Edwards asked a hundred pardons of my poor brother, who, worn out, and in extreme pain, declared he would as soon die as live. In fine, it was nearly a month more ere the cornet could travel to Dublin, and another before he was well enough to throw himself at the feet of his dulcinea: which ceremony was in due season succeeded by the wedding[[49]] I have already given my account of, and which left me much more unaccountably smitten than my more fiery brother.
[49]. Irish marriages ran, some few years ago, an awkward risk of being nullified en masse, by the decision of two English judges. In 1826, I met, at Boulogne-sur-Mer, a young Hibernian nobleman, the eldest son of an Irish peer, who had arrived there in great haste from Paris, and expressed considerable though somewhat ludicrous trepidation on account of a rumour that had reached him of his being illegitimatised. In fact, the same dread seized upon almost all the Irish of any family there.
“I have no time to lose,” said Lord ——, “for the packet is just setting off, and I must go and inquire into these matters. By Heaven,” added he, “I won’t leave one of the judges alive, if they take my property and title! I am fit for nothing else, you know I am not; and I may as well be hanged as beggared!”
Scarce had his lordship, from whom I could obtain no explanation, departed, when another scion of Irish nobility, the Honourable John Leeson, son to the late Earl of Miltown, joined me on the pier. “Barrington, have you seen to-day’s papers?” asked he.
“No,” I answered.
“Where was your father married?”
“In my grandfather’s house,” replied I, with some surprise.
“Then, by Jove,” exclaimed Leeson, “you are an illegitimate, and so am I!—My father was married at home, at eight o’clock in the evening, and that’s fatal. A general outcry has taken place among all the Irish at the reading-room.”
He then proceeded to inform me of the real cause of the consternation—and it was no trivial one. Two very able and honest English judges (Bayley and Park), on trying a woman for bigamy, had decided that, according to the English law, a marriage in a private house, without special licence or in canonical hours, was void; and, of course, the woman was acquitted, having been united to her first husband in Ireland without those requisites. Had that decision stood, it would certainly have rendered ninety-nine out of a hundred of the Irish Protestants, men, women, and children—nobility, clergy, and gentry—absolutely illegitimate; it was a very droll mistake of the learned judges, but was on the merciful side of the question before them; was soon amended, and no mischief whatsoever resulted from it:—though it was said that a great number of husbands and wives were extremely disappointed at the judges altering their decision. I seldom saw any couple married in church in Ireland; and in former times the ceremony was generally performed between dinner and supper, when people are supposed to be vastly more in love with each other than in the middle of the day.