne. Charlotte’s father certainly did not.

When Charlotte invited him to call, he stayed less than an hour. By some accounts, he then wrote to the Prince Regent to apologize for any impropriety. He asked for nothing. To a girl surrounded by people who wanted something from her, that restraint stood out.

It took her nearly two years to get him. Her father stalled, refused, and changed the subject. Charlotte kept at it in person and on paper. She turned down every other name put in front of her.

In January 1816 she wrote to her father from Windsor, declaring her preference for the Prince of Coburg. No one, she promised, would be more steady in this, their present and last engagement, than herself. In other words: do not bother offering anyone else. This time her father gave in.

On the 14th of March 1816, the engagement was announced in the House of Commons. Her letters change after that. The anger drains out of them. After an evening with her father and Leopold, she wrote that she found him charming.

She went to bed, she said, happier than ever before in her life. Then she added the line about her future: she believed no princess had ever set out with such prospects of happiness. Real domestic ones, she wrote, like other people. It was a modest wish for a future queen.

They were married on the 2nd of May, 1816. The ceremony took place at nine in the evening in the Crimson Drawing Room at Carlton House. Outside, crowds were packed so tightly that carriages could hardly move. After twenty years of royal quarrels and scandals, here was a royal wedding people wanted to cheer.

Charlotte’s dress, silver lamé over white silk, reportedly cost more than £10,000. Leopold, who owned very little, made his vows in the uniform of a British general. When he reached the promise to endow her with all his worldly goods, the bride is said to have laughed out loud. Her parents’ wedding had been a drunken transaction.

Hers was a love match, and the whole country knew it. When the couple went to the theater that spring, audiences rose to their feet to applaud them. Her father got a very different reception: in January 1817, as he drove back from opening Parliament, a crowd attacked his carriage and smashed a window. The same public that jeered the father cheered the daughter.

To them, she was the future they were waiting for. Parliament gave Leopold an income of £50,000 a year. In August of 1816, the couple moved into Claremont, a country house in Surrey, a few hours’ ride from London. For the first time, Charlotte had a home that was hers.

She planted flowers and made plans for a little Gothic garden house. She walked the grounds with Leopold and the dogs. The years after the war had left many local men out of work, and the couple hired some of them to work on the estate, including older men nobody else would employ. Stockmar, who lived with them, watched the marriage closely.

He came from Coburg like Leopold and had trained as a doctor before joining the prince’s household. He was quiet and observant, and he wrote things down. He noticed that Charlotte had grown calmer. She dressed simply now.

She listened to her husband and let him tease her. The loud girl from Warwick House had settled. The story goes that when she began to lose her temper, Leopold would say a single French word to her: “Doucement. ” And she would laugh and calm down.

Around then she sat for the painter George Dawe. His portrait shows a fair, full-faced young woman looking straight out of the frame. It is one of the last images of her. Then came the question of an heir.

Charlotte lost a pregnancy early in the first year of the marriage. By the spring of 1817, she was expecting again. The country went slightly mad. Bookmakers took bets on whether the baby would be a boy or a girl.

Newspapers printed every rumor about her health. In the City of London, people who dealt in money did the sums: the birth of a princess, they said, would lift government stocks by about two and a half percent. A prince would lift them by six. A young woman’s pregnancy had become a line in the national accounts.

Inside Claremont, the pregnancy looked very different. Charlotte felt well, walked in the grounds, and ate with pleasure. And that, to her doctors, was the problem. The man in charge of the birth was Sir Richard Croft, one of the most fashionable accoucheurs in London: a man-midwife, a specialist in deliveries.

He was not a physician in the full sense, and he had firm views about how a birth should go. He was fifty-five, well-connected, and trusted by great families. He had attended the Duchess of Devonshire’s children years before. He had learned his trade from his father-in-law, Thomas Denman, the most respected man-midwife of his generation.

Denman taught that instruments should be a last resort. Croft believed in letting nature take its course, intervening as little as possible and being very slow to reach for instruments. It was Croft who oversaw the lowering diet and the bleeding. Charlotte’s physicians agreed with the plan, or at least did not stop it.

And Stockmar, the one man in the house with medical training who had doubts, had already stepped back, refusing to be part of the team. Put those facts together, and this was less a case of one careless man making a mistake than of a house where everyone deferred to someone else. The physicians deferred to the accoucheur who trusted nature. The husband trusted the experts.

