Within weeks, Mary gave her notice to the manager of Drury Lane, the playwright (and MP) Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The savvy manager capitalized on Mary’s increased notoriety, adding more appearances in order to pack the house as frequently as possible through her final, emotional, farewell performance on May 31, 1780.
Mary finally surrendered her body to her royal lover at the unprepossessing Three Swans inn on Brentford, an islet in the Thames. The lovers would have further assignations at a small brick house not far from Kew.
One week after her final stage appearance, Mary’s behavior created another scandal when, as the prince’s invited guest (and everyone knew why), she sat in the Lord Chamberlain’s box during the King’s Birthday celebration at St. James’s Palace. Bad enough that an actress should be in their exalted midst, but the haute ton was doubly mortified when Mary immodestly trumpeted her position. During the first dance with the Lady Augusta Campbell, who bestowed a posy of roses upon him, His Royal Highness asked a courtier to bring the buds to Mary, who made a great show of placing them in her décolletage.
She set up house in Cork Street, Mayfair, as befitted a maîtresse en titre, but footed the bill for her own establishment, although it was frequented by the Prince of Wales and his circle of friends, providing a welcome respite from his parents, the repressive monarchs.
Already a celebrity as an actress, once she became a royal mistress, Mary’s allure multiplied. “Whenever I appeared in public, I was overwhelmed by the gazing of the multitude,” she wrote in her memoirs. “Even in the streets of the metropolis, I had scarcely ventured to enter a shop without experiencing the greatest inconvenience. Many hours have I waited till the crowd dispersed, which surrounded my carriage.”
She began flashing her status around town, gadding about in a coach that bore the emblem of her initials entwined with George’s, surrounded by a border that tapered at its apex into something resembling a coronet. She took a side box at the theatre, a location customarily the privilege of the titled and otherwise well-heeled. Despite the fact that Mary had once been queen of that very stage, her detractors thought she should have been relegated to the upper balcony, where the trolling prostitutes plied their trade.
The caricaturists, ever vicious, turned Mary and her royal lover into a popular subject for ridicule. It was then, as the prince’s mistress, and for the role in which she had first caught his eye, that Mary Robinson earned the sobriquet that would follow her for the rest of her life, no matter what her profession or who she was sleeping with. Everyone now called her “the Perdita,” which literally means the lost girl, a term more apt than people knew for this young woman whose father had abandoned their family when she was a little girl, and who as an adult would go from man to man seeking not merely material comforts but a fulfilling and enduring love.
And then, one day in mid-December 1780, when Mary believed herself at the zenith of her popularity and the prince’s affection, she received a brief message from George: “We must meet no more,” it read. Mary was startled, shocked, and devastated. She summoned one of her carriages and drove posthaste for Windsor. It was night when she approached the castle, her carriage passing another coach heading back to London carrying Elizabeth Armistead, a burgeoning courtesan. Evidently, her royal lover had taken a new mistress.
Days later in London, Mary begged George to take her back, and they had a passionate reconciliation at Lord Malden’s town house; but her relief was short-lived. The following day, Mary’s carriage passed the prince’s in Hyde Park and he gave her the cut direct, refusing eye contact and rattling right by her coach as if he never knew her.
Mary was well and truly lost now, and a laughingstock to boot. Her friends cautioned her against renewing her stage career, for no one wanted to see her triumph. Out of a job, and bereft of a protector, Mary made the difficult decision to publish their love letters. Naturally, she realized that the correspondence would become a bestseller and would provide the income necessary to support herself and her little girl.
When the prince’s father got wind of Mary’s intentions, he knew it was time to get involved. No way was this upstart actress going to bring down the House of Hanover by publicizing the heir’s immature indiscretions. Wanting to make the whole bloody embarrassing issue disappear, the king dispatched Colonel George Hotham, the prince’s treasurer, to negotiate a settlement with Mary. Mary chose a “second” as well: Lord Malden. The talks dragged on for more than half a year. By July 1781, Mary was still reminding the king that she had been compelled to relinquish her profession and her respectability as a married woman because she truly believed the prince loved her and would always provide for her, as he had so often promised to do.
