The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  By 1794, it seemed as though the misery engendered by Augustus’s exile and Royal’s disappointment threatened to overwhelm the entire household. ‘I assure you, from what I have lately heard,’ wrote James Bland Burges in December, ‘that royalty, when closely inspected, has few charms for reasonable people. I do not believe there is a more unhappy family in the kingdom than that of our good king. They have lately passed whole hours together in tears; and often do not meet for half a day, but each remains alone, separately brooding over their misfortunes.’ Burges cited a long list of reasons for the atmosphere of despair, all of them related to the behaviour of the princes. There was ‘the bad conduct’ of Augustus; ‘the ill-success and disgrace’ of the Duke of York, who had been removed from his role as commander-in-chief of British forces after a series of defeats fighting the French in the Low Countries; and inevitably, ‘the strange caprices and obstinacies of the Prince of Wales’. All these causes, Burges believed, ‘are perpetually preying on them and make them miserable’. Hunkered down behind her impenetrable façade of detachment, it seemed to Burges as if ‘the queen seems to suffer and feel the least’. Other members of the family were less constrained in expressing their distress. ‘The king sometimes bursts into tears – rises up and walks about the room – then kisses his daughters and thanks God for having given them him to comfort him – whilst the princesses are variously agitated, and sometimes so much as to go into fits.’

  This atmosphere of hysterical distress weighed heavily on the already wilting spirits of the princesses. Burges thought ‘the effect of this kind of life’ upon them

  has been very different according to their constitutions. Princess Augusta, soft and tender-hearted, vents her sorrows at her eyes and cries until she becomes composed and resigned. Princess Elizabeth feels very strongly, but soon recovers her spirits, and observes that, thank God, she does no harm herself and that she will not be such a fool as to make herself more unhappy than she is obliged to be; and therefore, she will be merry if she can, and drive away all the care, which she is strong enough to keep at a distance.

  As Burges saw, the eldest of the princesses lacked either Elizabeth’s robust refusal to succumb to unhappiness or Augusta’s ability to cry the misery out of herself. ‘The effect of all this on the poor Princess Royal is very different. She is naturally nervous, and susceptible of strong impressions. Convinced she now has little chance of altering her condition; afraid of receiving any impressions of tenderness or affection; reserved and studious; tenderly loving her brothers and feeling strongly every unpleasant circumstance attending them, she is fallen into a kind of quiet desperate state, without hope and open to every fear; in other words, what is called broken-hearted.’ Sunk in sadness, Royal’s mute dejection was so severe that she had been seen by the doctor Sir Lucas Pepys, who was shocked by her depression, whilst correctly diagnosing its cause. Burges reported that he ‘expresses considerable apprehension for her and even privately hints that he thinks her in great danger, as from her particular situation, there is no chance of her being able to marry, which, he pretty plainly says, is the only probability he can see of saving her life or her understanding’.69

  The knowledge that there was nothing she could do for herself to change her prospects was undoubtedly a factor in Royal’s decline. Her one attempt to take the initiative had ended in failure, illustrating forcefully her total dependence on the intervention of others to bring about any change in her life for the better. Her elder brothers were not indifferent to her fate; but when there proved no easy solution to her problem, it gradually slipped down the list of their priorities, emerging as an issue only when other women achieved the ‘settlement’ Royal so craved. ‘I suppose I was as much vexed as you,’ wrote Frederick to the Prince of Wales in 1793, ‘that my two brothers-in-law [the princes of Prussia] are engaged to marry the two Princesses of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.’ These were the daughters of the queen’s beloved brother Charles, on whose education she had been so eager to advise years before. ‘I had hoped they would have married two of our sisters,’ commented Frederick ruefully. ‘However that cannot be now.’70

  There was, the brothers concluded, little that they could do for Royal. Besides, her eldest brother had other things on his mind. With a freedom to make his own choices that was denied to her, the Prince of Wales had decided to have for himself the very thing his eldest sister wanted most in the world. It was, he considered, time for him to marry.

