Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, who was accused of murdering her own daughter, has died at the age of 89.
Elizabeth Alice Wise, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the third cousin, once removed, of King Charles, died on 2 August at Friarage Hospital in Northallerton, Yorkshire.
Despite being one of the lesser-known royal relatives, Elizabeth arguably lived one of the most contentious lives. Not long after giving birth to her long-awaited first child, Elizabeth found herself pleading guilty to murdering her daughter after giving her an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Elizabeth was around 36 when she gave birth to Emma Charlotte, a baby she “had longed and prayed for”. But tragedy struck just nine days later when Emma fell ill with a serious viral infection.
Emma’s battle with encephalitis
At the time, she recalled the moment her daughter “went very sleepy” before entering a “deep coma” within just 24 hours of becoming unwell.
It was only when Emma was rushed to hospital, at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, that it was revealed that she had serious brain damage caused by encephalitis, which is an active inflammation of the brain tissue. The illness causes the brain to swell inside the skull and can prove life-threatening.
For the next nine months, Elizabeth “devoted every waking moment” to caring for her daughter. Emma’s condition meant that her eyes and ears “were normal” but that she had “no brain to interpret the messages they sent, or to tell the limbs what to do.”
She was so ill that Elizabeth was forced to feed her “desperately slow” to stop her from “vomiting constantly” as her stomach and muscles were not working properly, according to an obituary in The Times.
© Getty ImagesThe desperate mother sought specialists and even travelled to Australia, where she had previously lived, in the hope of curing her child’s condition at a hospital for brain-damaged children. A few months later, Emma had lost three-quarters of her brain to the infection. Elizabeth then decided to end her child’s life.
On 3 June 1974, she fed her an overdose of Mandrax sleeping tablets in the hopes that she would die “quickly, peacefully, and painlessly.” A few months later, she appeared before Reading Crown Court, where she pleaded guilty to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility.
Sympathetic sentencing
Given the circumstances surrounding Emma’s death, she received much sympathy and was sentenced to just a year’s probation. The judge’s compassionate punishment reflected what he described as an “extreme case even among exceptional cases”.
© Getty ImagesFollowing her daughter’s death, she advocated for greater support to be given to parents of severely disabled children, once appearing on BBC’s The World This Weekend programme to argue whether doctors should artificially prolong the lives of children in similar predicaments to her own.
Her cousin, the Queen, was reportedly sympathetic to her situation, and offered a source of great comfort following her arrest. Elizabeth, born at Kensington Palace in 1936, was the youngest of Colonel Sir Henry Abel Smith and Princess May of Teck’s children.
She spent the first part of her life in Ottawa, Canada, before returning to England, where she attended Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s wedding in 1947. Her grandmother was Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, a grandchild of Queen Victoria.
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