And the patient, who had fought her father over every other decision in her life, did as the doctors told her. Nobody in that house had both the knowledge and the authority to say stop. Custom also required witnesses. For more than a century, senior officers of state had been expected to attend royal births in person.

It went back to 1688, when rumors claimed that King James II’s newborn son had been smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming pan. After that, royal births needed witnesses. The due date was the 19th of October. It came and went.

Charlotte grew heavier and more tired. The great officers of state gathered to witness the birth as custom required, waited, then drifted away. The queen was in Bath. The Prince Regent was away in the country.

At Claremont there were the doctors and nurses, Stockmar in the background, and Leopold, who stayed close. On the evening of Monday the 3rd of November 1817, Charlotte’s labor began. In the early hours of Tuesday, at about half past three, messengers rode out to summon the officers of state. By morning the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and a group of ministers were waiting in a room near the princess.

They would wait a long time. In London, crowds gathered for news. By tradition, guns would fire when a royal child was born. People listened for them.

The first stage of labor went on for about twenty-six hours. The contractions came, but they did little. Croft watched and waited and did not intervene. That was his method.

Charlotte had been weakened for weeks by diet and bleeding, and now she was given little food through the labor, to keep her low. Somewhere on Tuesday evening there was a warning sign. The fluid showed traces of meconium, the baby’s first waste. To a modern midwife, that suggests a child in distress.

Croft grew worried and sent for another specialist, Dr. John Sims. Sims arrived during the second day. He brought forceps with him, the iron instruments that could draw out a baby stuck in the birth canal.

He was not allowed to see the princess. Several accounts say Croft thought a new face in the room would frighten her. Sims stayed outside, advising at second hand. Forceps in 1817 were a serious risk.

In clumsy or tired hands, they could badly injure both mother and child. Croft had seen what they could do. He held back. The second stage of labor went on for about twenty-four more hours.

Picture that room on the second night, with the candles burning low: a young woman exhausted beyond anything she had known, doctors murmuring at the foot of the bed, her husband sitting nearby, watching something he could not stop. Those who were there remembered how patient she was. She hardly complained. Through all of those hours, she was given very little to eat.

That too was part of the method of keeping the patient low. At nine on the evening of Wednesday, the 5th of November, the child was born. It was a boy, large, about nine pounds, and perfectly formed. By one account, those who saw him said he had the look of the royal family.

He was not breathing. The doctors worked on him and tried everything they knew. Nothing worked. The heir the country had placed bets on was stillborn.

Outside the room, the officers of state had come to witness the birth of a future king. Instead, they were told that the child was stillborn. Then came the afterbirth. The placenta did not come away on its own.

Croft had to remove it by hand. There was some bleeding, but it seemed to settle. Charlotte took the news about her son quietly. By the accounts of those present, she said it was the will of God.

She asked for something to eat after her long fast. She was given a little food, and later a stimulant for her heart. To the exhausted men in the house, the danger seemed to be over. The ministers went home.

A bulletin went out to London saying that the princess was doing well. Across the country, people went to bed sad about the baby, but relieved about the mother. Leopold had not slept for two nights. He took a sleeping draft, laced with opium, and lay down in another room.

The house went quiet. Stockmar went to bed too. He had stayed out of the medical decisions as he had said he would. He was still in the house when he was needed.

A little after midnight, Charlotte began to vomit and complained of pain in her stomach. Her pulse raced. She said she felt cold and struggled to breathe. The nurse ran for Croft.

He found her shivering, her breathing noisy and labored, and bleeding again. Those present later remembered a rattle in her throat. He did what the medicine of the time recommended: hot water bottles, hot flannels, wine and brandy to stimulate her heart. Nothing held.

Croft sent for Stockmar and asked him to wake Leopold. Stockmar went first to Charlotte’s bedside. She reached out, caught his hand, and held it tightly. “They have made me tipsy,” she told him.

It was the wine and the brandy speaking, and the exhaustion. A small, confused thing to say. Stockmar left her to go and rouse Leopold, who was heavy with the opium and hard to wake. As he went, he heard her call after him.

“Stocky, Stocky. ” He turned back. By the time he reached the bed, she was dead. It was about half past two in the morning on the 6th of November, 1817.

She was twenty-one years old. She had been married for eighteen months and had lived in her own home for barely fifteen. The riders went out again, this time with the other kind of news. The Queen, Charlotte’s grandmother, wrote to the Prince Regent.