The king’s final offer, through Hotham, was £5,000 (a whisper under $900,000 today) for the letters—all or nothing. Mary was left with no choice, but wanted it stipulated that the money was for the return of the letters, not as payment for services rendered to the prince. In other words, she considered herself the prince’s girlfriend, not his whore. “I never would or could have made him ampler restitution, as I have valued those letters as dearly as my existence & nothing but my distressed situation ever should have tempted me to give them up at all,” she wrote in her memoirs.
Although Mary despised gamblers, she decided to throw the dice once more. Five thousand pounds would scarcely cover her debts, leaving her with little to live on, and she had no immediate prospects of an independent income. She still had the £20,000 bond the prince had given her. Hotham argued that the document was invalid because the prince, being underage, had no authority to make such a promise.
Nevertheless, it did bear the official seal and His Royal Highness’s true signature, insisted Mary. However, she was willing to forfeit the bond in exchange for an annuity, and cited considerable precedent for English kings and princes providing annuities for their cast-off mistresses. Hotham did his best to stand his ground on behalf of the crown, but Mary had a point. Besides, she wasn’t about to relinquish the promissory note without compensation, because in two years’ time, when Prince George turned twenty-one, the document might very well be viewed as perfectly legitimate.
They settled on a £500 annuity (nearly $90,000 today), with half-payment of the sum to be given to Mary’s daughter, Maria Elizabeth, upon Mary’s demise. This petty squabbling over financial matters, which didn’t reach a full accord until late August 1781, was an ugly denouement to what had begun so romantically.
As the years wore on, Mary and her prince became cordial acquaintances and often moved in the same social and political circles. At the very least, the glimmer that remained from that initial glow of young love was enough not to turn the pair against each other irrevocably.
When Mary died in 1800 at the age of forty-three, her request that two locks of her hair be cut off and sent to two former paramours was fulfilled. One of the recipients was her lover of fifteen years, Colonel Banastre Tarleton. The other man who received an auburn curl was the Prince of Wales, and it is said that he was buried with it.
GEORGE IV and Maria Fitzherbert 1756-1837
Maria Anne Smythe came from a Catholic Royalist family. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, she was educated at an English convent school in Paris. At eighteen, she wed Edward Weld, a wealthy landowner twenty-six years her senior, who died after a fall from his horse just three months into their marriage. Three years later, in 1777, Maria married Thomas Fitzherbert, who came from an illustrious and highly respected Catholic family. She bore Fitzherbert a son, but both husband and child died in the South of France in 1781.
By 1784, Maria was twenty-seven years old, with a £1,000 annuity (nearly $187,000 today) from Thomas Fitzherbert, a respectable annual income for a childless young widow. Following Fitzherbert’s death, she traveled extensively through the Continent’s most picturesque towns and Alpine villages, endeavoring to assuage her grief.
Her uncle, Henry Errington, finally coaxed her back to England, and one evening tha
t March he convinced her to attend the opera with him. That night her fate was to change dramatically. According to a contemporary’s account, “She left the opera leaning on Henry Errington’s arm, and when at the door, with her veil down waiting for the carriage, the Prince came up to him and said, ‘Who the devil is that pretty girl you have on your arm, Henry?’ On being introduced, the Prince is said to have been transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away from the lovely face half hidden by the veil. Then her carriage drew up and she was able to make her escape.”
Six years Maria’s junior, George found her entirely irresistible, although she was not a classic beauty. Women, in particular, were inclined to think her somewhat “fat.” Her chin was considered too “determined” and there was rather a vast amount of cheek along the sides of her oval face, described by contemporaries as “a very mild benignant countenance without much animation.” She even mocked her own aquiline “Roman Catholic” nose. But she made up for it with her hazel eyes, silky blond hair, and flawless complexion. More important, everyone who knew Maria Fitzherbert thought the world of her sweet temper and demure, yet utterly uncloying, nature. Respected and respectable, she was kind and compassionate—the utter antithesis of the typical grasping, opportunistic royal mistress.
