Noble Blood - The Princess That England Lost

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

Princess Charlotte of Wales was England's grand hope for the future, directly in line for the throne after the infirm King George III and the buffoonish Prince Regent George IV. She fought for her independence, for the ability to choose her own husband, and ultimately succeeded. But her love story was short-lived.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes and scripts on Patreon— Merch!— Order Dana's book, Anatomy: A Love Story— Sign up to join Dana on the Mary Shelley Pilgrimage in April Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. Video on Demand.

This guy's bobo-bubim. 2 a whatever time it is. Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like, the paper view. It was like a first closet moment from me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful.

But I'm appreciating her. in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like, but listen to Los Coleristas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. Princess Charlotte of Wales, the only legitimate grandchild of King George III of England. The woman who was directly in line to become Queen of England herself,

died in the early hours of the morning on November 6, 1817, and plunged the entire nation into mourning. She was the beloved daughter of the country, the bright light of a nation that had been battered down by war with Napoleon. Her grandfather, George III, had gone mad, and her father, the hedonistic and philandering Prince Regent, future King George IV, was hated by the people. She alone, Charlotte, had been their hope for the future.

The country had celebrated with her when she married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Salfeld and eagerly placed bets on the sex of her infant when it was announced that she was pregnant. No one was prepared to lose her. Charlotte was just 21 years old, and she had been married to her husband for only a year. She died just hours after giving birth to a stillborn son, a child that, had he lived, would have become a king of England. After her death, stores closed for two weeks, and not just stores, the courts, the royal exchange, docks, even gambling parlors closed on the day of her funeral. Linen drapers ran out of black cloth because frivolous decoration was forbidden. in during official mourning, at a certain point, ribbon makers had to petition the government

to shorten the morning period to prevent them from going bankrupt. Poets ranging from Felicia Herman, Letitia Elizabeth Lainden, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, they all wrote about Charlotte's death. In Byron's poem, he wrote a stanza that goes, Sions of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou? Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead? Could not the grave forget thee and lay low, some majestic, less beloved head? The physician who had been attending to Charlotte as she delivered her child, and who had been treating her as she died, was a man named Sir Richard Croft, a baron. Though female midwives had traditionally delivered infants, at the turn of the 19th century, it became fashionable to have

male midwives, sometimes called a cushare, deliver one's child. Three months after Charlotte's death, her loss and the grief of the entire nation continued to weigh heavily on Dr. Croft. While he was in the home of another patient, with the woman delivering a child upstairs, Croft went down to their study, sat in a high-backed chair, and shot himself in the head with a gun. For all of the extreme heartache that Princess Charlotte's death caused at the time, today she is rarely discussed.

She's a historical footnote, eclipsed by another bright, romantic young woman, the future Queen Victoria, Charlotte's cousin, born two years after Charlotte's death, ironically to fill the gap in succession that Charlotte left behind. Had Charlotte lived, the course of history would have been irrevocably altered. But history is full of misroads and false starts,

and the fascinating, maddening thing about monarchy is that the fates of entire nations do change with the fates of individuals. Princess Charlotte was progressive and adventurous, and dreamed of becoming queen and undermining the tired, conservative Tory regime of her father and grandfather, but instead she spent her entire short life as a pawn. First upon under parents who loathed each other, then by a government that wanted her to be a tool of diplomacy, then by men who wanted to marry her, and then by the political parties who saw her popularity as a means to their

own ends. In the aftermath of Sir Richard Croft's death by suicide, investigators on the scene noticed that a book had fluttered open nearby, purely out of coincidence. It was a copy of the Shakespeare play, Love's Labor's Lost, and it was open to Act 5, Scene 2. On the page, mere feet from where the slumped body of the man whose guilt had consumed him were the words, Fair, sir, God save you, where is the princess? I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. To call the marriage of Princess Charlotte's parent an unhappy one would be a vast understatement almost to the point of being misleading.

