What a way to treat a lady

THE CAPTION (July 9) under pictures of King William IV and Mrs Fitzherbert illustrating a recent Charterhouse was not only wildly at odds with what I had said in the column, but also monstrously, if unintentionally, might seem to have maligned a great Catholic lady.
Efforts to make a last-minute correction were frustrated by some of the difficulties that arise when a newspaper changes its printer. However, this enables me to repeat that Maria Fitzherbert was the true and Catholic wife of King George IV, and to assume that her romantic story is not as well known as I had supposed it to be.
She met George when he was Prince of Wales and she was a young woman twice widowed. She was a daughter of an old English Catholic family, the Smythes, of Hampshire.
Both her husbands, Edward Weld, of Lulworth Castle, Dorset, and Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton, Staffordshire, also belonged to the small secluded world of Catholic gentry which for well over a century had lived in retirement on their country estates, suffering the restrictions imposed on all Catholics.
ya t e accounts she was very pretty, and much more so than her portraits suggest.. One of her biographers, Anita Leslie, writes of "extraordinary freshness . . . sweetness . . . hazel eyes and golden hair and an English country complexion."
The Prince of Wales pursued her with frenzied histrionics which included threats of suicide.
She went abroad to escape him but in the end they were married by a Church of England clergyman in the presence of her brother and her uncle.
Though the marriage was illegal under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, it was unquestionably sacramentally valid, and this view was supported by the Pope, to whom Mrs Fitzherbert applied for advice when George wanted to return to her after he had "married" Caroline of Brunswick so as to obtain funds from Parliament to pay his debts.
Anita Leslie says: "There may have been children of his marriage to Mrs Fitzherbert." Mysteriously she adds: "There are few clues — just a miniature and a few whispers echoing on in two English families, while the Jesuits of Georgetown in America keep a picture and a legend."
Mrs Fitzherbert is still revered in Brighton where she lived until her death in 1837 at the age of 81. She is especially associated with the Catholic church of St John the Baptist there, where she used to go to Mass, and where she is buried.
Her monument there shows her wearing theee wedding rings. A Catholic school is named after her.
To those who might want to know more of her fascinating story I recommend the biography by Anita Leslie and a longer, but earlier, one by her father Shane Leslie.