On November 6, 1817, died the Princess Charlotte,
only child of the Prince Regent, and heir to the crown
of England. Her short life had hardly been a
happy one. By nature impulsive, capricious, and
vehement, she had always longed for liberty; and she
had never possessed it. She had been brought
up among violent family quarrels, had been early separated
from her disreputable and eccentric mother, and handed
over to the care of her disreputable and selfish father.
When she was seventeen, he decided to marry her off
to the Prince of Orange; she, at first, acquiesced;
but, suddenly falling in love with Prince Augustus
of Prussia, she determined to break off the engagement.
This was not her first love affair, for she had previously
carried on a clandestine correspondence with a Captain
Hess. Prince Augustus was already married, morganatically,
but she did not know it, and he did not tell her.
While she was spinning out the negotiations with the
Prince of Orange, the allied sovereign—it
was June, 1814—arrived in London to celebrate
their victory. Among them, in the suite of the
Emperor of Russia, was the young and handsome Prince
Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. He made several attempts
to attract the notice of the Princess, but she, with
her heart elsewhere, paid very little attention.
Next month the Prince Regent, discovering that his
daughter was having secret meetings with Prince Augustus,
suddenly appeared upon the scene and, after dismissing
her household, sentenced her to a strict seclusion
in Windsor Park. “God Almighty grant me
patience!” she exclaimed, falling on her knees
in an agony of agitation: then she jumped up,
ran down the backstairs and out into the street, hailed
a passing cab, and drove to her mother’s house
in Bayswater. She was discovered, pursued, and
at length, yielding to the persuasions of her uncles,
the Dukes of York and Sussex, of Brougham, and of
the Bishop of Salisbury, she returned to Carlton House
at two o’clock in the morning. She was immured
at Windsor, but no more was heard of the Prince of
Orange. Prince Augustus, too, disappeared.
The way was at last open to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.
This Prince was clever enough to get round the Regent,
to impress the Ministers, and to make friends with
another of the Princess’s uncles, the Duke of
Kent. Through the Duke he was able to communicate
privately with the Princess, who now declared that
he was necessary to her happiness. When, after
Waterloo, he was in Paris, the Duke’s aide-de-camp
carried letters backwards and forwards across the Channel.
In January 1816 he was invited to England, and in May
the marriage took place.
