In the revolutionary war Duke George fought like a hero. At home he afforded refuge to bold but honest writers driven from more mighty states. He beautified his city, improved the country; and, without being of great mental cultivation himself, he loved to collect around him scholars, philosophers, artists, authors, gentlemen. With these he lived on the most familiar terms, and when I say that Schiller and John Paul Richter were of the number, I afford some idea of the society which Duke George cared chiefly to cultivate. He buried his own mother in the common churchyard, because she was worthy, he said, of lying among her own subjects. The majority of these were country folk, but George esteemed the country folk, and at rustic festivals he was not unwilling to share a jug of beer with any of them. Perhaps the rustics loved him more truly than the sages, to whom he proved, occasionally, something wearisome. But these were often hard to please. All, however, felt a honest grief when, on the Christmas night of 1803, Duke George died, after a brief illness, caused, it is said, by a neglected cold, and by rage at an urgent demand from the Kaiser of 60,000 florins, fine-money for knightly orders ducally declined.
The Duke left a young family, Adelaide, Ida, and his son and successor, Bernard, then only three years of age. The mother of these fatherless children took upon herself the office of guardian, with that of Regent of the duchy. The duties of both were performed with rare judgment and firmness, during a time of much trouble and peril, especially when the French armies were overrunning and devastating Germany.
On the young ladies, gently and wisely reared in this little court, Queen Charlotte had begun to look with the foresight of a mother who had elderly and wayward sons to marry. When the death of the Princess Charlotte of Wales threatened to interrupt the direct succession of the crown, the unmatched brothers of the Regent thought of taking unto themselves wives. Cumberland had married according to his, but to no other person’s, liking, hardly even that of his wife. The Dukes of Kent and Cambridge made better choice, and there then remained but the sailor-prince to be converted into a Benedick. The Queen selected his bride for him, and he approved or acquiesced in the selection. He might, as far as age goes, have been her father, but that was of small account; and when Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen was spoken of, men conversant with contemporary history knew her to be the good daughter of an accomplished and an exemplary mother.
The preliminaries of the marriage were carried out amid so much opposition that at one moment the accomplishment of the marriage itself wore a very doubtful aspect. The difficulty was of a pecuniary nature. The Dukes of Kent and Cambridge were content, on the occasion of their respective marriages, to accept an addition to their income of 6,000l. The Duke of Cumberland was compelled to rest content, or otherwise, without any addition at all—save the expenses of a wife. With the Duke of Clarence it was different. He already possessed 18,000l. per annum, and ministers resolved, after a private meeting with their supporters, to request the Parliament to allow him an increase of 10,000l. On the 13th of April, 1818, a message from the Prince Regent to that effect was submitted to either House by Lord Castlereagh and the Earl of Liverpool. In the Commons the first-named Lord hinted at the dependence of our Princes on the liberality of Parliament since the time when the crown had surrendered its long uncontrolled disposal of revenues. But the House was not to be ‘suggested’ into a generosity which might be beyond justice. Tierney, the gadfly of his period, complained of the previous meeting of the friends of ministers, and the communication to them, before it was made to the House, of the amount to be applied for. Methuen insisted that before the Commons would grant a farthing they must be made acquainted with all the sources from which the King’s sons derived their present revenue, as well as the amount of the revenue itself. Finally, Holme Sumner met the proposal of an additional 10,000l. by a counter-proposal of 6,000l. This was carried by a narrow majority of one hundred and ninety-three to one hundred and eighty-four, and when this sum was offered to the Duke he peremptorily declined to accept it.
Things did not progress more in tune with marriage-bells in the House of Lords. There, when Lord Liverpool stated what his royal client would be contented to receive, Lord King started to his legs and exclaimed, ‘That the question was not what it might please the Duke of Clarence to take, but what it might please the people to give him!’ They were not willing to give what he expected, and for a time it seemed as if there would consequently be no marriage with the Princess of Saxe-Meinengen. But only for a time.
‘The Duke of Clarence is going to be married, after all,’ was a common phrase launched by the newspapers, and taken up by the people, in 1818. If the phrase had but one meaning, it had a double application. In the former sense it had reference to the disinclination of Parliament to increase his income, without which he had expressed his determination not to marry. It was further applied, however, to the old course of his old loves. There were the years spent with Dora Bland, then ‘Mrs. Jordan,’ the actress—years of an intercourse which had much of the quiet, happy character of a modest English home—the breaking-up of which brought such great grief to the mother in that home that even every service subsequently rendered to her seemed to partake of the quality of offence. It has been registered as such by those who heard more of the wailing of the Ariadne than they knew of the groundlessness of it, when vented in reproaches for leaving her unprovided for as well as deserted.
Then the public remembered how this light-of-heart Duke had been a suitor to other ladies. He was the rival of Wellesley Pole for the favour and the fortune of the great heiress, Miss Tilney Long. That ill-fated lady conferred on this wooer of humbler degree the office of slaying her happiness, sapping her life, and ruining her estate. The other lady, who declined the Duke’s offer of his hand or petition for her own, was Miss Sophia Wykeham, of Thame Park, daughter and sole heiress of an Oxfordshire ’squire. Each lady had merits of her own, and other attractions besides those which lay in the beaux yeux de sa cassette; but perhaps each remembered the clauses of the Royal Marriage Act; however this may have been, Miss Tilney chose between her two suitors, while Miss Wykeham, after turning from the prayer of the Duke, never stooped to listen to a lowlier wooer.
These were the ‘antecedents’ of the lover who, in mature age, took rather than asked for the hand of Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen. Of all the actions of his life it was the one which brought him the most happiness; and with that true woman he had better fortune than is altogether merited by a man who, after a long bachelorship of no great repute, settles down in middle-life to respectability and content, under the influences of a virtuous woman, gifted with an excellent degree of common-sense.
In the dusk of a July evening, in the year 1818, this unwooed bride quietly arrived, with her mother, at Grillon’s Hotel, Albemarle Street. She had but cool reception for a lady on such mission as her own. There was no one to bid her welcome; the Regent was at Carlton House at dinner, and the Duke of Clarence was out of town on a visit. Except the worthy Mr. Grillon himself, no person seemed the gladder for her coming. In the course of the evening, however, the Regent drove down to Albemarle Street; and at a later hour the more tardy future husband was carried up to the door in a carriage drawn by four horses with as much rapidity as became a presumed lover of his age, in whom a certain show of zeal was becoming.
The strangers became at once acquainted, and acquaintance is said to have developed itself speedily into friendship. The family-party remained together till near upon the ‘wee sma’ hours; there was much indulgence there, we are told, of good, honest, informal hilarity; and when the illustrious and joyous circle broke up, the easy grace, frankness, and courtesy of the Regent, and the freedom and light-heartedness of the Duke, are said to have left favourable impressions on both the mother and the daughter.