[Illustration: PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES.]
But on this occasion the affair was much more serious, whether blame attached to him solely for mistaken treatment, or whether scandal whispered at criminal complicity. The Princess Charlotte died on November 6, 1817; three months later--on February 13, 1818--Sir Richard Croft, in despair, shot himself. He was but fifty-six years of age.
Years later--in 1832--when Lady Ann Hamilton's extraordinary scribblings were published in two volumes under the title of "A Secret History of the Court of England, from 1760 to the Death of George IV.," these old rumours were crystallized into a definite charge of murder against some nobleman whose name is prudently veiled under a blank. The Princess, says Lady Hamilton, was in a fair way of recovery, and a cup of broth was given her; but after partaking of it she died in convulsions. The nurse who handed her the cup noticed a dark red sediment at the bottom, and on tasting it found her tongue blistered! This peer, according to Lady Hamilton, acted with the connivance of the King, George III., and his glorified German _hausfrau_, and with the approval of the Princess's father, the Regent, who, it is asserted in those pages, was heard to say some time previously at Esher that "no child of the Princess Charlotte shall ever sit upon the throne of England." Lady Ann Hamilton, however, was a malevolent gossip, holding the most extreme Radical views, and as a personal friend and uncompromising partisan of Caroline, Princess of Wales,--that silly and phenomenally undignified woman--was eager to believe anything, no matter how atrocious, of her husband and his people.
No member of the Royal Family was present at the Princess Charlotte's death-bed. She died, with the sole exception of her husband, Prince Leopold, amid physicians and domestics.
The King and Queen were (says Lady Hamilton) a hundred and eight miles away, and the Regent was either at Carlton House or staying with the Marquis of Hertford (or rather the _Marchioness_, she adds, in significant italics).
It is said that Lady Ann Hamilton's writings, published as a "Secret History," were given to the world, without her knowledge or consent, by a gentleman who had obtained the manuscript. Certain it is that when these two volumes appeared, in 1832, they were suppressed; and some four years later, when some other manuscripts belonging to the author were advertised for sale by auction, they were hastily bought up on behalf of a royal personage, and, it is believed, destroyed.