Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (20 page)

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W a n d e r i n g R o y a l s

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The 1701 Act of Settlement barred any Roman Catholic, or heir pre-

sumptive who married a Roman Catholic, from ascending the throne

in England. Moreover, the Royal Marriages Act forbade any descen-

dant of George II under the age of twenty-five from marrying with-

out permission of the monarch. Nonetheless, on December 15, 1785,

at the age of twenty-three, the Prince of Wales wed Mrs. Fitzherbert

in a private ceremony at her home. It seems unlikely that he intended

by this act to renounce his right to the throne. The ceremony was

probably more a way of locking in a long sought-after mistress than

an all-for-love act of defiance, especially because he kept the marriage

a secret even from his close friends, and he must have known that the

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1772 Act made it invalid.

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The unconstitutionality of the marriage may have trumped its

illegality, particularly in discussions regarding the need for a regency.

On December 16, John Rolle, an independent Tory hostile to Fox,

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hedged his bets by avowing that “he was ready to admit that a Prince

of Wales, of full age and capacity, was the properest person to be

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appointed the Regent, provided he had not by any illegal
or
unconsti-

tutional act forfeited such pretensions” (
History and Proceedings
62;

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italics added). A month later he was more explicit, declaring that he

would agree to the Prince being made regent “only upon the ground

that he was not married to Mrs. Fitzherbert either in law or equity”

(296). He made it clear that he saw the marriage’s unconstitutionality

as more significant—and damning—than its illegality. If the Prince

had married a Catholic, it did not matter whether the marriage was

illegal upon other grounds; he could not inherit the crown, and Fox’s

earlier argument that the heir apparent had the clearest right “to

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assume the reins of government” would no longer hold. Rolle “had

heard it to be the opinion of some of the first lawyers of this coun-

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try, that nothing contained in” the Royal Marriages Act “altered or

affected the Clause in the Act of William and Mary, which enacted

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and declared, that any Heir to the Crown, who married a Papist,

forfeited his right to the Crown” (387
).
He reverted several times to

Fox’s “explicit disavowal of any such marriage” made on the House

floor two years earlier (296). Fox had, in the late spring of 1786,

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denied that the marriage had taken place when the controversy sur-

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faced during debates on a proposal that Parliament redress the Prince’s

once again enormous debt. Pitt first raised the question by alluding

vaguely to “the knowledge he possessed of many circumstances relat-

ing to” the Prince’s insolvency, which he would find “absolutely nec-

essary to lay . . . before the public” if the House went forward with the

proposal (
Speeches
323). Pushing the issue further, Rolle then rose to

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R o y a l R o m a n c e s

say that “the question involved matters, by which the constitution,

both in church and state, might be essentially affected” (323). Fox’s

response was unequivocal, calling reports of the marriage “a tale in

every particular so unfounded, for which there was not the shadow of

any thing like reality” (326). When Rolle pressed him for a clarifica-

tion, pointing out that, despite “certain laws and acts of parliament

which forbade it and made it null and void . . . still it might have taken

place,” Fox obliged. “When he denied the calumny in question, he

meant to deny it not merely with regard to the effect of certain exist-

ing laws, but to deny it
in toto
, in point of fact as well as law. The fact

not only never could have happened legally, but never did happen in

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any way whatsoever” (327).

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Both Fox’s and the Prince’s biographers maintain that he spoke

rashly and in ignorance and that his sense of having been betrayed

by the Prince permanently damaged their relationship.25 Fox was

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not at the ceremony and may have believed, with others, that it had

never taken place. When he learned his mistake, he was “in a most

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dangerous position. Even though the deception was the Prince’s and

not his, he had been the means of conveying the lie to the House”

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(Hibbert,
George IV
67). Rolle may have been trying to catch Fox in

that lie, to see if he could be brought to the same declaration again,

two years later. Rolle insists, however, on a distinction between “fact”

and “law” and pushes that distinction in both debates.26 An illegal

marriage is still a marriage in fact. If he has contracted such a mar-

riage, the Prince must still be called to account for it. Rolle is forcing

a contest between illegality and unconstitutionality and maneuver-

ing Fox into that contest. Fox was popularly believed to have been

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at least in the know, if not instrumental, in the matter of the secret

marriage. On March 27, 1786, a month before his decisive speech in

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the House, James Gillray published
Wife and no Wife—or—A Trip

to the Continent
(BM Satires 6932), which depicts Fox giving Mrs.