The union of the future George IV of England and Caroline of Brunswick was nothing short of calamity. George IV, the oldest son of King George III, was a disastrously unpopular figure in England at the time, routinely mocked in the press with caricatures. The perception of him, and not necessarily an incorrect one, was that he was an over-indulged, irresponsible, vain man, and not too intelligent. He womanized frequently and spent extravagantly.

When having his portrait painted, he forced servants to help squeeze him into a girdle several sizes too small to try to cut a more fashionable figure. In my estimation, George IV suffered from the tragedy of being a prince in an era when princes were no longer considered God's vessels on earth. There was an irreconcilable disconnect between his own sense of his importance and his actual abilities, and this just happened to coincide with the age when it was easier than ever for the population to draw and distribute mean cartoons about him. The historian James Chambers in his book Charlotte and Leopold describes the then-princes failings

in almost poetic terms. Quote, he longed to be regarded as the leader of fashion, the nation's foremost sportsmen, and the most eminent connoisseur of art and architecture. To that end, he had squandered absurd sons on clothes and horses, and he had lavished fortunes on building and embellishing his position. pavilion in Brighton and his home in London, Carlton House, each of which he had crammed with an indiscriminate clutter of both exquisite and tasteless pictures and furniture, end quote.

As you might imagine, desperately trying to buy his way into being respected and thought of as smart, didn't do much for George except rack up his debts. By 1794, his debt had reached over 600, hundred thousand pounds, and his annual allowance from the privy purse of 60,000 pounds, was barely enough to even cover the interest. The government had already bailed him out once by this point, and they would not happily do so again. George, who at this point was Prince of Wales, only had one option. He needed to get married. If the prince made a suitable marriage,

the first step to him fulfilling his duty of providing the kingdom within it, air, his allowance would be increased to 100,000 pounds annually, in theory to provide for a larger household. It was the money, more than any sense of duty, certainly not love, that motivated George then in his mid-30s to get married. Well, a brief but important side note here. Technically, George already was married, or at least he thought he was. Almost a decade before, when he was 23, he had secretly, and without the permission of his father, the king, had a private wedding with a woman named Maria Fitzherbert, who just so happened to be Catholic. If that sounds familiar to you or you're getting deja vu, I did an episode all about this secret marriage years ago, a very, very early episode of this podcast called What I Has Wept for George the Fourth. But to the vast relief of the king's cabinet, the marriage between George and Maria Fitzherbert

was easily nullified. It broke a handful of laws. First, any royal marriage needed the approval of the king. But second, and more importantly, Maria Fitzherbert being Catholic, meant that the marriage was invalidated automatically by both the Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1700. And so, needing to make an appropriate and legal marriage, George selected from among the small pool of eligible foreign princesses, his first cousin, Caroline, Duchess of Brunswick. The diplomat Lord Malmesbury came to Brunswick to escort Caroline to her new home in England, but fairly quickly Malmesbury realized that the match might be troublesome for the prince. Allegedly, Caroline's behavior was rowdy and uncouth,

and Malmesbury reported that she didn't wash or change her clothes often enough. There were rumors about Caroline being unsuitable even before the prince had chosen her, but the prince's mistress at the time, a woman named Lady Jersey, was all too happy to encourage the match between her lover and a woman who was considered unpleasant and undignified, where there was no risk of him growing to love her more than her. So George made his choice, and then appointed his mistress, Lady Jersey, as his new wife-to-bees Lady in Waiting. The alleged and oft-repeated anecdote about Prince George meeting his future wife Caroline in person for the first time, right before their wedding, is that after greeting her, he went pale as a ghost and called out for his friend.

