The implications for Victoria were immense: surely this helps explain why she had to be carried so much towards the end of her life, why she relied on strong servants – and her ghillie John Brown – why she wrote so blackly about childbirth, and perhaps why she was in a stinking mood much of the time. When her diamond jubilee was celebrated, she was 78, and she stayed in her carriage for the entire celebration outside St Paul’s Cathedral. It has long been assumed this was because she was old or arthritic – but has anyone tried walking around with an advanced prolapse?

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To be seeking answers to this, on one level, seemed prurient, and intrusive. On the other, it explained so much. And to consider such things secret, even more than a century after one’s death, seemed to be to underline the assumption that such things were shameful, or deserving of stigma, not something millions of women regularly suffer after giving birth.

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, almost half of all women between 50 and 79 have “some degree of uterine or vaginal vault prolapse, or some other form of pelvic organ prolapse”. Victoria gave birth nine times. Carrying extra weight doesn’t help, and it would be hard to shift if your mobility is impaired. No one knew the burden she was carrying.

This is not something that would need to be published at the time – imagine her horror at having the world dissect the state of her pelvic organs – but knowing this after her death gives historians a deeper understanding of her struggles. It also helps explain Victoria’s hostility towards childbearing, despite the fact she was an avatar of domesticity and wifehood. She wrote that: “all marriage is such a lottery – the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a very happy one – still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.” She wrote to her eldest daughter, Vicky, who was pregnant, in 1858: “What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, my dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments.”

A woman walking down the aisle, she said, was like a lamb to the slaughter.

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When is secrecy privacy and when is it shame? If more women spoke about menopause, endometriosis and prolapse, it would reduce the embarrassment and mortification many have felt, however irrationally. If more men spoke about prostate problems, heart disease and depression, more would seek medical help when they needed it.

It’s been encouraging to see William and Harry speak of their own struggles with their mental health, to allow us to see them as human.

The Royal Archives tried to pressure me into carving out several parts of my manuscript, including a reference to Victoria’s post-natal depression. She spent many months lamenting how low she felt after giving birth. Doesn’t this matter? It’s a too-common experience. I kept it in.

But it’s wrong to pressure someone currently wrestling with a confronting diagnosis to talk at length about it. The shock of discovery and pain of treatment is taxing enough without the burden of public disclosure. Expecting someone to be a pin-up for pain can be overwhelming when they’re screaming into their pillow, or trying to fathom their possible end. Sometimes healing requires quiet.

Surely it’s enough now to know Charles is ill. The details can wait.

Julia Baird is the author of Victoria: the Queen, an Intimate Biography of a Woman Who Ruled an Empire.