The circumstances that attended the death of this Princess, to whom the nation looked as their future Queen, were not a little mysterious, and gave rise to many sinister rumours and scandals. Sir Richard Croft, a fashionable _accoucheur_ of that time, was in attendance upon her with other physicians. He was one who signed the bulletins announcing her steady progress towards recovery after the birth of a dead child; but on the following day the news of the Princess's death came as a sudden shock upon England, whose people had but recently shared in the joy and happiness of her happy marriage, doubly welcome after the sinister quarrels, estrangements, and espionages that marked the wedded life of the Regent. Scarce had the tidings of the Princess Charlotte's death at Claremont become public property than all manner of strange whispers became current as to the causes of it. The public mind was, singularly enough, not satisfied with the medical explanations which would ordinarily have been accepted for very truth; but became exercised with vague suspicions of foul play that were only fanned into further life by the mutual recriminations of medicos and lay pamphleteers. Even those who saw no shadow of a crime upon this bad business were ready to cast blame and the bitterest reproaches upon Sir Richard Croft, in whose care the case chiefly lay, for his mistaken treatment. And this was not the first occasion upon which Croft's conduct had been looked upon with suspicion, for, years previously, a scandalous rumour had been bruited about with regard to two of his noble patients,--the Duchess of Devonshire and an unnamed lady of title,--by which it would seem that he was privy to a supposititious change of children at the Duchess of Devonshire's accouchement, when it was believed that the Duchess exchanged a girl for her friend's boy. [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.