Harris, he said, I'm not feeling well. Pray, get me a glass of brandy. But some of the English reports about Caroline being unladylike need to be, in my opinion, given just a little bit of indulgence. When Caroline first arrived in England after a long and arduous journey through a Europe besieged by Napoleonic War, her future husband was not at the port to greet her. Instead, the only representative from her new home was Lady Jersey, whom Caroline quickly and correctly gleaned, was her. fiance's mistress. At her first dinner with George VIII, Caroline made a number of jokes poking fun at her,

soon-to-be husband blatant indiscretions, which he and the rest of the court were aghast at, but which I personally feel Caroline was perfectly in her right to do, no doubt a tiny attempt at staking out a little bit of power and a little humor in a very vulnerable and uncomfortable situation. Meanwhile, Prince George was loudly mocking her to his friends, calling her ugly and unhygienic and speculating that she wasn't a virgin. Not that it matters, but remember, George was most certainly not a virgin himself. And though most people recount the story of the prince asking for

brandy after their first meeting, it should also be noted that Caroline wasn't impressed with her future husband either. He's nothing like as handsome as as his portrait, she said as she was leaving. It was a marriage doomed from the start, and though on their wedding night the prince was so drunk that he slept on the floor, they did manage to consummate the marriage very shortly after. And nine months after the wedding,

on January 7, 1796, Caroline gave birth to a little girl, young Princess Charlotte. Three days after that, George separated from his wife and declared that their union was all but over. King George III, George's father, Harvard hoped that the couple would eventually reconcile and have a baby boy, but fairly quickly it became apparent that would never happen.

George and Caroline despised each other, and their only child, their daughter Charlotte, was caught in the middle. For a period during a Charlott, during Charlotte's childhood, they all lived in the same mansion, Carlton House in London, albeit on different floors. But eventually, Caroline moved to Blackheath, an area of southeast London, and when Charlotte was eight years old, she moved to another palace, Warwick House, and was given her own household. And so from eight years old on, Charlotte was surrounded only by people who were paid to be with her.

Charlotte was in direct line to be queen after her father, and as air presumptive she was incredibly well-educated. Although some historians remarked that Charlotte was not particularly studious or a natural scholar, she was bright and inquisitive and interested in poetry, politics, and literature. When Jane Austen's novel's Sense and Sensibility came out, at the time published anonymously, authored only by, quote,

A Lady, Charlotte read and enjoyed it and even wrote to a friend that she related to the character of Marianne. Because her father was a royal prince and Charlotte was a royal heir, her father had full custody of care. But when she was young, Charlotte still saw her mother frequently and spent her summers in Blackheath to spend even more time with her. But all of that changed. after something that came to be known as the delicate investigation.

Separation hadn't made Charlotte's parents grow fonder. In fact, living their own separate lives each taking on their own extramarital flirtations, their mutual dislike turned to loathing. Meanwhile, both of their reputations took a turn for the worst. George was considered frivolous for his overspending in the time of war, against Napoleon, and while Carolyn was popular among the people, gaining sympathy and seen as a jilted wife, among the nobility she was derided for her informality and her suggestive and crude behavior. Living on her own, separated from her daughter, Caroline informally adopted around

eight poor children, paying for their education and their room and board. The rumors started that one of the children, a boy named William Austin, was actually Caroline's biological child, an illegitimate son born out of wedlock. The rumor was likely started by Caroline herself, who found it funny to laugh at Little Williams' antics and joke that the boy was actually hers and George's. Of course, the scandal of the wife of the future King of England bearing a son can't be overstated. It would threaten the entire line of succession into question. The matter was so important that the question as to whether or not Caroline had had another child was actually given over to a commission that included the Prime Minister, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice of England in Wales, and the Home Secretary.

