There was no one whom the postponement of the marriage more annoyed than it did the Duchess of Marlborough. She was then residing in Marlborough House, which had been built some five-and-twenty years previously by Wren. That architect was employed, not because he was preferred, but that Vanbrugh might be vexed. The ground, in which had formerly been kept the birds and fowls ultimately destined to pass through the kitchen to the royal table, had been leased to the duchess by Queen Anne, and the expenses of building amounted to nearly fifty thousand pounds. The duchess both experienced and caused considerable mortifications here. She used to speak of the King in the adjacent palace as her ‘neighbour George.’ The entrance to the house, from Pall Mall, was, as it still is, a crooked and inconvenient one. To remedy this defect, she intended to purchase some houses ‘in the Priory,’ as the locality was called, for the purpose of pulling them down and constructing a more commodious entry to the mansion; but Sir Robert Walpole, with no more dignified motive than spite, secured the houses and ground, and erected buildings on the latter, which, as now, completely blocked in the front of the duchess’s mansion. She was subjected to a more temporary, but as inconvenient, blockade when the preparations for the wedding of the imperious Anne and her ugly husband were going on. Among other preparations a boarded gallery, through which the nuptial procession was to pass, was built up close against the duchess’s windows, completely darkening her rooms. As the boards remained there during the postponement of the ceremony, the duchess used to look at them with the remark, ‘I wish the princess would oblige me by taking away her orange chest!’
But the sick bridegroom took long to mend; and it was not till the following January that he was even sufficiently convalescent to journey by easy stages to Bath, and there drink in health at the fashionable pump. A month’s attendance there restored him to something like health; and in February his serene highness was gravely disporting himself at Oxford, exchanging compliments and eating dinners with the sages and scholars at that seat of learning. Another month was allowed to pass, and then, on the 24th of March 1733, the royal marriage was solemnised ‘in the French Chapel,’ St. James’s, by the Bishop of London.
The ceremony was as theatrical and coarse as such things used to be in those days. The prince must have looked very much as M. Potier used to look in Riquet à la Houppe, before his transformation from deformity to perfection. He was attired in a ‘cloth of gold suit;’ and George and Caroline may be pardoned if they smiled at the ‘baboon’ whom they were about to accept for their son-in-law. The bride was ‘in virgin robes of silver tissue, having a train six yards long, which was supported by ten dukes’ and earls’ daughters, all of whom were attired in robes of silver tissue.’
Nature will assert its claims in spite of pride or expediency; and accordingly it was observed that, after the bridegroom had arrived, and the marriage procession began to move through the temporarily constructed gallery, blazing with light, and glittering with bright gems and brighter eyes, the bride herself seemed slightly touched, and Caroline especially grave and anxious in her deportment. She appeared, for the first time, to feel that her daughter was about to make a great sacrifice, and her consequent anxiety was probably increased by the conviction that it was too late to save her daughter from impending fate. The King himself, who had never been in the eager condition of the seigneur in the song, who so peremptorily exclaims—
De ma fille Isabelle
Sois l’époux à l’instant—
manifested more impassibility than ever. Finally, the knot was tied under a salvo of artillery and a world of sighs.
The ceremony took place in the evening, and at midnight the royal family supped in public. It was a joyous festival, and not before two in the morning did the jaded married couple retire to the bower prepared for them, where they had to endure the further nuisance of sitting up in bed, in rich undresses, while the court and nobility, ‘fresh’ from an exhilarating supper and strong wines, defiled before them, making pleasant remarks the while, as ‘fine gentlemen’ used to make who had been born in our Augustan age.
Caroline felt compassion for her daughter, but she restrained her feelings until her eye fell upon the bridegroom. In his silver tissue night-dress, his light peruque, his ugliness, and his deformity, he struck her as the impersonation of a monster. His ill figure was so ill-dressed, that, looked at from behind, he appeared to have no head, and seen from before, he appeared as if he had neither neck nor legs.[8] The Queen was wonderfully moved at the sight—moved with pity for her daughter, and with indignation at her husband. The portion of the ceremony which used to be the merriest was by far the most mournful, at least so far as the Queen’s participation therein was concerned. She fairly cried with mingled vexation, disappointment, and disgust. She could not even revert to the subject, for days after, without crying, and yet laughing too, as the oddity of the bridegroom’s ugliness came across her mind.
The married couple were assuredly a strangely assorted pair. The bride, indeed, was not without common-place charms. In common with a dairy-maid the princess had a lively clear look and a very fair complexion. Like many a dairy-maid, too, of the time, she was very much marked with the small-pox. She was also ill-made, and inclined to become as obese as her royal mother. But then the bridegroom! All writers dealing with the subject agree that his ugliness was something extraordinary. No one doubts that he was deformed; but Hervey adds some traits that are revolting. His serene highness did not, like the gods, distil a celestial ichor. He appears, however, not to have been void of sense or good feeling; for when, at the period of his arrival, he was received with very scanty honours and cold ceremony—was made to feel that he was nothing in himself, and could only become anything here by marrying an English princess; when George, if not Caroline, ‘snubbed’ the courtiers who crowded his apartments at Somerset House; and when, in short, the prince of 12,000l. a year was made to feel that but little value was set upon him—he bore it all in silence, or as if he did not perceive it. Let us hope that gallantry for the lady induced the princely Quasimodo thus to act. It was almost more than she deserved; for while the people were ready to believe that the alliance was entered into the better to strengthen the Protestant succession, Anne herself was immediately moved thereto by fear, if she were left single, of ultimately depending for a provision upon her brother Frederick.