Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  Charles James Fox was aghast to discover that he had been duped. Crossing paths with the Whig firebrand at Brooks’s, Henry Errington (another version of the event names Orlando Bridgeman instead) told Fox, “I hear you have denied in the House the Prince’s marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert. You have been misinformed. I was present at the marriage.”

  As furious as she was with Fox, Maria realized that he would not have publicly shredded her reputation in Parliament without a cue from the prince. Her only recourse was to cut off all contact with her husband.

  His reaction was to fall “exceeding ill” with “an inward complaint and a high fever.” Once again, George threatened suicide if Maria didn’t return to him. She had no choice but to relent, fearful that if she refused, he might actually go through with it.

  George’s carriage was seen every morning at Maria’s door. She had precedence at every function. He let it be known that Mrs. Fitzherbert was to receive the courtesy of any social invitations extended to him, and if precedence could not be waived in her favor by other hosts, His Royal Highness would refuse to attend their affairs. He was as solicitous and attentive to her in public as if she was his legal wife, but Maria had insisted on maintaining separate residences.

  That July, those who glimpsed Mrs. Fitzherbert with the prince in Brighton were certain she was visibly pregnant. Most people believe that Maria had at least one child, and possibly two, by the prince; and she never denied having any. On the death of George IV in 1830, Lord Stourton, one of her executors and her eventual biographer, asked her to sign a declaration written on the back of her marriage certificate that read, “I, Mary Fitzherbert, testify that my Union with George P. of Wales was without issue.”

  “She smilingly objected on the score of delicacy,” said Stourton. Surely she would have signed the endorsement without hesitation if she had never given George any children. Considering their relationship lasted several years, it is more likely than not that she became pregnant by him and carried to term.

  Her first child may have been born in the early autumn of 1786. There was a baby boy given the name of his foster father, James Ord, who was taken first to Bilbao, Spain, and then to Norfolk, Virginia, raised by prominent Catholic families and afforded the best education available. James Ord’s paternity was never clearly established, but if it became known that the heir apparent had fathered a Catholic son, it would have irrevocably destroyed George’s chances of ever becoming king. For all her maternal instincts, assuming James Ord was their son, Maria would never have ruined her beloved husband’s destiny.

  The Regency Crisis of 1789 came and went. George III recovered from his bouts of madness and the issue of whether the Prince of Wales was suited to be his father’s regent became moot. But his choice of rakish friends remained an issue. Ironically, Maria Fitzherbert, who still loved him in spite of his numerous character flaws, was the only sobering influence on him. But even she was powerless to keep him from the wildly drunken debaucheries he enjoyed amid “the most depraved” company of his cronies, including Fox and Sheridan.

  By the winter of 1793, Maria’s marriage to the prince was floundering. Their diverging tastes had become an increasing problem. Maria preferred intimate, quiet evenings at home and her husband’s excesses were wearing very thin. They often quarreled about it, and it was said that they were drifting apart.

  The following summer, his debts had swelled to upwards of £50,000 (nearly $8.5 million today), and Maria was lending him money out of her £3,000 (roughly $560,000) royal annuity!

  But the greatest source of tension was caused by the prince’s philandering. Throughout their relationship he had dallied with other women and there was nothing for Maria to do but suffer in quiet dignity, because the legality of their union was to appear a mere rumor. While they were married, the prince had an affair with Anna Maria Crouch, a mercenary singer-actress who demanded several thousand pounds from him before she would bestow her charms. After haggling a bit over her price, the prince eventually extricated himself from the entanglement with a heavier purse than he had anticipated, but he had not learned a lesson from it.

  Instead, he commenced a relationship with the forty-one-year -old former Frances Twysden, who had become the beautiful but diamond-hard Lady Jersey, cleverly introduced to him by the queen in the hopes of detaching her son from his Catholic inamorata. Married to the 4th Earl of Jersey, who was thirty-five years her senior, her ladyship was one of the Devonshire set, the fast crowd of Whigs who orbited around the glamorous Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana.