Members of Caroline's household staff confirmed that she was sometimes flirtatious with visiting male suitors, but they had no actually. evidence that she was having an affair, let alone that she had ever been pregnant or had another child. And there was also the small matter of young William Austin actually having a mother who came and visited him at the palace often. The delicate investigation was closed, and though the commission remarked that some of Caroline's behavior might have been a little less than seemly, there was no actual evidence of an affair or an illegitimate child. With the end of the investigation also came the end of the hope,

George had no doubt been carrying, that he would finally have recourse to get an official divorce. Their poor daughter, Charlotte, was caught in the middle of it all, kept from her mother during all of this by her father. She would write George letters, asking for permission to see her mother, or at least to write to her. At one point during the investigation, George was so intent on keeping his wife away from their daughter

that Caroline was forbidden from acknowledging her daughter when their carriages happened to pass in the park one afternoon. Young Charlotte wrote about the event to her father, recounting that she had seen but not spoken to her mother, worried that if she didn't tell him, he would be upset at her. Respectful as she was of her father's wishes, it seemed that something of her mother had, in a sense, inadvertently rubbed off on Charlotte. People noted that though she was beautiful, her table manners

didn't quite match, and Charlotte wore ankle-length drawers that showed at the hem of her dresses in a scandalous manner. And even more scandalous, when Charlotte was a teenager, she began a little romance with a man named Charles Hess, a captain of the 18th Light Dragoons. Charles had a reputation as a cad, but Charlotte was captivated. He was her first love, and they exchanged romantic letters back and forth. It likely went no further than that, although at one point, Charlotte was staying with her mother and Caroline, Ever the Joker, locked the 16-year-old in her room with her sweetheart, and told the pair to amuse themselves.

Still, like most childhood loves, this one faded into the background, and by the the time Charlotte turned 17, talk turned in earnest to finding her a husband. The frontrunner, at least in her father's mind, was easy. William the hereditary Prince of Orange, son of the newly minted sovereign Prince of the Netherlands, a title that their family had reclaimed after Napoleon's men were driven out of Holland. In George's mind, tying his daughter, the future Queen of England, to the future King of the Netherlands was a brilliant strategic move to secure British influence

in the northwest part of Europe. Charlotte was less convinced. For one, she wasn't too keen on getting married at all. She was hoping to bide her time. When the rumors started swirling that she was already engaged to William of Orange, Charlotte jokingly replied that she actually favored another suitor,

the Duke of Gloucester. The princess's marital prospects were such a hot topic of conversation that her off-handed remark was spun the way a celebrity's on the red carpet might be today. There was breathless coverage as to whether Charlotte would choose the orange or the cheese, a reference to Gloucester cheese. The two men, both named William, were dubbed by the popular press, Slender Billy and Silly Billy. But aside from Charlotte's antipathy towards marriage as a whole,

there were some actual problems with William of Orange. For when he was sickly, pale, and not too attractive, a friend of Charlotte went to scope him out when he arrived in England and reported back an account that politely could be characterized as damning with faint praise. Charlotte had attended a dinner with her suitor's father, and he and the rest of the men in attendance got blackout, slipped down from the table, fall onto the floor drunk, which didn't do much to ingratiate her to the Orange clan.

But all that aside, her mother hated the oranges. There was old European family bad blood there, and as much as George tried to persuade his daughter to marry William of Orange, Caroline was making herself clear on the position in the other direction. There was another small matter that worried Charlotte at this moment that isn't quite relevant to the larger story, but which I find I just have to share because of how absolutely modern it feels. While Charlotte was weighing a possible engagement, she was preoccupied with terror about the letters she had sent to her old flame, Captain Charles Hess, back when she was

She had burnt all of the letters that he sent her, but he almost certainly had not done the same. To make matters worse, Captain Hess had already departed for the continent with his regiment. Charlotte begged her best friend Mercer Elephant Stone, which is incidentally just a great name, to secure those letters, and Mercer wrote to the captain. Captain Hess wrote back that, no, Princess Charlotte's letters were not destroyed. but they were safe in a trunk back in England, and if he died in battle, he had told a friend to put the trunk at the bottom of the Thames.

