The Lost Princess

A few years ago, in one of those spells when writers have to find other means of paying for groceries and cat food, I took a job as a guide at a stately home owned by the National Trust in my home county of Herefordshire. Croft Castle, high on a green hillside near the Welsh border, is remarkable for being on a site inhabited by successive generations of the same family for more than a thousand years. Below it are the water meadows where a fifteenth century Croft fought in a decisive battle in the Wars of the Roses. Above it in the woodlands is the grave of a twentieth century Croft who died in the Commandoes in the Second World War. The family could seldom keep out of any battle going.

Inside are several centuries-worth of objects and artefacts, from the halberd that Sir William Croft may have been carrying when he was killed fighting for King Charles in our civil war in the seventeenth century, to some much more peacable eighteenth and nineteenth century furniture, china and portraits. (Later, I borrowed some of those to furnish the Mandeville's London drawing room in chapter nine of The Foreign Affair.)  One object puzzled me for a while because I couldn't see what it had to do with Croft Castle and Herefordshire.

It was an early nineteenth century porcelain bust of a pleasant looking young woman, slightly pop-eyed, with a wreath of roses in her dark curly hair. All I knew about her was that she was Princess Charlotte, grand-daughter of George III, only legitimate child of his son the Prince Regent, later George IV, so destined one day to be Queen of England. But it never happened and the princess, loved and celebrated in her day, is now only one of the ifs of history. The more I found out about her story, the odder it became.

For a start, it was surprising that she existed at all. Her father had become engaged to Princess Caroline of Brunswick on his father's orders before he even met her. He hated her on sight, was drunk through the marriage ceremony and spent only a few nights in bed with her, but Princess Charlotte was the result. After that came separation, probably well-justified allegations of adultery against Caroline and public rows that reached a climax when she was locked out of her husband's coronation. The other surprise about young Charlotte, given her parentage, was that she turned out to be a lively and generous-hearted girl, even if inclined to bounciness and wearing her skirts too short. The British public thoroughly disliked her father but took to Charlotte. The family married her to a handsome young German prince named Leopold of Saxe Coburg. (The German Chancellor Bismark called the Saxe-Coburgs 'the stud farm of Europe' because they produced such a plentiful supply of princely husbands.)  

Leopold did his duty and when Charlotte became bloomingly pregnant at the age of twenty-one, everything seemed set fair for the royal succession.  On November 3, 1817, she went into labour at her house Claremont, in Surrey. She was in labour for three days and for the final two days the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the Lord Chancellor, the Home Secretary, and the Secretary for War were all waiting downstairs. According to the law of the time, they had to be present at the birth of heirs to the throne to make sure that no substitutions took place. But the baby, a 'large and beautiful' boy weighing nine pounds, was born dead. Charlotte seemed to be recovering from the birth,  but died in the early hours of the following day.

So what was the connection with Croft Castle? Another sad story. One of the medical experts attending the princess was the head of the Croft family of the time, Sir Richard Croft. The Crofts at this point had lost their fortune and Sir Richard lived in London and adopted his father-in-law's profession of accoucheur, or gentleman midwife, with many patients among the aristocracy. There is a portrait of him in the dining room at Croft, a sensitive looking and sad-eyed man, more likeable than the mostly rather self-satisfied males in other family portraits. He blamed himself for not preventing the princess's death, almost certainly unjustly. A few months later – after seeing several of his other patients through their confinements – he shot himself through the head.

His death helped to fuel some vicious rumours that circulated. One of the nastiest was that Charlotte and the baby had been poisoned by her grandmother, George III's wife Queen Charlotte, who was determined that no descendant of the scandalous Caroline should ever come to the throne. No historian takes that one seriously. As for the suggestion that the baby was rescued from the murderous attentions of his great grandmother and lived to claim the throne twenty years later – that's entirely my fiction or, for the purposes of this book, Lord Kilkeel's fiction: 'a horrible, warped fairy tale', as Daniel says.

At the time I worked as a guide, Liberty Lane was already in my mind. I had this picture of her, a young woman totally alone on Calais sands, refusing to believe that her father had died in a duel. What I hadn't worked out was what had happened to bring her to this situation. Slowly, through two summers, Liberty's fictional story and Princess Charlotte's story came together.

Coming back to history, there was one real and momentous consequence of Charlotte's death. With no direct heir to throne, the Prince Regent ordered his middle-aged royal duke brothers to discard their mistresses, marry princesses and produce legitimate royal children as soon as possible. Edward, Duke of Kent, obeyed efficiently though with no great enthusiasm and baby Alexandrina Victoria,  'plump as a partridge' was born nineteen months later – the Little Vicky whose accession to the throne was eventually to have such a dramatic effect on the life of Liberty Lane.

At the end of The Foreign Affair Liberty is thinking, without envy, of the distance between her life and the queen's. And yet there are resemblances between them. They are both young (Liberty at 22 is four years older than Victoria) and share the characteristics of being intelligent, self-reliant and stubborn to the point of pig-headedness. In the unlikely event of Liberty and the young Victoria meeting, they might have shared enthusiasms for opera, ballet, horseback-riding. Both of them have just lived through momentous changes in their lives and face big questions in the future. We know what lay ahead for Victoria – a long life through one of the fastest-changing centuries in world history. As for Liberty – I want to know and I can only find out by going on writing about her.

An adventure of historic proportions. A Foreign Affair is a featured book in Fictions Readers, a group to discuss contemporary women's fiction, books, women's issues and much more. Click here to join the group.

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