She had hoped to take up her pen to give him joy, she said. Now she had to write of grief instead. The news reached the Prince Regent as he hurried back to London. Those around him said he collapsed.

Charlotte’s mother, Caroline, was in Italy. Nobody in the family sent her word. She heard the news from a passing courier and fainted. The country went into deep mourning.

Shops ran out of black cloth. The Royal Exchange and the courts closed. The docks went still. Even the gambling houses shut their doors on the day of the funeral.

People who had never seen her wore black armbands for weeks. Poets wrote about her. Lord Byron, in exile in Italy, put her into the long poem he was working on, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. “Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead?

” he asked. A monument was raised to her in St. George’s Chapel, paid for by public subscription. Ordinary people gave what they could.

The sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt carved her body lying under a sheet with mourners bent over it. Above her, a figure rises towards heaven, and an angel carries her son. She was buried on the 19th of November in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.

Her son was laid at her feet. Her father was too ill to attend. At Claremont, a young widower sat in a silent house. And in London, a doctor who had done exactly what his training told him began to fall apart.

Now the four suspects, taken one at a time. Most of what we know about that night comes from the people who were in the house, above all Stockmar. His account of her last hours was published by his family many years after his death. It is detailed and careful, but it is also one man’s memory.

Suspect one is the lowering: weeks of a thin diet, purging, and bleeding given to a strong young woman before the hardest physical ordeal of her life. The case against it is easy to make. She went into a fifty-hour labor with less food, less blood, and less strength than she should have had. A woman in that state has fewer reserves when something goes wrong after the birth.

Plenty of people today reach the same conclusion. Bleeding a pregnant woman sounds like madness to a modern ear. Modern medicine adds a detail the doctors of 1817 could not know. Pregnancy already dilutes a woman’s blood.

Drawing off more of it takes away exactly what she will need if she bleeds after the birth. The case for the defense is just as real. Lowering was standard advice for well-fed patients of her class, not Croft’s private eccentricity. Her physicians went along with it.

If it was a crime, it was the whole profession’s. Suspect two is the forceps that were never used, and the specialist kept outside the door. This is the suspect most people remember because it has a face: Croft standing at the foot of the bed with a colleague and his instruments waiting in the next room. The case against Croft here is simple.

The labor was obstructed. Sims was in the house with the instruments. Nobody let him in. The case for Croft is also simple.

By most descriptions, the baby was lying awkwardly. Forceps at that stage in 1817 could have killed both mother and child. The other option, a cesarean section, was almost always fatal to the mother in that era. Some doctors at the time said openly that Croft had been right to wait.

Others said the opposite. By several accounts, Sims himself agreed that the forceps should not be used. The two men reached the same judgment. Doctors argued about it for years.

A modern hospital would handle a labor like hers very differently. It would almost certainly end in a cesarean section long before the second day, and bleeding after the birth would be treated with drugs that make the womb contract and with blood transfusion. None of that was safely available in 1817. Within a year of her death, a London obstetrician named James Blundell began experimenting with transfusing human blood, driven by the deaths he saw from bleeding after childbirth.

His first successful transfusion to a mother in that condition was reported in 1829. It came twelve years too late for Charlotte. Suspect three is the one most biographies name: bleeding after the birth. The placenta had to be removed by hand.

The womb may not have clamped down properly afterwards. That is a classic cause of death after childbirth. Even today, it fits some of the picture, including the bleeding, the coldness, and the racing pulse. It also fits the treatment she had had: a woman who starts with less blood can afford to lose less.

But it does not settle the question. The royal surgeons who examined her body, Sir Everard Home and Sir David Dundas, could not point to one clearer cause. The post-mortem is usually described as inconclusive. Their report concluded only that everything had been done for the best.

That left a gap. If the bleeding alone does not explain it, something else happened in those last two hours. Suspect four comes from more recent research. A study published in 1988 looked again at the symptoms recorded that night.

Its author suggested that the sudden pain, the struggle to breathe, the coldness, and the racing heart pointed to a pulmonary embolism: a clot, or some other blockage, traveling to the lungs after the long labor. It is a theory built on two-hundred-year-old notes. Nobody can test it now, but it would explain why a woman who seemed to be recovering collapsed so fast. Long labors, exhaustion, and dehydration all raise the risk of clots.