It never came to that, and ultimately Captain has returned and did destroy the letters, we assume. But I find something very relatable about Charlotte desperately enlisting a friend to try to get an old flame to destroy evidence of their possible impropriety. But back to Charlotte,

its primary suitor, the Prince of Orange. On December 12th, 1813, George arranged dinner for his daughter to sit down and meet the Prince of Orange face to face at a dinner party. Halfway through, the Prince Regent called his daughter aside and asked if she had made a decision. Well, his personality seems fine enough so far, from the very little I've seen of it, she said. Her father reacted with a resounding cheer and walked back in announcing that Charlotte had agreed to the match. It took several more months for the actual marriage contract to be ironed out, and I'll spare you the exceedingly boring details there. But the big picture was that they decided that if Charlotte had two sons,

one would be the king of the Netherlands and one would be king of England. And that was the end of that. Charlotte, Princess of Wales, future Queen of England, was engaged. Or rather, that was supposed to be the end of that. In the two years that Charlotte was engaged to William of Orange, she grew less and less excited by the idea of actually marrying him. It didn't help things that at a large banquet celebrating the soldiers of the war against Napoleon, Charlotte saw her, well, frail and underwhelming fianc, next to far more attractive men in uniform.

One of those men, Prince Frederick Augustus of Prussia, Charlotte fell head over heels for, and she often referred to her infatuation with the prince in her diaries, anonymizing him as F. Prince August even called on Charlotte, secretly, of course, and it took her best friend, Mercer arriving to Warwick House and bursting in on them to remind Charlotte that this sort of meeting was not the appropriate conduct for a princess. But Charlotte was well aware that the real problem here wasn't her little indiscretions. It was that she simply did not want to marry William of Orange. When she and William sat together for the first time after they had gotten engaged, William commented that Charlotte would need to spend two or three months out of the year in Holland with him.

Charlotte burst into tears and fled from the room. She didn't want to go to Holland. And there was a political angle to that as well. Politically, Charlotte was a wig, a young progressive. Her father had been a wig too in his youth, until he became regent for the Mad King George III, and transitioned toward the more conservative, old-school pro-monarchy Tory party.

Where Charlotte's father was incredibly unpopular, Charlotte and her mother were beloved by the people, and the Whigs knew that having Charlotte and Caroline in the country, the bright young daughter and the discarded wife, was politically prudent. Whig politicians whispered to Charlotte that some said her father was eager to marry her off to a foreign prince because he resented her popularity in the country.

And once Charlotte was gone, it would be easier to get Caroline to move abroad as well. The English population began to view the marriage as a choice Charlotte was making between her two parents. People would shout at her in the streets, telling her not to give in, not to abandon her mother and marry Orange. Eventually, Charlotte wrote to William of Orange and told him, no, she did not want to leave England to live in the Netherlands for any period of time,

and she also put to him a question that she already knew the answer to. Would her mother, Caroline, always be welcome in their home at court? William of Orange apologized, but told Charlotte, no, given Caroline's scandals and the fact that George, the Prince Regent of England, hated her, he couldn't agree to that. And so Charlotte made up her mind. She broke off the engagement with William. Her father, George, was livid. He came to her London house and berated her for her insubordination,

and he declared that all of her servants would be dismissed, and that she would be sent to live in the remote Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor without permission for any visitors except her grandmother. Charlotte was outraged. Right then and there, She ran out into the street. An architect looking out the window in one of the buildings next door noticed this woman clearly in distress,

either crying or having recently been crying. He went downstairs and asked the young woman if he could help her. She asked him for help summoning a hackney cab, something she had never done before. The architect helped her summon the cab, and when it came, he insisted on escorting her to her destination. It wasn't until they arrived at her mother's address, where the servants bowed deeply to the princess, that the man realized who his fellow passenger had been. Whatever rescue Charlotte was expecting at her mother's house, she didn't find it. She was miserable, disheveled, and angry.