By March 10, 1784, just days after George demanded an introduction to the mysteriously veiled beauty, rumors abounded that the Prince of Wales was making “fierce love to the widow Fitzherbert,” and it was expected that he would succeed in his quest. What the gossips hadn’t counted on was Maria’s impeccable dignity. Although he peppered her with invitations to Carlton House, Maria, accepting some of them, while declining others, made it quite clear to the heir apparent that she had no interest in becoming his mistress.
So he proposed marriage.
Maria countered with every pragmatic reply. She was a devout Catholic with no intentions of renouncing her faith. Should she marry him, it would be in defiance of both the Royal Marriages Act (which prohibited a royal under the age of twenty-five from marrying without the king’s permission) and the Act of Settlement (which barred any Catholics, or anyone married to a Catholic, from inheriting the crown). Were Maria to marry George, it would cost him his throne. Even a secret marriage would violate both laws.
But the prince was uninterested in anything approaching a rational argument. He practically stalked Maria, showing up at her doorstep at all hours and threatening to do himself some bodily injury if she did not surrender.
The prince could be seductively disarming, but he was also spectacularly manipulative, selfish, and insensitive—all the ugliest qualities of royal entitlement. If Maria would not consent to be his, he would die. And he meant it. He had frequently dissolved into hysterical protestations of love, but had failed to move her.
On July 8, 1784, the prince stabbed himself just badly enough to make it look like a credible suicide attempt. Late that evening four men from his household showed up at Maria’s doorstep insisting that she return to Carlton House with them immediately. The distracted faces of the prince’s men convinced Maria that they weren’t kidding, but to preserve her honor from malicious gossip, she insisted that their mutual friend Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, accompany her as a chaperone and witness.
At Carlton House, they found the prince tearing at his bandages. He threatened to rip them off and bleed to death in front of Maria if she refused to marry him. As George continued to toy with his bandages, bleeding through his shirt, Maria relented. She signed a paper consenting to marry him, and the duchess pulled a ring from her own finger, as the prince had none of his own to bestow upon his bullied bride.
Immediately after the women departed, Georgiana wrote up a deposition stating that Maria was aware that a written promise extracted under such threats was invalid, thus protecting themselves against the illegality of the bedside agreement. The following day Maria went abroad in the hope that the whole messy business with the prince would blow over.
Throwing temper tantrums like a spoiled brat, the twenty-two -year-old heir apparent wept uncontrollably, tore at his hair, and banged his head against hard objects. He desperately wished to follow Maria, but could not leave the country without his father’s permission. From Brighton, the prince wrote to Maria so frequently that French authorities were concerned that some espionage was afoot and arrested three of his couriers. When the packets turned out to contain sheaves of billets-doux, the French ministers had to laugh and shrug, “Ahhh, l’amour.”
The letters routinely pledged George’s eternal fidelity to Maria. In an eighteen-page love note, George told Maria that he now “looked upon himself as married. You know I never presumed to make you any offer with a view of purchasing your virtue. I know you too well,” he insisted. Imploring her to return to him, the prince signed this letter, “Not only the most affectionate of lovers but the tenderest of husbands.”
The constant heart beat extremely irregularly, however. If only Maria could have known that the Prince of Wales was temporarily consoling his sorrows in the arms of other women, she might have remained in France forever.
Instead, in October 1785, after receiving more suicide threats from the ever-manipulative George, Maria wrote to tell him that she might consent to marry him. The prince accepted her “maybe” as a “yes” and was over the moon.
Just in case Maria might change her mind, the bombardment of desperate love notes continued. Written on November 3, a forty-two-page letter closed with the words “Come then, oh come, dearest of Wives, best and most sacred of women, come and for ever crown with bliss him who will through Life endeavor to convince you by his love and attention of his wishes to be the best of husbands and who will ever remain under the latest moments of existence.” He signed the letter “Unalterably thine.”
