All through the summer, the rumors spread that the twelve-year connection had ended. After George informed his next youngest brother, Frederick, Duke of York, that he and Maria were “parted, but parted amicably,” the soldier-duke replied, “I am rejoiced to hear that you are now out of her shackles.” The Duke of York was pleased to hear of his older brother’s intention to marry their first cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick.
Marriage was the only way out of the hole, according to their father, George III. And to underscore his point, he promised the prince that his debts—which in 1794 had topped £600,000 (nearly $80 million in today’s economy)—would be paid the day he wed.
It had been some time since Maria received her allowance from George and her funds were dwindling rapidly. She wrote to him requesting payment, “thinking it would be proper to settle this matter before the Princess of Brunswick came to England, as after that period it might have appeared indelicate” for her to contact him. The situation was an emotional one for both of them. Still angry about the vast amounts of money she had spent to entertain the prince and his friends for the previous dozen years, 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.
The prince married Caroline on April 8, 1795; but before the year was out, he began to resent his enforced separation from Maria. George 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. Evincing a modicum of sensitivity to her feelings, he urged his friends to show her the same attention as they had done before the split.
On January 10, 1796, three days after Caroline gave birth to their daughter Charlotte, the Prince of Wales wrote his last will and testament, a document of some three thousand words, bequeathing all his “worldly property . . . to my Maria Fitzherbert, my wife, the wife of my heart and 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 . . .” He also desired 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.”
But this outpouring of self-pity did not lead to a reunion. After several months elapsed, the prince actively sought a reconciliation with his “second self” during the summer of 1798. By then he had separated from Caroline for good and was bored with Lady Jersey. Maria, however, was not so easily won and did not return to his arms.
In February 1799, the prince read a newspaper report of Maria’s death in Bath. He was utterly devastated. “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 reportedly 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.”
By mid-July, Maria advised the prince that a rapprochement would be possible only if the Pope deemed their marriage legitimate. The prince was on tenterhooks while they awaited a decision from Rome. Finally, the pontiff 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.
But if George was considered legitimately wed to Mrs. Fitzherbert, then his marriage to Caroline was bigamous, and Charlotte was a bastard. Yet, he didn’t seem to care that his reunion with Maria jeopardized Princess Charlotte’s chances of succession.
Maria claimed that the next eight years of her life were her happiest, telling Lady Anne, “He is so much improved . . . all that was boyish and troublesome before is now become respectful and considerate. . . . He is not so jealous of me with every foolish fellow that I speak to. . . . We live like brother and sister. I find no resentment tho’ plenty of regret that I will have it on this footing and no other, but he must conform to my stipulations. I did not consent to make it up with the Prince to live [with] him either as his wife or his mistress.”
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, or of the fact that it was no longer sexual, people were shocked. What made this new incarnation of their relationship such a scandal was that the prince was now a married man. Ironically, Maria found herself snubbed by the very members of the haute ton who had previously welcomed her most warmly.
Between 1801 and 1804, 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, shortly after asking Mrs. Fitzherbert to look after their baby girl. After the Court of Chancery ruled against Maria in 1804, George brought the case to the House of Lords, the highest appeals court in the land, where Maria was granted permanent custody of little Minney. At his spectacular Marine Pavilion in Brighton, George and Maria “played house” with the child. It was the closest they would ever come to any semblance of “family” and the only one they could safely get away with.
Maria never lived at the Pavilion, but she often dined there, as one of a party of twelve or fourteen. The Hon. Mrs. Calvert, a recognized beauty of the day, was one such dinner guest on an evening in 1804. She described Mrs. Fitzherbert as “. . . about fifty . . . but with a charming countenance, her features are beautiful, except her mouth which is ugly, having a set of not good false teeth, but her person is too fat, and she makes a great display of a very white but not prettily formed bosom, which I often long to throw a handkerchief over.”
Although by 1806 Maria and the prince may have thought of each other as “brother and sister,” in her mind they would always be married; so she panicked during the so-called Delicate Investigation into the possible sexual misconduct of the Princess of Wales—specifically whether Caroline of Brunswick had given birth to an illegitimate son in 1802, six years after her formal separation from the prince. Caroline’s lawyer was the anti-Catholic Spencer Perceval, who had represented Minney Seymour’s uncle during the lengthy and contentious custody battle, and Maria worried about what Perceval might dredge up during the investigation. Caroline would certainly want to shred her husband’s reputation in retaliation for dragging her through an inquest, and Maria would undoubtedly be cross-examined about her relationship with the Prince of Wales. So she snipped out the names of the witnesses to her royal wedding from her marriage lines, to “save them from the peril of the law,” in case she was called to testify, as their presence at the illegal ceremony rendered them complicit in the violation of the various acts and statutes.
