Charlotte was very close to her old grandfather, King George III, and for a time he was able to protect her from the worst nastiness of her father, who used the child to torment his hated wife. Once the old King slipped into madness, however, she was left without a champion. As the crowds in the streets cheered Charlotte more and more, Prinny’s resentment of his daughter and his determination to remove her from the country increased. While it was traditional to mark the eighteenth birthday of the heir presumptive to the throne with widespread celebrations, he used “economy” as an excuse to ignore the occasion and simply left London to visit friends in the north.
Charlotte did indeed have a brief, innocent romance with a Captain Charles Hesse. His position as an illegitimate son of the Duke of York is disputed by some, but the fact that Charlotte herself accepted the relationship and was very close to her uncle York makes it more probable. As difficult as it is to believe, the story about her mother locking the young couple in her bedroom at Kensington Palace is true. The possible explanations Hero and Sebastian discuss have all been suggested, but no one knows exactly why Caroline did it. Charlotte did send Hesse letters and trinkets she then desperately tried to get back, and those letters did refer to the bedroom incident. Hesse did leave the letters in a trunk with a friend when he sailed for Spain. But the “Hesse letters” were never stolen, and Charlotte was eventually able to retrieve and destroy them.
Captain Hesse’s future exploits are interesting, for he joined up with Caroline and traveled with her for a time after she left England. He later became the lover of the Queen of Naples (a daughter of King Carlos IV of Spain) and was ultimately killed in the Bois de Vincennes in a duel with Count Leon, an illegitimate son of Napoléon. What are the odds?
The story of the circumstances surrounding Charlotte’s betrothal to Orange as told by Caroline to Sebastian is based on the accounts left by the various people involved. The Regent did pressure his daughter into promising that she would give him a yes or no answer after her first meeting with Orange at a dinner at Carlton House. Then, when the Prince asked her opinion of the young man and she tried to prevaricate, Wales pretended to misunderstand and immediately announced to both Liverpool and Orange that she had given her consent. Charlotte was appalled, and when she discovered the next day that Orange intended to require her to leave the country—and that her father had known of this—she was furious. Although the betrothal was arranged in December 1813, the announcement was indeed delayed for months while Orange solidified his position in the Netherlands.
Negotiations on the marriage contracts dragged out when Charlotte—who knew her father well—refused to accept vague promises and kept insisting that everything be put in writing. She became convinced that her father planned to push through a divorce from Caroline once his daughter was out of the country. Along with Charlotte’s concerns for her mother was the very real fear that her father might then remarry and produce a son who would take her place in the line of succession. Eventually, in the summer of 1814, Charlotte broke off the betrothal. Her father reacted by firing everyone in her household in a truly hideous scene that ended with Charlotte running out of the house.
While various reasons are given for Charlotte’s decision to break the betrothal, I suspect from the subtle things she said in various letters that at some point the Princess discovered the truth about Orange’s sexual preferences. But because her friend Mercer was in London at the time when Charlotte’s attitude toward Orange shifted suddenly from a determination to make the best of things into an intense, bitter loathing, we do not know for certain. But we do know that because of her experiences with her father, honesty was very important to Charlotte, and she felt betrayed.
The Dutch Republic dated back to the sixteenth-century Union of Utrecht and lasted until overrun by the French in 1795. After the defeat of Napoléon, the Allies decided to turn the stadtholder—who had been an elected head of state—into a king and joined Holland to the largely French-speaking Austrian Netherlands (today’s Belgium). The resultant Kingdom of the United Netherlands lasted until the Belgian Revolution of 1830, after which the Belgians were allowed to recover their separate identity, but only as the Kingdom of Belgium under Leopold I (yes, the same Leopold who was by then Princess Charlotte’s widower).
The Regent did suffer a well-publicized attack of gout in January of 1814, and he really did hate dogs. Charlotte did have a white greyhound named Toby that had belonged to Napoléon’s wife before being seized aboard a French ship and sent to the Prince.
Charlotte Jones (I have called her “Lottie” to avoid the confusion of two characters with the same name) was Princess Charlotte’s miniature portrait painter. The daughter of a Norwich merchant,