Her mother wasn't home, and so she sent messengers to summon her back, and she also had several other prominent wigs joined them in the meeting. In the end, they all decided that the prudent thing for Charlotte to do was, go back to her father's house and accept his punishment. And so, miserably, the runaway princess returned, still unwilling to marry William of Orange, but ready to accept her father's terms of exile to Windsor. The stunt made the public love her even more, and word of her father's cruelty of keeping the princess under how,

house arrest, traveled widely. It was even broached by one of the princess's allies in the House of Commons. Caroline, the princess's mother, wasn't allowed to visit her, and Caroline soon decided that a life on the continent would be far more amenable to the tense situation with her husband in England. Caroline left for Italy, never to see her daughter again, and Charlotte, who had rejected the Prince of Orange, at least in part out of not wanting to abandon her mother. became the one feeling abandoned. George could only hold out against the tide of public sympathy for so long. After a few months of isolation,

George allowed Charlotte to go visit, not fashionable Bristol, but at least somewhere, Weymouth. Huge crowds arrived to cheer her every leg of the way, with people throwing their hats in the air and shouting, Hail Princess Charlotte, Europe's hope and Britain's glory. Her father, George, still held out hope that she would come around and marry William of Orange, but Charlotte held fast. Still, she would need to get married, and by the end of 1814, she herself had picked a frontrunner, not the dashing Prince F that she mooned over.

He was a cad, scandalous, never a real choice to begin with, and, even more heartbreakingly, had seemingly moved on to another woman. No, Charlotte made a pragmatic decision. She settled on the dashing Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Charlotte had actually met Prince Leopold before in a meet-cute that feels right out of a rom-com. When she was in the process of breaking up her engagement with Prince of Orange, she was meeting with the visiting Tsar of Russia at the Pulteney Hotel in London,

worried that she might actually run into Orange and hoping to avoid the awkward run-in, She snuck out towards a back staircase and ran, actually ran into, a man in uniform, Prince Leopold. He introduced himself and offered to escort her back to her carriage. If you're a prince, Charlotte asked, why have you not called on me formally like all of the others? Prince Leopold apologized and promised that he would rectify the error. And he did, formally calling on the princess a few days later and writing to her father, to state his intentions.

All of it was very much above board. George wasn't particularly moved by Leopold, who had few connections and less money, and Leopold eventually left with his regiment for the continent. But Charlotte's mind was made up. No arguments, no threats, shall ever bend me to marry the detested Dutchman, she wrote in a letter to a friend.

She would marry Leopold, or, as she called him, him, the Leo. Charlotte did the thing that so many of us do when we have a crush on a new person. She began casually bringing him up in conversation, inquiring about him to her friends and relatives. What do you think of Prince Leopold? You know, just asking, just curious. She kept telling her best friend Mercer to write him, passing hints along that she wanted him to come back to England. Finally, her father George yielded, and in February 1816, 18 months after Charlotte and her

Prince's meet cute at the hotel, the Prince Regent invited Leopold and Charlotte to invite him for dinner at his home in Brighton. During the dinner, everyone got along swimmingly. It didn't hurt things that just a few weeks earlier, William of Orange had finally moved on and married someone else, which meant that George's favorite horse was out of the running. He conceded that Prince Leopold was an appropriate match with, quote, every qualification to make a woman happy. Charlotte was thrilled. I find him charming and go-to-bed happier than I have ever done yet in my life.

I am certainly a very fortunate creature and have to bless God, she wrote. A princess never, I believe, set out in life, or married, with such prospects of happiness, real domestic ones, like other people. Charlotte and Leopold were married two months later, May 2, 1816, during a dazzling ceremony in which Charlotte donned a silver gown that cost 10,000 pounds. It's a dress you can still see today if you go to visit the Royal Ceremonial dress collection at Hampton Court Palace. The only part of the wedding ceremony that didn't go exactly as scripted was during the ceremony itself, when the groom was promising to endow his new wife with all of his worldly goods, and Charlotte,

knowing that her husband was basically broke and she was the rich one, couldn't help but giggle. They were a beloved couple, young, beautiful, and in love. When they made public appearances at the opera or theater, people would burst out into spontaneous applause or singing of God save the king. They were enough during a time when the rulers were the infirm mad King George III and his detested regent George IV to make people believe in the monarchy again. When Charlotte announced less than a year later that she was pregnant, it's impossible to overstate how delighted the public was. There was betting in halls about the sex of the child, and economists at the time predicted