Ironically, in gaining Minney Seymour, Mrs. Fitzherbert lost the prince—again. The custody suit had bonded them, but once it was settled there was nothing much beyond long-standing respect and affection, along with a dollop of nostalgia, to keep them together. Maria and George had tried to make things work between them, but they were fundamentally unsuited to each other temperamentally. Not only did George continue to behave like a frat boy, drinking and gaming deep into the night, but he was also not remotely monogamous.
The prince still financially supported Mrs. Fitzherbert, although he remained unable to meet the promise he had made upon their marriage to give her £10,000 a year. He had raised her annuity incrementally, but now she was in an embarr
assing financial situation. Her house had burned down and the prince had hired an architect to build her a new one. However, the building costs had run woefully over-budget, and now she was in dire need of funds. In 1809, Maria wrote to the prince: It is with the greatest reluctance I take up my pen to address you upon a subject very painful to my feelings. . . . For though we have now been married three-and-twenty years I have never at any period solicited you for assistance.
The fifty-three-year-old Mrs. Fitzherbert explained that she had twice been threatened with arrest and debtors’ prison. Although she assured George that she “would feel no degradation going to a jail, I thought it my duty to inform you of these circumstances, for which I hope I shall not incur your displeasure, for as your wife, I feel I still have a claim upon your protection which I trust is not entirely alienated from me.”
The prince must have paid the debts because no more was said about them and Maria was never arrested or incarcerated. But her influence was waning in direct proportion to the ascendance of George’s new mistress, Lady Hertford.
By December 1809, Maria had endured enough of her husband’s flagrant fickleness. She wrote him a letter on the eighteenth of the month, explaining why she could not accept his most recent invitation to the Pavilion: 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.
On February 5, 1811, the prince was sworn in as regent, initially for a period of one year. By this time George III was nearly blind as a result of cataracts, and was riddled with rheumatism. Additionally, he had been suffering from bouts of “madness” since the 1780s (believed nowadays to be a symptom of porphyria, a rare metabolic disorder). When it became apparent that the king would never recover his wits, the Regency was made permanent. The prince hosted a fête 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 the regent had sent Maria a gown, she refused to attend because she would not be seated at his table, where the two hundred highest-ranking guests would be placed, according to the strictest court etiquette. George’s 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.
That contretemps spelled the end of their romance. Maria demanded—and received—a formal separation. The regent agreed to provide her with an income of £6,000 a year (over $481,000 today), paid from a mortgage on the Brighton Pavilion.
The regent became king at the age of fifty-seven upon the death of his father on January 29, 1820. Now George IV, he and Maria rarely crossed paths, but evidently she was never terribly far from his thoughts. Their relationship was certainly uppermost in her mind during the 1820 hearing on the Bill of Pains and Penalties, through which George sought a divorce from Caroline. The sixty-four-year-old Maria decamped to Paris, where she endured a few uneasy months, anxious that she’d be called by the defense to testify before the House of Lords and be compelled to produce the documents pertaining to their wedding. Mercifully, her name was never placed on the witness list.
During the first few years of his reign George turned against Maria as he did, Prince Hal-like, to several of his former associates. Sir William Knighton, his physician (and private secretary after 1822), insisted that whenever the king mentioned her name it was “with feelings of disgust and horror,” claiming that their union “was an artificial marriage . . . just to satisfy her; that it was no marriage—for there could be none without a license or some written document.” Of course we know that there were documents, which were in Maria’s possession. From time to time after their final break, Maria’s demands for her annuity payments were accompanied by veiled threats to go public with her papers if she did not receive the funds.
The king’s revisionist reminiscences of the good old days with Maria were far from rosy. He confided in Knighton that her temper “was violent in the extreme and there was no end to her jealousies,” recalling that during “one fit of fury” she lobbed a slipper at him.