By late November, having spent more than fifteen months in France, Maria resolved to return to England and commit herself to the prince. “I know I injure him and perhaps destroy forever my own tranquility,” Maria wrote to Lady Anne Barnard, her former traveling companion on the Continent. By this time, she had fallen in love with the twenty-three-year-old George.
It was not easy to find a clergyman willing to risk the wrath of heaven and earth to perform a blatantly illegal wedding ceremony, secretly uniting a Roman Catholic to the underage (according to the 1772 Royal Marriages Act) heir. Finally, a young curate, the Reverend John Burt, was located—in the Fleet, where he was incarcerated for debts. Burt struck a hard bargain: he would marry the prince to Mrs. Fitzherbert for £500 (almost $98,000 today), payment of all his debts, the appointment as one of the prince’s chaplains, and a future bishopric.
The ceremony was performed on the frosty afternoon of December 15, 1785, behind the curtained windows and locked doors of Maria’s Park Street parlor. The twenty-eight-year-old bride wore a simple suit of traveling clothes. Maria’s uncle, Henry Errington, and one of her brothers, John Smythe, stood as witnesses, endangering themselves if their complicit participation was ever discovered. The prince’s friend, Orlando Bridgeman, stood guard outside the door. After the groom and the two witnesses signed the marriage certificate, George gave it to Maria to keep.
Although the marriage was illegal in the eyes of the state, it was valid in Church law. Any issue of the marriage would therefore be considered illegitimate according to English civil law, but legitimate by canon law.
The happy couple honeymooned at Ormley Lodge on Ham Common. After that came the systematic public denials of their marriage, particularly in Parliament, where George’s friend, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (who knew the truth) vehemently denounced the prince’s marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert as a fiction. The prince’s mentor, the fiery Whig orator Charles James Fox, accepted George’s denial that “there not only is not, but never was, any grounds for those reports . . . so maliciously circulated,” and vociferously insisted in the House of Commons that any “reports” of such a union were baseless rumors.
Maria was mortified by the deceit. From then on, Fox would r
emain her bitter enemy. Thanks to him, her precious reputation was in tatters and her position impossible. Fox “had rolled [her] in the kennel like a street-walker . . . he knew every word was a lie.” She and George had agreed to just say nothing at all when they were confronted with the question. He had broken a vow already. True, if it were known for certain that she was George’s legal wife, he would never inherit the throne and—perhaps worse—their union could spark a civil war. Anti-Catholic sentiment still ran high. But with their secret marriage openly and publicly denied, she seemed no better than the prince’s whore. She had never wanted to be a royal mistress.
At least the king’s brothers, the dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester, were very cordial to her and treated her as one of the family. Gloucester wrote to his nephew, “I have seen so much of her that I think I can with truth say she has few like her. I am convinced she loves you far beyond herself—I only allow myself to rejoice that the two people I have every reason to love the most, seem to be so happy in each other, and must last because there is so much good temper and good judgment.” Unfortunately, those fine qualities turned out to be possessed by only one of the newlyweds.
Although the few people who knew the truth were sworn to secrecy, caricatures of the prince and Mrs. Fitzherbert appeared in every shop window. A clandestine royal marriage, true or not, was the talk of the town.
Mary Frampton’s diary for 1786 refers to Mrs. Fitzherbert calling on her mother in London. “If ever the prince loved any woman, it was she: and half London, had he thrown his handkerchief, would have flown to pick it up . . . Mrs. Fitzherbert’s very uncomfortable life since her connection with the Prince affords as strong a lesson as was ever given in favor of virtue, for she never desired any benefit.”
The Earl of Denbigh wrote to Major Bulkeley on March 4, 1786, “Surely there cannot be any truth in the Report of the Prince being married to a Catholic widow? Is it believed or not? If true, the consequences may be dreadful to our posterity.” Denbigh also asked the same question of the Reading Clerk of the House of Lords, Matthew Arnot. Arnot replied on March 14, “The marriage you allude to, I fear, is but too well founded in fact.”
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 26