  His decision came as a surprise to everybody. The prince had always insisted that he had no wish to take a wife, and declared himself perfectly happy to see the royal line continue through the children of his brothers. In 1791, in the course of an interview in which he sought the king’s approval for the marriage of the Duke of York, who was absent in Prussia, he explained in detail exactly why he believed marriage for himself was not a likely option: ‘I was come to a time of life when I thought I had tolerably weighed all my own sentiments and prospects, that it was not everyone who could expect to be as lucky as His Majesty had been to meet with a person whose disposition suited so perfectly with his own as the queen’s did, if one might presume to judge by the unanimity that appeared to reign between them.’ Dropping the circumlocutory politeness that characterised most of the prince’s exchanges with his parents, he then spoke more plainly: ‘That as to us princes particularly, the choice of a wife was indeed a lottery, and one in which I did not at present intend to draw a ticket. There were very few prizes compared with the number of blanks.’ It was possible, he admitted, that his feelings on the subject might one day change, but at present he thought them unconquerable. ‘I did not mean to bind myself not to marry at all, but thought it most likely I should not, as the sentiments I had expressed were prejudices I could not get the better of.’71

  There is little doubt that the prince meant what he said; but with his usual ability to convince not just others but also himself that a partial truth represented the whole of a story, he had omitted one important detail from his explanation.

  He was, in fact, already married.

  *

  The Prince of Wales had met Maria Fitzherbert in 1784 through his Whig friends. Twice widowed, like so many of his mistresses, she was older than him, by six years. Her deceased husbands had left her comfortably provided for, and she surveyed the churning metropolitan social scene with an air of quiet confidence in her own value. She was handsome rather than beautiful, with a good bosom, striking eyes, fair hair and a clear complexion. Her critics considered her ‘perhaps too much inclined to fullness of figure’, but the prince was always drawn to amply proportioned women.72 She was thought good-natured, if a little proud; and beneath her calm exterior, she shared some of the hair-trigger temper and unpredictable mood swings of her royal lover. She was not a sparkling conversationalist, but was a kind and patient listener, which appealed to the loquacious and needy prince.

  When they met, he was twenty-two and already the veteran of a string of affairs with women of every conceivable background. His lovers had included grand ladies of the court, opera singers, Maids of Honour, the wife of the Hanoverian ambassador, actresses and a number of semi-professional courtesans, many of whom he inherited or poached from his closest friends. Despite her affection for him, Maria was made of sterner stuff than most of George’s conquests, and refused to become his mistress. This only served to fan the flames of George’s desire. With his usual theatricality, George declared that he would die if she did not surrender, and attempted – somewhat half-heartedly – to stab himself. Seriously alarmed, Maria ran away to France. Whilst there, the prince bombarded her with letters, some over forty pages long, declaring that he could not live without her, that he would ‘ever remain unto the last moments of his existence unalterably thine’. He declared that he considered himself married to her in spirit, and insisted that the king could be persuaded to ‘connive’ at their union, although his rational mind must have known this was impossible. He called her ‘his dearest wife’, ‘h
is beloved wife’ and urged her to return to him. ‘Come then, oh! Come then, dearest of wives, best and most adored of women, and forever crown with bliss him who will through life endeavour to convince you by his love and attention of his wishes to be the best of husbands.’73 Mrs Armistead, Charles Fox’s mistress, was horrified by the violence of the prince’s behaviour, ‘rolling on the floor, striking his forehead, tearing his hair’. He repeatedly declared that he would ‘abandon the country, forgo the crown, sell his jewels and plate and scrape together a competence to fly with the object of his affections to America’.74 The prince was clearly in a state of hysterical distress. He’d always had a volatile personality, but beneath the drama lurked a hint of real feeling, a kernel of perception that, more than any of his other transient relationships, his love for Maria Fitzherbert offered the prospect of something genuinely transformative in his life. ‘Save me, save me,’ he urged her repeatedly, ‘save me on my knees, I conjure you, from myself.’75

  Eventually, Mrs Fitzherbert capitulated, came back to London, and on 15 December 1785, she and the prince were married. It took the prince’s aides some time to find a clergyman who was willing to perform the ceremony; finally a curate, currently imprisoned for debt, agreed to conduct it in return for the payment of creditors and the promise of future preferment. The wedding took place in Mrs Fitzherbert’s drawing room, behind securely locked doors.

