Behind the Palace Doors (30 page)

George III’s eldest son, the future King George IV, ruled for his father as regent beginning in 1810 and succeeded him ten years later
.

Next to his wicked brother Ernest, George, Prince of Wales, was, well, a prince. Nevertheless, it was he—above all his misbehaving brothers—who offended George III the most with his antics, and the one for whom the rigidly moralistic monarch reserved most of his ire.

King George had doted on the prince as a baby, but as the boy grew older, his father turned on him ferociously—as Hanoverian monarchs were wont to do. Discipline was harsh and unrelenting. One of the prince’s sisters later recalled seeing young George and his brother Frederick “held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long whip.” And the concept of gentle encouragement to bring forth a child’s good qualities was entirely lost on the king. Instead, he found fault in almost everything the boy did. “He hates me,” the younger George later lamented; “he always did, from seven years old.”

Some children of disapproving parents will do anything to gain their approbation. The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, grew up to exceed even his father’s worst fears. Though he could be charming, witty, and gracious, with a sophisticated eye for art and architecture, he was also a drunken fop who staggered his way through London society, bedding indiscriminately a long succession of mistresses, and generally making a grand spectacle of himself. His excessive drinking was exceeded only by his extravagance. The obscene amounts he spent on his homes and his person resulted in staggering debts that became a public scandal and left his father sputtering with indignation.

“It is now almost certain that some unpleasant mention of you is daily to be found in the papers,” the king wrote to his wayward son. Indeed, the prince was a fixture in the broadsheets.
The Times
of London, for example, condemned him as a hard-drinking, swearing, whoring man “who at all times would prefer a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon,” and whose only states of happiness were “gluttony, drunkenness, and gambling.”

The king despaired of his son’s undignified behavior and regularly reproached him for it, to little effect. “The Prince of Wales on the smallest reflection must feel that I have little reason to approve of any part of his conduct for the last three years,” the king wrote as his heir approached his twenty-first birthday, “that his neglect of every religious duty is notorious; his want of common civility to the Queen and me, not less so; besides his total disobedience of every injunction I had given and which he … declared himself contented with. I must hope he will now think it behooves him to take up a fresh line of conduct worthy of his station.”

Far from reforming, though, the prince, who not only offended his father with his various dissipations but openly flirted with the king’s political opposition party, performed the ultimate act of defiance in 1785 when he entered into a secret
—and very illegal—marriage with a twice widowed Roman Catholic named Maria Fitzherbert.

The Prince of Wales had a rather loose definition of love in that his fervent declarations of eternal devotion to a woman would quickly evaporate when the next buxom lady caught his eye. Playwright Richard Sheridan, author of
The School for Scandal
and one of the prince’s drinking buddies, observed wryly that George was “too much every lady’s man to be the man of any lady.”

But the prince’s feelings for Maria Fitzherbert, six years his senior, were different—perhaps because he couldn’t have her. She was too moral to be his mistress, and two laws made it impossible for her to be his wife. The Act of Settlement decreed that anyone married to a Catholic could not inherit the throne, and the Royal Marriages Act of 1772
^*
required that all members of the royal family obtain the sovereign’s permission to wed. And there was no way King George would ever allow his heir to marry a Catholic commoner.

Desire drove George into a total emotional frenzy. He swooned and sobbed, took to his bed, and declared hysterically that he would kill himself if he couldn’t have the woman he loved. Finally he determined to marry Mrs. Fitzherbert, damn the consequences. Yet Maria wasn’t so sure. Overwhelmed by his ardor, knowing of his inconstancy with other women, and all too aware of the dangers such an arrangement would entail,
the widow resisted. She planned to go abroad to escape the prince’s attentions, which, upon hearing of it, propelled George to an act of utter desperation.

Four of the prince’s associates arrived at Mrs. Fitzherbert’s home and informed her that he had stabbed himself, was near death, and that only her immediate intervention could save him. Maria was reluctant to attend the prince, however, fearful that her arrival at his home unaccompanied would be seen as scandalous. It was only when a female chaperone was provided for her that she agreed to go. What she found was horrifying. The Prince of Wales was in his bed, pale and lethargic, his sheets soaked in blood. The sight nearly made Maria faint, and in this state—with the prince’s plea that “nothing in the world would induce him to live unless she promised to become his wife”—she consented to marry him.

It is uncertain whether the future king had actually stabbed himself or had simply ripped off the bandages from an earlier medical bleeding.
^†
But after the shock of seeing George in such condition wore off, Mrs. Fitzherbert regretted her promise to become his wife. Her emotions had been manipulated, she insisted, and though she blamed not the prince but rather his associates, she signed a deposition stating that “promises obtain’d in such a manner are entirely void.” The next day she sailed for France.

Now George was more frantic than ever. He bombarded Maria with lovesick letters begging her to reconsider and be his wife. Otherwise, he swore, he would die. “Come then,” he pleaded. “Oh! Come, dearest of wives, best and most adored of women, come 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 and who will ever remain until the last moments of his existence,
unalterably thine.
”

When the prince wasn’t spewing out melodramatic missives, “he cried by the hour,” one member of his household reported, and “testified the sincerity and violence of his passion and his despair by the most extravagant expressions and actions, rolling on the floor, striking his forehead, tearing his hair, falling into hystericks, and swearing that he would abandon the country, forego the crown, sell his jewels and plate, and scrape together a competence to fly with the object of his affections to America.” And, of course, he drank himself stupid.