In June 1830, when the king was dying, he refused to have her visit his bedside, because he was ashamed of his appearance, but eagerly seized her “get well soon” letter and, after reading it, placed it under his pillow. George had grown so obese that he had to sleep in a chair. On June 26 at 3:15 a.m., Maria Fitzherbert—who had no idea just how ill he was and was deeply hurt that he had never replied to her final letter—was made a widow for the third time. The king was buried wearing the Maria Cosway miniature of Mrs. Fitzherbert about his neck, carrying “with him to the grave the image of her, who was perhaps the only woman he had respected as well as loved,” according to George Keppel.
George’s successor, William IV, offered to make Maria a duchess, but she declined a title. And he unhesitatingly settled her £6,000 charge on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Maria signed a release on any claim to George IV’s property, but she would continue to receive the same annual pension (now £10,000—nearly $1.1 million today—although George had changed his 1796 will that had initially left her everything). She often had to fight for her royal annuity payments, which were not always paid in a timely fashion, or in full, but her relationship with the new king was an amicable one. When William first called on the widowed Maria at her Brighton residence, Steyne House, she proudly showed him her marriage certificate, and his eyes filled with tears.
Maria now spoke openly of her marriage to George, and William’s court happily accepted her as a respected in-law. A wealthy woman, at the time of her death she possessed £28,726—over $3.1 million today. But much of her history as a royal wife cannot be fully pieced together because almost all of her correspondence with George and his family was burned pursuant to his instructions. From 1833 to 1836 the Duke of Wellington, as one of George IV’s executors, consigned numerous packets of letters to the flames. Maria herself had agreed to destroy most of her own papers pertaining to her royal relationship, leaving her emotionally drained and complaining of the lingering odor of “burnt paper and sealing-wax” in her Tilney Street drawing room. She did retain certain “essential documents”—her marriage certificate, George’s will made in January 1796, a letter from Reverend Burt attesting that he had performed their wedding ceremony, and George’s passionate forty-two-page letter to her written in November 1785. Those papers she deposited in Coutts Bank. They remained there until the early twentieth century, when Edward VII permitted a biographer to peruse them, after which they were placed in the Royal Archives.
The remainder of Maria’s life was gracious and genteel. She was a devoted mother and grandmother to Minney and Maryanne and their children, hostessing parties, traveling throughout England and abroad. When she was in Brighton, she attended the Church of St. John the Baptist every week for confession. Only a young charwoman was permitted to remain in the building on these occasions, and she was told by the priest to curtsy deeply to the mysteriously veiled old lady, “for maybe it was the queen of England and maybe not.”
One day in March 1837, Maria collapsed. For years she had suffered from lumbago, rheumatism, and gout. She died at her Brighton home on Easter Monday, March 27, at the age of eighty. On April 6 she was buried in St. John the Baptist church. The ring finger of her stone effigy is carved with three wedding bands.
In March 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that England’s prime minister Gordon Brown was looking into changing Britain’s rules of succession, effectively overturning the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century laws prohibiting the heirs to the throne from marrying a “papist.” Even if England’s Parliament approved such a measure, the proposed new law would have to be presented, debated, a
nd voted upon by the parliaments in each of Britain’s commonwealth realms—a lengthy process that may close more doors than it opens, because in some dominions, including Australia, there is widespread sentiment in favor of breaking with the monarchy altogether.
One can’t help but wonder what might have been had George and Maria Fitzherbert been permitted to live openly and legally as a married couple. For one thing, she would have genuinely been Queen of England.
For another, there would have been no Caroline of Brunswick.
GEORGE IV
and
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK
1768-1821
married 1795-1821
“Judge what it was to have a drunken husband on one’s wedding day, and one who passed the greatest part of his bridal night under the grate, where he fell, and where I left him.”
—Caroline of Brunswick to Lady Charlotte Campbell
“HARRIS, I AM NOT WELL, GET ME A GLASS OF brandy,” the Prince of Wales said curtly.
James Harris, the Earl of Malmesbury, embarrassed for both Caroline and the prince, diplomatically endeavored to smooth things over. “Sir, had you not better have a glass of water?”
“No,” the prince replied, adding an oath presumably too crude for Malmesbury to record in his diary. “I will go directly to the queen.” George then turned on his heels and strode out of the room without another word.
The astonished Caroline of Brunswick inquired of Malmesbury (in French), “My God! Is the prince always like that? I find him very fat and nothing as handsome as his picture.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 32