  As the prince must have known, the marriage was invalid, as it breached every provision of the Royal Marriages Act. But it did more than that. Maria Fitzherbert was a Catholic, and the 1689 Act of Settlement required succession to the throne to be forfeited if the heir married a Catholic. The prince, focussed as ever on achieving his short-term desires, paid no attention to all to the possible consequences of his actions. The couple did not actually live together, but Mrs Fitzherbert was soon established in a house in Brighton, close to George’s retreat at the Royal Pavilion. In London, she lived in St James’s, not far from Carlton House. The marriage could never be formally acknowledged, but the pair were often seen together in society. The prince made it known that she was to be invited to all events he was expected to attend, and required that she was always to be placed at his table.76 The exact nature of their relationship was the subject of much speculation. Only months after the supposedly secret ceremony, the Catholic aristocrat Lady Jerningham was certain, from all she had heard, that the prince and Mrs Fitzherbert were indeed married. Seemingly better aware of the laws he had flouted than the prince himself, she thought it ‘a very hazardous undertaking … God knows how it will turn out’.77 The rumours finally surfaced in the House of Commons in 1787, and were put directly to Charles Fox, the leader of the Whig opposition and the prince’s close friend. Fox assured the House that the stories were false: the marriage ‘not only never could have happened legally, but never did happen in any way whatever’.78 He claimed ‘the immediate authority of the Prince of Wales’ for his assertion. This was indeed the case. Fox had been against the union from the beginning, recognising the dangers it posed to the prince’s future, and had done all he could to dissuade him from taking so potentially dangerous a step. In response to his warnings, the prince had assured his old friend that he had no plans to marry Mrs Fitzherbert, telling him that ‘there not only is, but never was, any ground for these reports which have of late been so malevolently circulated’.79 Fox told the truth as he believed, or wanted to believe, he knew it; but Mrs Fitzherbert was furious, declaring that Fox had ‘rolled her in the kennel like a streetwalker’, and never spoke to him again.80

  For a while, it seemed as though Mrs Fitzherbert had succeeded where so many others had failed, and had indeed saved the prince from himself, enticing him into the enjoyment of a more domestic life. Certainly his family thought so, and considered this more settled relationship as a great improvement on its ramshackle predecessors. They did not know – or chose not to know – that it was based on a double illegality. But as the years went by, the partnership began to founder, partly on George’s duplicity. He took other lovers – his pledges of lifelong fidelity had not proved long-lasting – and justified himself to his friends by arguing that he knew his marriage had no real meaning, although his wife persisted in believing in it.81 Painfully anxious about her ambiguous status, wife and yet no wife, Mrs Fitzherbert grew resentful. The couple argued over the prince’s affairs, his drinking, his habitual and wounding dishonesty, and his recklessness with money.

  Soon it was well known that their romantic idyll was over; one popular caricature showed Mrs Fitzherbert throwing a cup of tea in the prince’s face. Then, in the summer of 1794, the prince met someone new, the elegant and manipulative Lady Jersey, who was as experienced as he was in the conduct of extramarital affairs. Mrs Fitzherbert was brutally dismissed, the separation announced by a curt letter which, she insisted, ‘was preceded by no quarrel, or even coolness and came upon her quite unexpectedly’, whilst she was sitting down to dinner with William, Duke of Clarence.82 George was unrepentant. Should his letter ‘not meet with the success which the good intentions with which it is written merit and entitle it to, I have nothing further to say or reproach myself with’. He wrote to Frederick in Germany that though ‘we are finally parted … you will not lay the fault, whatever it may have been, at my door’.83

  The ink was hardly dry on the prince’s letter ending almost ten years of life with Mrs Fitzherbert, than he was on the road to Weymouth to announce to his father his plans to marry. The prince’s complete volte-face on the subject of matrimony produced a rich crop of speculation about his motives, but it seems likely that three different factors had brought him to act so swiftly. Firstly, he saw marriage as a way of paying off his huge debts, which by this time approached £630,000. As a married man, he would be entitled to a greater payment from the Civil List, which would secure him more credit, even if it did not wipe out all his indebtedness. Secondly, Lady Jersey, now fully established as his principal mistress, was said to have encouraged him in the scheme as a way of preventing any resurgence of feelings for Mrs Fitzherbert. And finally, and in some ways most significantly, the judgement declaring his brother Augustus’s marriage invalid in July must have reassured him that his own union would not be held binding if brought to a court of law. Having effortlessly shrugged off any sense of moral obligation, he could now plan a marriage in the reasonable assumption that he was also legally free to do so.