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Fitzherbert away in a ceremony performed by Burke and attended by

the Prince’s friends Louis Weltje and George Hanger, a sleeping Lord

North, and a choir of tonsured monks.27 The monks, the subtitle,

and the partially obscured crucifix above Burke’s head suggest a con-

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tinental betrayal of British Protestant interests and may also reference

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Fox’s support for Catholic emancipation. Paintings on the wall behind

the participants depict scenes of temptation and betrayal. Above the

Prince’s head is a framed picture of David watching Bathsheba bathe;

the angle of David’s head recapitulates the Prince’s as he gazes at

Mrs. Fitzherbert. Between the couple are depicted the temptation of

St. Anthony and Eve’s temptation of Adam, while above Fox’s head,

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W a n d e r i n g R o y a l s

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and again oriented in the same direction, is the image of Judas kiss-

ing Christ. The title, “Wife
and
no Wife,” evokes the conundrum

of the Prince’s double transgression. The Prince of Wales
is
married,

and to a Catholic; his betrayal of the Act of Settlement means that

the heir is no heir. The Prince is
not
married, because, as a prince of

the realm, he cannot legally do so—and therefore, if he
is
married,

he must not be a prince of the realm. Maria Fitzherbert is both his

wife and his mistress, his not-wife. The either/or of Rolle’s original

query resolves into the oxymoronic both/and of the regency crisis.

The Prince’s condition of being both married and not married, heir

and not-heir, replicates—and magnifies—the condition of the nation,

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with a throne that is both occupied and not occupied; a third estate

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that is both “whole and entire” and incomplete; a parliament that is

not a parliament, and that, like the Parliament of 1688, must act as

a body to reconstitute the executive branch without an executive to

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ratify their proceedings.

The regency debates turned on this question of whether there was

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currently a monarch in England. The Whigs, led by Fox and Burke,

maintained that the King’s incapacity left the legislature incomplete

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and paralyzed. Without a king, Parliament was not Parliament and

could pass no laws until both Houses first resolved to supply the

deficiency by appointing a regent. Pitt and the Tories held that the

King was still king and that as long as he was alive and expected to

recover, the Prince of Wales was, in the words of Sir John Scott, the

Solicitor General (later Lord Eldon), “only a subject” (
History and

Proceedings
87). Much was riding on that second qualification, about

which opinion was privately so divided. If the King was going to

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recover, then he could not be said to have left the throne. Both sides

recalled the Glorious Revolution, when, after the enforced abdication

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of James II, Parliament named his daughter Mary and her husband

William of Orange joint monarchs. The force of the contrast between

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that period and this, however, was belied by the possibility of com-

parison. A speech by Pitt on December 16 demonstrates the layers of

qualification his distinction requires:

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It was then a century ago since any thing of equal importance had

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engaged the attention of the House. The circumstance that had then

occurred was the Revolution, between which, however, and the pres-

ent circumstance, there was a great and essential difference. At that

time the two Houses had to provide for the filling up of a Throne that

was vacant by the abdication of James the Second; at present they had

to provide for the exercise of the Royal Authority, when his Majesty’s

political capacity was whole and entire, and the Throne consequently

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full, although in fact all the functions of the executive government

were suspended, but which suspension they had every reason to expect

would be but temporary. (
History and Proceedings
40)

Conscious of the rhetorical force of a resemblance—two constitu-

tional crises, two Parliaments forced to meet with the throne unoc-

cupied, only one digit’s difference in the dates—Pitt first makes his

comparison and then allows it to emerge as a contrast. Despite the

equal importance of the two events, things were very different “at

that time” than they are “at present.” This king is not gone like the

other one; he is just unavailable to us at the present moment. But we

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have “every reason to expect” that he will return to us, and the throne

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will be literally—and not simply as a legal fiction—full. We are not a

parliament without a king; we just look like one. The legislature, like

the executive, is whole and entire.

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The King’s physicians reinforced this position by asserting that

their patient was going to recover both his health and his sanity, albeit

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with varying degrees of confidence. In the statement that was read

on December 10 all seven of the attending physicians “respectively

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declare[d] the King at present incapable of meeting his Parliament,

or attending to public business, but express their hopes of his recov-

ery, and ground their opinion of its probability on their experience,

which has taught them that the majority of patients afflicted with

the same disorder have recovered, although they cannot pronounce

when the precise point of time will arrive at which his Majesty will

be well” (
History and Proceedings
9). This distillation of each doctor’s

testimony before the Privy Council obscures the fact that Warren

needed some leading and prompting before he could be satisfactorily

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quoted to this effect. He was also probably edited. In the printed ver-