Ruby Dunn

In November 1817 the only legitimate grandchild of George III, twenty-one years old and carrying the heir to the throne, was bled and starved through her pregnancy by the most fashionable obstetrician in London, left in labour for 50 hours because he did not believe in forceps, and died five hours after delivering a dead nine-pound son, which is the reason Britain ended up with a queen called Victoria. Princess Charlotte was the nation's darling. Her father, the Prince Regent, was fat, extravagant and loathed, and her grandfather was mad. She was the one member of the family the public actually liked: headstrong, funny, married for love to a handsome German prince called Leopold and living with him at Claremont in Surrey. When the pregnancy was announced in the spring of 1817, the bookmakers opened a market on the sex of the baby. Her care went to Sir Richard Croft, the leading man-midwife of the day, and he did exactly what the best medicine of the day prescribed. It was called the lowering treatment. A pregnant woman was thought to be dangerously full of blood and nourishment, so she was bled to prevent haemorrhage and kept on a thin diet so the baby would not grow too large. Charlotte had begun the year robust. She was bled repeatedly and fed sparingly for months, and by the autumn she was weak and anaemic. She went into labour in the first days of November, two weeks late. The first stage lasted 26 hours. Croft could tell the baby was lying badly. The profession held that a natural labour should be left to nature and that forceps were a vulgar interference, so he left it. The second stage lasted another 24 hours, without pain relief, because none was given to labouring women. On the evening of the 5th she delivered a boy, nine pounds and dead. Around midnight she began to bleed, and in the small hours of the 6th she died. Britain mourned her on a scale nobody would see again until Diana. Shops shut for a fortnight. An inquiry cleared Croft, and everyone else blamed him. Three months later, attending another long labour, he took his own life. Then the kingdom looked at the succession and found nothing. George III had fifteen children and not one legitimate grandchild left alive. His middle-aged sons, most of them with mistresses and families on the side, were packed off to find German princesses and produce an heir. The Duke of Kent married a widowed princess, and in May 1819 she had a daughter. Her name was Victoria. The obstetricians took the lesson, slowly. Forceps came back. The lowering treatment faded out of the textbooks. A young, healthy woman was weakened for months on the orders of the best physician in the land, because the best physicians in the land agreed, and when she was dying in front of them, the same agreement told them to keep their hands in their pockets. The settled science of 1817 decided who would sit on the throne for most of the next century, in a bedroom in Surrey, and it was only ever tested on the people who could not argue with it.