Quaintest of royal weddings was that which now took place in old Kew Palace. Indeed, there were two, for the Duke of Kent, who had gallantly fetched his wife from abroad, where he had married her according to Lutheran rites, was now re-married to his bride according to the forms of the Church of England. Early in the day there was a dinner, at which the most important personages in that day’s proceedings were present. The old house at Kew seemed blushing in its reddest of bricks, out of pure enjoyment. The Regent gave the bride away; and, the ceremony concluded, the wedded couples paid a visit to the old Queen in her private apartment. She was too ill then to do more than congratulate her sons, and wish happiness to the married. The Duke and Duchess of Kent thereupon departed, but the Duke and Duchess of Clarence remained—guests at a joyous tea party at which the Regent presided, and which was prepared al fresco in the vicinity of the Pagoda. It must have been a thousand times a merrier matter than wedding state-dinners of the olden times, at which brides were wearied into suffering and sulkiness. A more joyous party of noble men and women never met in mirthful greenwood; and when the princely pair took their leave for St. James’s, the Regent led the hilarious cheer, and sped them on their way with a ‘hurrah!’ worthy of his bright and younger days.
The Regent, undoubtedly, manifested a clearer sense of the fitness of things on this occasion than either of the managers of the theatres honoured by the presence of the newly-married couple soon after the union.
At Drury Lane was given the ‘Marriage of Figaro,’ and Covent Garden complimented the Duke and Duchess with the ‘Provoked Husband.’
It cannot be said that the public looked with much enthusiasm on any of the royal marriages. Such unions, with rare exceptions, are unpleasantly free from sentiment or romance; and in the present instances there was such a matter-of-fact air of mere ‘business’ about these contracts and ceremonies, such an absence of youth and the impulses and the dignity of youth, that the indifferent public, even remembering the importance of securing a lineal succession to the throne, was slow to offer either congratulation or sympathy. The caricaturists, on the other hand, were busy with a heavy and not very delicate wit; and fashionable papers, uniting implied censure with faint praise, observed that ‘the Duchesses of Kent, Clarence, and Cambridge are very deficient in the English language. They can scarcely speak a sentence. They possess most amiable dispositions.’ They also possessed true womanly qualities, which won for them the esteem of their husbands.
After a brief residence at St. James’s, and as brief a sojourn at the Duke’s residence in Bushey Park, the Duke and Duchess of Clarence repaired to Hanover, and remained there about a year—no incident marking the time is worthy of observation. The issue of this marriage scarcely survived the birth. In March 1819, a daughter was born, but to survive only a few hours. In December 1820, another princess gladdened the hearts of her parents, only to quench the newly-raised joy by her death in March of the following year. The loss was the keener felt because of the hopes that had been raised; and the grief experienced by the Duke and Duchess was tenderly nourished, rather than relieved, by the exquisite art of Chantrey, which, at the command of the parents, reproduced the lost child in marble—sleeping for ever where it lay.
The household at Bushey was admirably regulated by the Duchess, who had been taught the duties as well as the privileges of greatness. The fixed rule was, never to allow expenditure to exceed income. It is a golden rule which, when observed, renders men, in good truth, as rich as Crœsus. It is a rule which, if universally observed, would render the world prosperous and pauperism a legend. It was a rule the more required to be honoured in this case as the Duke had large calls upon his income. When those were provided for, old liabilities effaced, and current expenses defrayed, the surplus was surrendered to charity. There was no saving for the sake of increase of income—economy was practised for justice-sake, and the Duke and Duchess were so just that they found themselves able to be largely generous. With the increased means placed at their disposal by the death of the Duke of York, there was but trifling increase of expenditure. If something was added to their comforts, they benefitted who were employed to procure them; and, if there was some little additional luxury in the rural palace of Bushey, the neighbouring poor were never forgotten in a selfish enjoyment of it.
In 1824, the Duke and Duchess of Clarence had apartments in St. James’s Palace, where, however, they seem to have been as roughly accommodated, considering their condition, as any mediæval Prince and Princess in the days of stone walls thinly tapestried and stone floors scantily strewn with rushes. The Duke cared little about the matter himself, but he gallantly supported the claims of his wife. In a letter addressed to Sir William Knighton, the King’s privy purse, in 1824, he thus expresses himself—from St. James’s Palace:—
‘His Majesty having so graciously pleased to listen to my suggestion respecting the alteration for the Hanoverian office at the palace, I venture once more to trouble you on the point of the building intended for that purpose. To the accommodation of the Duchess this additional slip at the back of the present apartments would be most to be wished and desired, and never can make a complete Hanoverian office without our kitchen, which the King has so kindly allowed us to keep. Under this perfect conviction, I venture to apply for this slip of building which was intended for the Hanoverian office. I am confident his Majesty is fully aware of the inconvenience and unfitness of our present apartments here. They were arranged for me in 1809, when I was a bachelor, and without an idea at that time of my ever being married, since which, now fifteen years, nothing has been done to them, and you well know the dirt and unfitness for the Duchess of our present abode. Under these circumstances, I earnestly request, for the sake of the amiable and excellent Duchess, you will, when the King is quite recovered, represent the wretched state and dirt of our apartments, and the infinite advantage this slip would produce to the convenience and comfort of the Duchess.... God bless the King and yourself, and ever believe me, &c.—William.’
Though often as ungrammatical and inelegant, it was seldom the Duke was so explicit in his correspondence as he is in the above letter. Generally, he wrote in ambiguous phrases, very puzzling to the uninitiated; but when his Duchess Adelaide was in question, and her comfort was concerned, he became quite graphic on the ‘state and dirt’ in which they passed their London days, in the old, dingy, leper-house palace of St. James’s.
With the exception of the period during which the Duke held the office of Lord High Admiral, 1827–28—an office which may be said to have been conferred on him by Canning, and of which he was deprived by the Duke of Wellington—with the exception above noted, this royal couple lived in comparative retirement till the 26th of June, 1830, on which day the demise of George IV. summoned them to ascend the throne. During his fatal illness, Mrs. Fitzherbert addressed a letter of sympathy to her old lover, if not husband. She affectionately tendered any service which might be of use to him in his extreme necessity. To this letter no reply ever reached her; but some vestige of human affection was nevertheless evinced by the King on his death-bed. ‘He more than once expressed his anxiety,’ the ‘Memoirs’ tell us, ‘that a particular picture should be hung round his neck, and deposited with him in the grave.’ It seemed to be the opinion of the Duke of Wellington that this portrait was one which had been taken of Mrs. Fitzherbert in early life, and was set round with brilliants. It appeared the more likely, as this portrait was afterwards missing when the others were returned to her. Mrs. Fitzherbert was possessed of an annuity of 6,000l., settled on her by George the Fourth, which she enjoyed to the year of her death, 1833.