Secret of the prince's other wife

NO LESS than 12 years ago Patrick O'Donovan wrote in this column that he had been reading a remarkable booklet by Lavinia Watson about St David's, which is a home for disable exSeTVjCeMen in Ealing.
The Booklet in question has just been updated and reissued and at a very opportune moment. St David's will be visited next month by Cardinal Hume just 80 years after its original foundation in 1918.
This foundation, in turn, occurred almost exactly 100 years after the first attempted sale of the building that was eventually to become St David's Home. The attempted sale was made by the father of Queen Victoria in the year of her birth, 1919. The would-be vendor was the Duke of Kent who no longer had much use for his country house called Castle Hill Lodge near the village of Ealing in Middlesex. Formerly the house had been leased to the Duke of Kent's brother, the sometime Prince Regent.
There is thus a fascinating link with those distant days through the late Cuthbert Fitzherbert who received the Queen Mother on behalf of the Home when she visited it exactly 25 years ago. For, in 1795, the future King George IV married Princess Caroline of Brunswick in order, as it was hoped, to produce an heir to the throne. (He was then Prince of Wales and would later be Prince Regent).
Unknown, however, to most people, the Prince of Wales already had a wife. She was Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic lady whom he had married in 1785. The Prince of Wales leased Castle Hill Lodge from the year in which he married Princess Caroline and registered it in the name of Maria Fitzherbert.
Mrs Fitzherbert's life was unhappy but highly dramatic. She had had two previous husbands, Edward Weld and Thomas Fitzherbert, when, as a double widow, she met the Prince of Wales in 1984. She refused to have any intimate association with him unless he married her which he duly did, with an Anglican priest as chief witness, in the December of the following year.
It was the nearest thing to a morganatic marriage in English history, for Maria Fitzherbert was validly married to the future King even though the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 forbade the marriage of a member of the royal family to a Catholic.
After his subsequent marriage to his cousin the German Princess, George put the unfortunate Mrs Fitzherbert aside with a pension. She returned to him in 1800 with the approval of Church authorities in Rome but finally ended the relationship when slighted in public by her boorish husband. He nevertheless died with a locket round his neck bearing her likeness.
The house once associated with her name is now a marvellously run home, Cuthbert Fitzherbert having chaired its organising committee from 1949 to 1965. The Sisters of Charity to whose famous order, alas, there are now less vocations, have provided the backbone to the running of the in the past.
What of the future? Optimism prevails as this extremely interesting booklet shows. (Further enquiries would, I am sure, be welcome by its author, Mrs J N P Watson of Pannett's Shipley, Horsham, Sussex).