  No mere fling, the prince’s affair with the witty and accomplished Lady Jersey was to change all of their lives. The contemporary diarist Nathanial Wraxall referred to the tall brunette’s “irresistible seduction and fascination.” This architect of the destruction of George’s relationship with Maria was also an arch manipulator. Robert Huish, a contemporary biographer of the Prince of Wales, likened Lady Jersey to “a type of serpent—beautiful, bright, and glossy in its exterior—poisonous and pestiferous.”

  The prince was not the ambitious Lady Jersey’s first extramarital conquest, but he was her most illustrious one. As soon as she had insinuated herself into his heart she began to systematically evict its other residents, starting with Mrs. Fitzherbert. Lady Jersey convinced George that the reason he was so unpopular was because Maria was a Roman Catholic—but he might redeem himself if he married a Protestant princess. To save his ratings George had to end his relationship with Mrs. Fitzherbert.

  On June 23, Maria received a note from the prince just as she was about to depart for Bushy Park, the residence shared by the Duke of Clarence and his mistress Dorothy Jordan. The note expressed George’s regrets at being unable to join her, as he had just been called to Windsor.

  That evening, Captain Jack Willet-Payne, the head of the prince’s household, arrived at Bushy Park with a subsequent letter from his employer, tersely telling Maria that their relationship was over and “he would never enter my house again.”

  Maria paled and immediately begged to excuse herself, saying that she would prefer to drive home alone. On reaching her residence, the devastated Mrs. Fitzherbert endorsed the bottom of the first note with the words “This letter I received the morning of the day the Prince sent me word he would never enter my house.” Then she wrote the two-word explanation for George’s cruelty to her: “Lady Jersey.”

  Marriage was also the only way out of the hole, according to the king. Because George’s marriage to Maria had been so officially denied, and even (or particularly) because the Catholic Maria would not confirm it herself at peril to the prince’s ability to inherit the throne, most people accepted him as a bachelor. And because the prince had been under the age of twenty-five and had not gained the sovereign’s consent to wed, Parliament and the Anglican Church would have deemed the marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert invalid.

  To encourage George to do his duty, the king promised that his heir’s debts would be paid the day he wed. So on April 8, 1795, the Prince of Wales married his first cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick. At that time, his debts had surpassed the sum of £600,000—nearly $88 million in today’s economy. He was being dunned in the street. Despite his rank, tradesmen had begun to refuse his custom.

  Maria bore the prince’s marriage stoically. She pointedly ignored George when, two days before the royal wedding, he rode back and forth in front of her house, desperate to get her attention, so he could show how much he missed her. But later in the year, the prince began to resent his enforced separation from Maria. He confessed to Lord Moira, “It’s no use. I shall never love any woman but Fitzherbert,” repeating the same sentiment to the Duke of Clarence. He urged his friends to show her the same attention as they had done before the split.

  On January 12, 1796, having been married less than half a year to the now-pregnant Caroline, the Prince of Wales wrote his last will and testament, bequeathing all his “worldly property . . . to my Maria Fitzherbert, my wife, the wife of my heart a
nd soul. Although by the laws of this country she could not avail herself publicly of that name, still such she is in the eyes of Heaven, was, is, and ever will be such in mine . . .” The will indicates the desire to be buried with “the picture of my beloved wife, my Maria Fitzherbert . . . suspended round my neck by a ribbon as I used to wear it when I lived and placed right upon my heart.” If she predeceased him, he wanted her to be disinterred and buried beside him, with the adjoining sides of their coffins cut away so they could lie together, while “to her who is called the Princess of Wales, I leave one shilling.”

  The prince sought a reconciliation with Maria during the summer of 1798. By then he had separated from Caroline for good and was bored with his mistress, Lady Jersey. Mrs. Fitzherbert felt sorry for Caroline, believing her to be poorly used by the prince; and according to George’s factor, Colonel John McMahon, she “entertained an ill opinion of him,” and still considered the prince “among the friends of Lady Jersey.” Her answer, therefore, was no.