that the stock market would raise by 2.5% if she gave birth to a princess, and 6% if it was a prince. November 3, 1817, Charlotte went into labor, overdue at 42 weeks. The baby was lying horizontal in the womb, and the physician attending, a trendy male midwife named Sir Richard Croft,

made the decision, in line with the popular school of thought at the time, that using forceps would be more harm than good. Dr. Croft also determined that a cesarean section would be too dangerous. Whether or not he made the right or wrong medical decision it's impossible to know. After being in labor for two days, Charlotte gave birth to a stillborn boy, nine pounds. By all accounts, the baby was beautiful and looked just like his royal parents. The doctor tried chest compressions and water baths on the baby and mustard rubs, but the baby never breathed.

Charlotte seemed to recover, at least well enough that her frantic husband, who had been by her side for the entire ordeal, was willing to take an opiate to get some sleep beside her. But just five hours later, Charlotte began bleeding heavily. She was cold to the touch, and whispered of pain in her abdomen. Before her husband could even be woken up, Charlotte was dead. My Charlotte is gone from the country.

It has lost her. Leopold cried when he saw his wife's body gone cold and white. Two generations lost in an instant. The nation mourned with him. Charlotte's father, the Prince Regent George, was so distraught that he couldn't even bring himself to a time. her funeral. Charlotte's mother, Caroline, who had been out of the country and hadn't seen her daughter since 1814, passed out when she heard the news. Though Leopold and George had both assured

Dr. Croft that he had made the correct medical decisions, a few months later, Dr. Croft shot himself in an armchair, unable to shake the grief of an entire nation from his shoulders. Even though King George III had had incredibly 15 children, 13 of whom had reached adulthood, he had no more legitimate grandchildren. His younger sons had seemed happy just to enjoy the company of their mistresses. But with Princess Charlotte's death, there was a succession crisis. George III's middle-aged children were now in a frantic race to be the first to have a legitimate heir. The winner was his fourth son, Edward Duke of Kent, who married a young German princess in May 1818, the year after Princess Charlotte's death.

The year after that, the German princess gave birth to a baby girl at Kensington Palace, whom they named Alexandrina Victoria. Although she's better known by the name she would have when she ascended to the throne at age 18, Queen Victoria. That's the story of Princess Charlotte of Wales, her marriage and her death. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the men in her life after she was gone. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on Demand, this guy's bobo-oo-bub-a-m.

2 a.m., but whatever time it is, Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like the wild batch you were with. It was like a first, like, closet moment from me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of them. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like, but listen to Los Col Dristas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or whatever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be thoughts. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Langoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account,

and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.

Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had only been married to Princess Charlotte, the woman who had fought and advocated to marry him for a short time.

But he never forgot her. He would eventually become king of Belgium and he would marry again, and he and his second husband. wife would have living heirs. Leopold would insist on naming their only daughter, Charlotte, in honor of the woman he once loved. Unfortunately, little Charlotte has a slightly tragic end. She would marry a man named Maximilian, and they would go to Mexico as emperor and empress, where she would change her name to Carlotta. If you want to hear more about her, you can listen

to another very early episode of this podcast called Today, we leave for Mexico. Princess Charlotte of Wales other former paramour, William Prince of Orange, also went on to live a fascinating life. He was allegedly bisexual, and he was blackmailed about it in 1819. Now, I want to be on the record, blackmail is always bad, but there are actually theories that he was blackmailed into signing constitutional reforms that actually led to Netherlands becoming a parliamentary democracy. So what can we say, except history truly is a rich tapestry? Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin'Mild from Aaron Manky.

The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by Rima Ilkeali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Readers, Katie's finalists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on Demand, this guy's bobo-oo-oo-a-m-m-m-Wi-Mawyer. Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like, a wild batch you were with.

It was like a first like, closet moment from me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of them. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like, but listen to Los Coltristas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.