and binding, though admittedly illegal, relationship to the prince
as his canonical wife; and though that relationship was not, and
for political reasons could not be, publicly admitted, it was in
fact treated by their intimates on the footing of a morganatic
marriage. The position nevertheless was inevitably a false one;
Mrs Fitzherbert had promised not to publish the evidence of the
marriage (which, according to a strict interpretation of the Act
of Settlement might have barred succession to the crown), and
the rumours which soon got about led the prince to allow it to be
disavowed by his political friends. He lived in the most extravagant
way, became heavily involved in debt, and as the king
would not assist him, shut up Carlton House, and went to live
with Mrs Fitzherbert at Brighton. In 1787 a proposal was
brought before the House of Commons by Alderman Newnham
for a grant in relief of his embarrassments. It was on this
occasion that Fox publicly declared in the House of Commons,
as on the prince’s own authority, in answer to allusions to the
marriage, that the story was a malicious falsehood. A little
later Sheridan, in deference to Mrs Fitzherbert’s pressure and
to the prince’s own compunction, made a speech guardedly
modifying Fox’s statement; but though in private the denial was
understood, it effected its object, the House voting a grant of
£221,000 to the prince and the king adding £10,000 to his income;
and Mrs Fitzherbert, who at first thought of severing her
connexion with the prince, forgave him. Their union—there was
no child of the marriage—was brutally broken off in June 1794
by the prince, when further pressure of debts (and the influence of
a new Egeria in Lady Jersey) made him contemplate his official
marriage with princess Caroline; in 1800, however, it was
renewed, after urgent pleading on the prince’s part, and after
Mrs Fitzherbert had obtained a formal decision from the pope
pronouncing her to be his wife, and sanctioning her taking him
back; her influence over him continued till shortly before the
prince became regent, when his relations with Lady Hertford
brought about a final separation. For the best years of his life
he had at least had in Mrs Fitzherbert the nearest approach to
a real wife, and this was fully recognized by the royal family.[1]
But his dissolute nature was entirely selfish, and his various
liaisons ended in the dominance of Lady Conyngham, the “Lady
Steward” of his household, from 1821 till his death.
Notorious as the prince of Wales had become by 1788, it was in that year that his father’s first attack of insanity made his position in the state one of peculiar importance. Fox maintained and Pitt denied that the prince of Wales, as the heir-apparent, had a right to assume the regency independently of any parliamentary vote. Pitt, with the support of both Houses, proposed to confer upon him the regency with certain restrictions. The recovery of the king in February 1789 put an end, however, to the prince’s hopes. In 1794 the prince consented to a marriage with a German Protestant princess, because his father would not pay his debts on any other terms, and his cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick, was brought over from Germany and married to him in 1795. Her behaviour was light and flippant, and he was brutal and unloving. The ill-assorted pair soon parted, and soon after the birth of their only child, the princess Charlotte, they were formally separated. With great unwillingness the House of Commons voted fresh sums of money to pay the prince’s debts.
In 1811 he at last became prince regent in consequence of his father’s definite insanity. No one doubted at that time that it was in his power to change the ministry at his pleasure. He had always lived in close connexion with the Whig opposition, and he now empowered Lord Grenville to form a ministry. There soon arose differences of opinion between them on the answer to be returned to the address of the Houses, and the prince regent then informed the prime minister, Mr Perceval, that he should continue the existing ministry in office. The ground alleged by him for this desertion of his friends was the fear lest his father’s recovery might be rendered impossible if he should come to hear of the advent of the opposition to power. Lord Wellesley’s resignation in February 1812 made the reconstruction of the ministry inevitable. As there was no longer any hope of the king’s recovery, the former objection to a Whig administration no longer existed. Instead of taking the course of inviting the Whigs to take office, he asked them to join the existing administration. The Whig leaders, however, refused to join, on the ground that the question of the Catholic disabilities was too important to be shelved, and that their difference of opinion with Mr Perceval was too glaring to be ignored. The prince regent was excessively angry, and continued Perceval in office till that minister’s assassination on the 11th of May, when he was succeeded by Lord Liverpool, after a negotiation in which the proposition of entering the cabinet was again made to the Whigs and rejected by them. In the military glories of the following years the prince regent had no share. When the allied sovereigns visited England in 1814, he played the part of host to perfection. So great was his unpopularity at home that hisses were heard in the streets as he accompanied his guests into the city. The disgust which his profligate and luxurious life caused amongst a people suffering from almost universal distress after the conclusion of the war rapidly increased. In 1817 the windows of the prince regent’s carriage were broken as he was on his way to open parliament.
The death of George III. on the 29th of January 1820, gave to his son the title of king without in any way altering the position which he had now held for nine years. Indirectly, however, this change brought out a manifestation of popular feeling such as his father had never been subjected to even in the early days of his reign, when mobs were burning jack-boots and petticoats. The relations between the new king and his wife unavoidably became the subject of public discussion. In 1806 a charge against the princess of having given birth to an illegitimate child had been conclusively disproved, and the old king had consequently refused to withdraw her daughter, the princess Charlotte, from her custody. When in the regency the prince was able to interfere, and prohibited his wife from seeing her daughter more than once a fortnight. On this, in 1813, the princess addressed to her husband a letter setting forth her complaints, and receiving no answer published it in the Morning Chronicle. The prince regent then referred the letter, together with all papers relating to the inquiry of 1806, to a body of twenty-three privy councillors for an opinion whether it was fit that the restrictions on the intercourse between the princess Charlotte and her mother should continue in force. All except two answered as the regent wished them to answer. But if the official leaning was towards the husband, the leaning of the general public was towards the wife of a man whose own life had not been such as to justify him in complaining of her whom he had thrust from him without a charge of any kind. Addresses of sympathy were sent up to the princess from the city of London and other public bodies. The discord again broke out in 1814 in
- ↑ Mrs Fitzherbert herself, after her final separation from the prince, with an annuity of £6000 a year, lived an honoured and more or less retired life mainly at Brighton, a town which owed its rapid development in fashionable popularity and material wealth to its selection by the prince and herself as a residence from the earliest years of their union; and there she died, seven years after the death of George IV., in 1837. William IV. on his accession offered to create her a duchess, but she declined; she accepted, however, his permission to put her servants in royal livery. William IV. in fact did all he could, short of a public acknowledgment (which the duke of Wellington opposed on state grounds), to recognize her position as his brother’s widow. Charles Greville, writing of her after her death, says in his Diary, “She was not a clever woman, but of a very noble spirit, disinterested, generous, honest and affectionate.” The actual existence of a marriage tie and the documentary evidence of her rights were not definitely established for many years; but in 1905 a sealed packet, deposited at Coutts’s bank in 1833, was at length opened by royal permission, and the marriage certificate and other conclusive proofs therein contained were published in Mr W. H. Wilkins’s Mrs Fitzherbert and George IV. In 1796 the prince had made a remarkable will in Mrs Fitzherbert’s favour, which he gave her in 1799, and it is included among these documents (now in the private archives at Windsor). In this he speaks of her emphatically throughout as “my wife.” It also contained directions that at his death a locket with her miniature, which he always wore, should be interred with him; and Mrs Fitzherbert was privately assured, on the duke of Wellington’s authority, that when the king was buried at Windsor the miniature was on his breast.