Charlotte had all three. It is also possible that more than one suspect was at work: a weakened body, a long labor, some bleeding, followed by a sudden crisis in the lungs. It is easy to forget that every man in that house believed he was being careful. From the diet to the waiting to the refusal to use forceps, each careful choice took away a little more of her margin.

By the early hours of the 6th of November, there was none left. The one verdict ever given, with her body in front of the examiners, cleared the doctor. The Prince Regent sent Croft a message of thanks. So did Leopold.

The official record said he had done nothing wrong. What did not clear him was the public. Some people blamed him openly, asking why a princess had been left to labor for two days without help. People said that the doctor killed the mother and the child.

Some still say it. And there was one more judge. Croft could not escape himself. After Charlotte’s death, Croft kept working.

But friends noticed he was not himself. He was anxious, sleepless, and low. In February 1818 he was called to another long, difficult labor. The patient was Mrs.

Maryanne Thacker, the wife of a Cambridge clergyman. The labor dragged on much as Charlotte’s had, and Croft grew more and more distressed. Her husband was George Thackeray, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. The case, according to the college’s own history, had worrying similarities to Charlotte’s.

In the small hours of the 13th of February, Croft was persuaded to rest in another room. He took his own life. He was fifty-six. Beside him lay the book, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, open at a line from the fifth act: “Fair sir, God save you.

Where is the princess? ” Nobody can say whether he chose that page or whether it simply fell open there. It hardly matters. Everyone who heard about it made the same connection.

As for the woman he left in labor that night, Mrs. Thacker gave birth to a daughter. The baby was christened Maryanne Elizabeth in a hurry, because no one expected her to survive, but she lived to grow up. The mother died five days later.

One royal birth ended in three deaths. In a sense, it ended in four. Medical historians still call Charlotte’s case the “triple obstetric tragedy,” counting the baby, the mother, and the doctor. Mrs.

Thacker is usually left out of the tally. Her death changed things well beyond that house. In medicine, it changed a lot, slowly. Over the following decades, British obstetricians grew more willing to step in during long labors rather than wait for nature.

Charlotte’s case was quoted again and again. The consequences were even larger. Charlotte had been the old king’s only legitimate grandchild. With her and her son gone, the line of succession had a hole in it.

Her father’s middle-aged brothers, several of them settled with mistresses and debts, suddenly had a reason to marry. One of them, Edward, Duke of Kent, married a widowed German princess. She happened to be Leopold’s own sister. On the 24th of May, 1819, they had a daughter.

She was christened Alexandrina Victoria. Had Charlotte lived, there would have been no Queen Victoria. Charlotte’s father became King George IV in 1820. He never had another legitimate child.

When he died, the crown passed to a brother, and then to the brother’s niece. The race for an heir had been unseemly. The Duke of Kent had given up a companion of more than twenty-five years to make his marriage. His older brother, the Duke of Clarence, married too; his daughters died as babies.

Even the baby’s name caused a quarrel. The Prince Regent refused most of the names her parents wanted. She was named Alexandrina after her godfather, the Russian Tsar Alexander I. Victoria came to the throne in 1837 at eighteen.

She reigned for sixty-three years, longer than any British monarch before her. Her closest adviser in those early years was her uncle Leopold. He also encouraged her marriage to his nephew Albert. Leopold never quite recovered.

By the accounts of people who visited, he kept Charlotte’s rooms at Claremont as she had left them for a long time: her cloak, her bonnet, and her watch on the mantelpiece. Years later, his niece Victoria spent some of the happiest days of her childhood at Claremont, visiting her uncle. She played in the gardens Charlotte had planted. In 1831, Leopold became the first king of the Belgians.

He married again out of duty and had a family. He named his only daughter Charlotte. He outlived his first wife by almost forty-eight years. He died in 1865, still, by the account of those who knew him, carrying her memory.

Stockmar put the loss in one line. November, he said, saw the ruin of this happy home. So what killed Princess Charlotte? No single thing killed her, and no single man.

A healthy woman was weakened on purpose by the medicine of her day, then put through a labor of about fifty hours that nobody felt able to cut short. After that came, most likely, either bleeding after the birth or a clot to the lungs. That last part is a judgment, not a finding. Croft did not kill her by himself.

The system he stood for did, and it destroyed him too. Go back to Claremont for a moment. A watch lies on the mantelpiece, where she put it down on her last evening walk. Nobody was allowed to move it.

At Windsor, a small coffin still lies at her feet. Around them, the chapel is full of kings and queens who reigned. She is the one who was supposed to.