  The prince tried again to woo her back in February 1799, this time employing the Duchess of Rutland as a go-between. Her Grace was deputized to tell Mrs. Fitzherbert that “there never was an instant” when he did not care for her, adding that “everything is finally at an end in another quarter,” an assurance that his affair with Lady Jersey was over.

  A week later, he read a newspaper report of Maria’s death in Bath. The prince was utterly bereft. “To describe my feelings, to talk even of the subject is totally impossible, for I could neither feel, think, speak; in short, there was almost an end to my existence.”

  The account turned out to be false, but it exponentially increased the prince’s desire to rekindle their romance. Once again, he assumed his desperate stance. In a letter sent to Maria in June 1799—which took him two days to compose—he melodramatically begged her, “Save me, save me on my knees I conjure you from myself. IF YOU WILL NOT ADHERE TO YOUR PROMISE I WILL claim you as such, prove my marriage , relinquish everything for you, rank, situation, birth, and if that is not sufficient, my life shall go also.”

  Whenever he became emotionally distraught, he would suffer physically as well. The prince was by now liberally dosing himself with laudanum (it was soon his most frequent “mixer” with his postprandial brandy) and insisting on being bled with alarming frequency.

  With her son’s health in such jeopardy, the queen got involved. While Her Majesty never would have countenanced Mrs. Fitzherbert as a legitimate daughter-in-law, the entire royal family was genuinely fond of her. Queen Charlotte, in her own handwriting, begged Maria to be reconciled with the prince.

  Mrs. Fitzherbert’s resolve began to weaken. She advised the prince that a rapprochement would be possible only if they could maintain separate residences, and he would have to consider her his sister, rather than his wife or mistress. But more important, she refused to return to the prince unless the Pope passed judgment on whether their marriage was valid.

  The prince was on tenterhooks while they awaited a decision from Rome. Finally, the Pope ruled that Maria Fitzherbert was the true wife of the Prince of Wales in the eyes of the Catholic Church, as long as His Royal Highness was penitent for his sins. If so, then Maria was free to return to him.

  Maria considered the next eight years of her life her happiest. Their reconciliation became official. And on July 4, 1799, the Times reported that “a gentleman of high rank and MRS. FITZHERBERT are once more Inseperables. Where one is invited, a card to the other is a matter of course.” By the early spring of 1800, the couple was frequently seen out together in public. Unaware of the Pope’s sanction of their union, people were shocked to see the usually modest Mrs. Fitzherbert make such a display of herself.

  Despite the prince’s imprimatur of social approval, Maria now found herself snubbed by the very members of the haute ton who had previously welcomed her most warmly. Lady Holland deplored such hypocrisy, writing, “Every prude, dowager and maiden visited Mrs. Fitzherbert before, and all the decline of her favor scarcely reduced her visitors; but now they all cry out shame for doing that which she did notoriously five years ago. There is a sort of morality I can never comprehend.”

  Between 1801–4, the Prince of Wales used his influence to secure Maria’s adoption of Minney Seymour, the youngest child of their friends Lord Hugh and Lady Horatia Seymour, who had died within a couple of months of each other. In 1799, Minney’s parents had asked Mrs. Fitzherbert to look after the little girl, who at the time was not much older than an infant. Seymour was an admiral posted to Jamaica, and the ailing Horatia sought a cure in Madeira. They had never intended for Maria to become Minney’s permanent guardian, but she had grown so attached to the little girl that she could not bear to relinquish her into the custody of her aunt and uncle, as stipulated in the terms of the Seymours’ wills. When the case finally reached the Court of Chancery in 1804, the ruling went against Maria and the prince, who the Seymours had considered an entirely unsuitable parental influence on their little daughter regardless of his rank and title.

  Abusing that rank and title, the prince brought the case to the House of Lords, the highest appeals court in the land, where Maria was granted permanent custody of little Minney. Despite the initial misgivings of the Seymours’ surviving family, Mrs. Fitzherbert was a wonderful and doting mother, and “Prinny” a generous, loving, and playful father—far kinder to Minney than he was to his real daughter, the ungovernable Princess Charlotte, who reminded him far too much of her slatternly mother.