After a year in France agonizing over what to do, Maria Fitzherbert finally decided to return home. “I have told him I will be his,” she wrote to Lady Anne Lindsay. “I know I injure him and perhaps destroy forever my own tranquility.” What had changed her mind remains a mystery. Did she really love the prince? Or had she simply been worn down by his incessant pursuit? Whatever the case, George was ecstatic.

“I hardly know,
my dearest and only beloved Maria
, how I am to begin this letter to you,” the prince wrote at the beginning of a forty-two-page letter. “Such a train of extraordinary and wonderful events have happened lately, which at first created apprehensions and alarms in my bosom, and since have tended to the facilitating and entire arrangement of our plan, so that nothing now is wanting but the arrival of my adored Wife in this country to make me the happiest of men.”

Sensing that an illicit union was in the making, the prince’s friend and political ally, Charles James Fox, tried to deter him from the “very desperate step” he was about to take. It would destroy his chances of ever becoming king, Fox warned, and, he continued, were he Mrs. Fitzherbert’s father or brother, he “would advise her not by any means to agree to [a marriage], and to prefer any other species of connection … to one leading
to such misery and mischief.” George earnestly assured his friend that there was no marriage planned.

Meanwhile, the search for a minister to perform the secret ceremony was under way. Given that the Royal Marriages Act made it a felony to officiate over an unsanctioned union, finding a willing priest was no easy feat. Several wisely declined before John Burt, a disreputable clergyman languishing in debtors’ prison, finally agreed once the prince promised to pay off his debts and make him a bishop when George became king.

On the evening of December 15, 1785, the Prince of Wales and Maria Fitzherbert were illegally wed at her London home, with her brother and uncle serving as the only witnesses besides Burt. Clandestine as the wedding was, however, it was hardly a secret. Rumors and reports of the union spread, as Horace Walpole wrote, “even from London to Rome.”

Despite all the chatter, the couple maintained appearances by living separately and denying that they were married. The prince called reports of the union “pooh,” and when the matter came up in Parliament (in connection with debates over George’s enormous debts) he persuaded Charles James Fox to rebut the allegations. Fox was so vigorous in his speech—calling reports of the marriage a “low malicious falsehood”—that he earned Maria Fitzherbert’s unyielding enmity. He had in effect unwittingly proclaimed her to be the prince’s mistress, and, she complained, “rolled her in the kennel like a streetwalker.”

Maria was miffed at George as well, having concluded that he was more interested in resolving his money problems than he was in protecting her honor. Relative harmony was eventually restored, but the marriage was ultimately doomed. Infidelity was one factor. Mrs. Fitzherbert had managed to tame the prince, at least for a time, but soon enough he was eager to seek fresh conquests—and there was quite a succession.

None of these affairs was too serious, until George fell in love with Frances Villiers, Countess of Jersey, a “clever, unprincipled” woman, as one contemporary described her, “but beautiful and fascinating.” The countess urged her lover to inform his wife that he had found happiness elsewhere, which he did, and soon came to regret it. He wanted
both
women.

The Countess of Jersey certainly undermined the prince’s marriage, but his staggering debts finally destroyed it. George realized it would be impossible for him even to begin to extricate himself from his enormous financial burden unless he wed a princess of his father’s choosing. Only then would he be allotted more income. So Maria Fitzherbert was sent away. A divorce was unnecessary because, under English law, the couple was never married (although Pope Pius VII did decree the union valid).

Alas, the king’s choice of a bride for his son—George’s first cousin Caroline of Brunswick—was most unfortunate (see
Chapter 24
) and resulted in one of the most miserable royal marriages in the history of the kingdom, which was no easy feat.

As the prince embarked on an odious marriage with a woman he came to loathe—the “infamous wretch,” as he called Caroline—his first wife preoccupied him. On the way to the wedding ceremony, he turned to his brother the Duke of Clarence and said sadly, “William, tell Mrs. Fitzherbert she is the only woman I shall ever love.”

The following year, when he believed he was dying, George wrote a rambling will and bequeathed all his “worldly property … to
my Maria Fitzherbert, my wife, the wife of my heart & soul
, and though by the laws of the 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 prince declared that he wished 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.
” (As for his despised wife, she “who is called the Princess of Wales, I leave one shilling.”)

As his corrosive marriage to Caroline ground on, the prince managed to woo back Mrs. Fitzherbert, employing the same hysterics he had when first courting her. “He is so much improved,” Maria wrote to Lady Anne Lindsay after the reconciliation, “all that was boyish and troublesome before is now become respectful and considerate.” Or so she thought. The Prince of Wales was, and would always remain, a rake, utterly incapable of monogamy. And though Mrs. Fitzherbert tolerated his succession of passing trysts, his passion for Isabella Ingram-Seymour-Conway, Marchioness of Hertford, was hard to overlook. That flaunted affair, Maria wrote, “has quite destroyed the entire comfort and happiness of both our lives; it has so completely destroyed mine, that neither my health nor my spirits can bear it any longer.” And so the couple—man and wife, except by law—finally parted, this time for good.

Two decades later, as King George IV lay dying in 1830, he begged the Duke of Wellington to ensure that he would be buried “with whatever ornaments [that] might be upon his person at the time of his death.” The duke agreed, and after George died, he realized the reason for the king’s request. Peering into the coffin, Wellington observed a black ribbon around the late king’s neck. Curious, he drew aside the collar to see what was hanging from the ribbon. What he found was a diamond locket with a miniature portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert inside. Maria said nothing when she was told, but it was seen “that some large tears fell from her eyes.”