  It is often asserted that it was the king who selected the Prince of Wales’s wife for him, but that was not the case. The prince made the decision himself, declaring his choice to the king in the same conversation in which he had announced his intention to marry. Exactly why he chose his cousin, Princess Caroline, the Duke of Brunswick’s daughter, will probably never be known. Contemporary gossip attributed it to the malign influence of Lady Jersey, who hoped ‘that disgust for the wife would secure constancy to the mistress’.84 It was even suggested that the prince had been swayed by admiration for her father, a military hero of some renown. It seems more likely, however, that the prince pursued the project with a characteristic lack of reflection, intent only on considering the immediate benefits of the alliance, without giving any serious consideration to the life-changing implications of his choice. Back in 1791, he had told the king that he would never take a wife ‘unless at the moment I did, I thought I preferred the woman I was going to marry to every other creature existing in the world’. The thrill of a passion immediately and intensely indulged was everything to him. He was a romantic, of a particularly narcissistic and indulgent kind. He sought out sensation and extremity of emotion, perhaps in an attempt to deliver into an otherwise purposeless existence a sense of meaning and excitement. All this made him a particularly bad candidate to cope with the requirements of an arranged marriage. He had none of the traits which had served his father so well in a similar situation: a dogged determination to make the relationship work combined with an iron resolution not to indulge the lure of passion. Nor was he prepared
to take precautions, as the king had done thirty years before, to ensure he did not find himself yoked to a woman who did not suit him. He maintained that he would never marry unless ‘I knew enough of the disposition of my wife to think it would form the happiness and not the misery of my future days.’85 Now he disregarded entirely his own advice, making no enquiries at all about the character of his future bride. This was, perhaps, the biggest mistake of his life. A little more care in making his choice might have spared all of those concerned the years of grief, bitterness and recrimination which made it the unhappiest royal marriage in modern times, and in whose throes the royal family was engulfed, divided and almost destroyed.

  The king told the prince that he was entirely satisfied with his choice of bride. She was the daughter of his older sister, Augusta, and it was therefore not surprising that he thought it ‘the only proper alliance’. The queen, on the other hand, was horrified. Neither her son nor her husband had thought it worth seeking her opinion before the decision was made, although if they had done so, they would not have liked what she had to say. Charlotte was an assiduous collector of Continental gossip with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the reputations of female German royalty, and what she had heard about her niece Caroline was far from good. Coincidentally, Caroline had been the subject of a conversation between Charlotte and the king only weeks before the prince’s surprise announcement. ‘A fortnight ago I went into the king and found him busy sealing some letters, and he gave me one to show me it was for you,’ explained the queen to her brother Charles. In it, the king offered his recently widowed brother-in-law advice on finding another wife, and suggested as a possibility his niece, Caroline of Brunswick. ‘I was stupefied by these words; fortunately he did not notice; and said, “What do you think of it?” I said, “Perhaps Your Majesty is in more of a hurry over this event than my brother,” and that said, I shall take care not to reopen the conversation.’ Had the queen broken her usual self-denying ordinance, and ventured to offer her husband her true opinion, a great deal of misery could have been avoided. Instead, she confided only to her brother everything she knew about Caroline of Brunswick’s many and alarming shortcomings. ‘They say her passions are so strong that the duke himself said she was not to go from one room to another without a governess, that when she dances, this lady is obliged to follow her for the whole of the dance to prevent her from making an exhibition of herself by indecent conversation with men.’ Charlotte had also been told that ‘all amusements have been forbidden her because of her indecent conduct on account of which her father and mother have spoken with pain’. Breathless with indignation, the queen rested her case. ‘There, dear brother, is a woman I do not recommend at all.’86