  Maria and the prince may have had another child in addition to “James Ord”—if Ord indeed was their son. A little girl named Maryanne Smythe (a version of Maria’s birth name) was born around 1800, but she did not enter Mrs. Fitzherbert’s household until 1817. Maryanne was passed off as Maria’s niece, the daughter of her younger brother John—although official records reflect that John and his wife had no children. Some proof that Maryanne was really Maria’s daughter lies in an 1828 letter from Mrs. Fitzherbert in which she sends her regards to Maryanne’s husband, closing with the words “Say a thousand kind things from me to my son in law and believe me ever most affectionately . . .”

  Maria had twice risked all to be the prince’s consort, but the only thing in which he was constant to her was his inconstancy. In 1806, he began to chase Minney Seymour’s aunt, Isabella, Marchioness of Hertford. The marchioness, who had met the prince during Minney’s adoption proceedings, was ambitious, married, and two years his senior. According to Princess Lieven, Lady Hertford was “a luxurious abundance of flesh,” and Mrs. Calvert described her as “without exception the most forbidding, haughty, unpleasant-looking woman I ever saw.” By July 1807, the corpulent forty-seven-year-old rival had the Prince of Wales firmly within her clutches. Ironically, in gaining Minney, Mrs. Fitzherbert lost the prince.

  Maria’s influence with George waned in direct proportion to the ascendance of Lady Hertford. The scheming marchioness convinced the prince to drop his commitment to Catholic emancipation. She broke Maria’s heart by encouraging George to continue to see her even as their romance had all but faded. Lady Hertford’s intention was to slowly ooze her way into maîtresse en titre status, so that no one would notice a clean break of George’s affections toward Maria, thereby reducing the effect of damaging gossip. When Lady Hertford was there, Maria hated to visit the hothouse atmosphere of the Marine Pavilion, the prince’s opulent Brighton residence; nothing could have been more humiliating. But when the prince requested her attendance, she had no choice but to comply.

  Yet by December 1809, Maria, now fifty-three years old, had endured enough of Prinny’s flagrant fickleness. She wrote him a letter on the eighteenth of the month, explaining why she could not accept his most recent invitation: The very great incivilities I have received these past two years just because I obeyed your orders in going there was too visible to everyone present and too poignantly felt by me to admit of my putting myself in a situation of again being treated with such indignity . . . I feel I
owe it to myself not to be insulted under your roof with impunity.

  Saddened by Maria’s note, the prince assured her that nothing would ever make him “deviate from or forget those affectionate feelings” he had “ever entertained for her.”

  On February 5, 1811, the prince was sworn in as Regent. He hosted a fete for himself at Carlton House on June 19, where two thousand guests (except for Princess Caroline and their daughter Charlotte, who weren’t invited) celebrated the inauguration of the Regency. Although George had sent Maria a gown, she refused to attend because she was not to be seated at his table, where the two hundred most honored guests would be placed. His insult was keenly felt; for decades Maria had received the honors of his consort and wife at his own table, as well as that of every other host and hostess who had invited the prince to attend their events. On a copy of her letter to the regent declining his invitation and advising him that she would never again cross his doorstep, whether at Carlton House or the Pavilion in Brighton, she wrote the words “copy of a letter written to the Prince, June 7, 1811, when persuaded by Lady Hertford not to admit me to his table.”

  That contretemps spelled the end of their romance. If Maria was truly the love of his life, then Prinny had a warped idea of that sacred and noble sentiment. He playacted at it, a master of creating and sustaining melodrama, but he had no clue how to reciprocate the genuine article when offered, and was incapable of constancy, wounding the hearts and reputations of those—especially Mrs. Fitzherbert—who had succumbed, however reluctantly, to his charm. He twice abandoned Maria, his protestations of undying fidelity and sacrifice worth less than the paper they were scrawled on.