A few months later they were married.
“She, full of confiding love, refused every settlement beyond two hundred a year pin-money, out of his own property, on which he insisted”—words written by Mary Russell Mitford, many years after, and which would contradict our statement of her father’s pecuniary embarrassment, were they not discounted by the words of the Rev. William Harness, who, writing on the matter to a friend, says: “I hear that when Mitford was engaged to his wife she had a set of shirts made for him, lest it should be said that ‘she had married a man without a shirt to his back!’ Of course the story is not true; but it expressed what folk thought of his deplorable poverty and the impossibility of his making that settlement on her, for which my father was trustee, out of funds of his own, as Miss Mitford suggests.”
And so they were married, the bride being given away by her trustee, Dr. John Harness, then living at Wickham, some few miles south of Alresford.
Had the confiding wife misgivings, we wonder? Or was it the excitement natural to such a momentous event in her life that caused the little hand to be so tremulous as it signed the nervous characters, Mary Russell, beneath the bold hand of her lord and master, on that eventful October 17, 1785?
Henceforth, had she but known, she would have need of all the comfort she might wring from those fatalistic words, “Che Sarà, Sarà,” the motto of the Bedfords, whose ancestry she took such pride in claiming.
It had already been decided that Alresford should witness the commencement at least of the surgeon’s professional career, and seeing that the house in Broad Street was commodious and, what was more to the point, well-furnished, there was no need to make a fresh home, and it was there they set up housekeeping together.
That the young man had good intentions is fairly evident, for he continued his studies and, in the course of a year or so, took his degree in medicine which permitted him to practise as a physician.
Thirteen months later a son was born to them, but did not survive. In the Baptismal Register of New Alresford Church is the entry:—
“Francis Russell, son of George and Mary Midford, was privately baptized on the 12th, but died on the 23rd of November, 1786.”
It is important that this entry should be placed on record, for while, in after years, Miss Mitford speaks of herself as the only survivor of three children, two sons having died in infancy, it has been stated in print that “Mary Russell Mitford was their only child.” On the other hand, although careful search has been made, no record of the baptism or burial of a third child has been discovered in the Alresford registers, and we can only assume, therefore, that this child must have died at birth and on a date subsequent to that of his sister.