The loyalty of a secret wife

William Oddie on the lessons for Catholics in a fine biography of Maria Fitzherbert Maria Fitzherbert: The Secret Wife of George IV by James Munson, Constable £20 4 T he early twentieth century Englishman", wrote Adrian Hastings in his History of English Christianity (1986), "[was] still very conscious that at the Reformation his country had chosen the Protestant side. It was not a particulaily theological consciousness, rather one of emotion and a sense of political and ethical righteousness, of being loyal to the national history."
Part of that consciousness was a sense that to be a Catholic was to be disloyal to the national history; this was a feeling so deep-rooted that still, at the end of the last century, it was universally remarked on the death of Basil, Cardinal Hume, that one of his greatest achievements was that he had for the first time made people feel that there was nothing intrinsically unEnglish about being a Catholic.
Our acclimatisation has come comparatively recently; and even now, converts to Catholicism are well aware that they are becoming to some extent outsiders within their own national culture. It is an inconsistent and ambiguous phenomenon: there has been, for two centuries at least, a tension between — on the one hand— a very English desire to be decent and tolerant towards Catholics (who mostly cannot help it) — and on the other a deeply ingrown instinct towards antipopery which can surface at any time (Ferdinand Mount's reaction to the understandably jubilant reaction of some Catholics to the conversion of the Duchess of Kent was to ask, in The Spectator, whether it was "possible that, after all, we shall come to think that Catholic emancipation has turned out to be a mistake").
Maria Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales's "secret wife" remains, par exemple, the historical locus classicus for the ambiguous position of Catholics in English society; and her story is in several ways directly relevant to the situation of Catholics today. To be a Catholic is to be a member of a historically as well as a theologically defined community: that is why this sparkling and scholarly biography of Maria Fitzherbert is indispensable for arty English Catholic who wants to understand his own roots.
Mrs Fitzherbert was twice widowed, having been born into one of the great recusant families and having married the scions of two more. Her story is that of a world in which it was possible for the heir to the throne actually to marry a Catholic, for the marriage to be generally known (or at least, assumed), for the woman in ques tion to enjoy much of the social consequence proper to the Prince of Wales's wife, and yet — as a consequence of the Act of Succession and the Royal Marriage Act (still bones of contention) — for the marriage itself to be illegal, even treasonous.
Only a few years earlier, the King had supported the passage of the Catholic Relief Act (1778), which passed easily through Parliament, and which made it no longer a crime punishable by imprisonment to be a Catholic bishop, priest, schoolmaster, or member of the Society of Jesus. It was a rational and humane measure which appears to have caused no particular controversy among the governing classes; and yet there was a backlash, not just among the likes of the crazy Lord George Gordon (whose eponymous riots reduced London to a state of anarchy for six days) but in less fevered Protestant circles, too; John Wesley actually demanded that the Act should be repealed.
In the end, it was inevitable that the future George IV should repudiate his marriage to Maria, not only because of his personal situation but also as a foreseeable consequence of his dissolute and faithless character. "Previous writers", says Dr Munson, have depicted Maria Fitzherbert "as a romantic heroine who was ill-used and whose pure love was won and then spurned by an unworthy prince". But this is not one of those tiresome modem biographies which seek to debunk all previous attempts and their subject into the bargain — an operation sometimes encompassed by means which include gruesome subFreudian speculations about the sexual pathology of the individual in question.
That the sex life of the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert was of prime importance to them is clear enough from these pages; but we are not, thank the Lord, made privy to any speculations upon the matter that Dr Munson might have entertained; indeed, it seems fairly clear from the outset that we are safe in the hands of a writer for whom such musings would be not merely indecent but, very much worse, both unscholarly and ungentlemanly.
Though he is necessarily critical of previous biographers (this is the first genuinely scholarly work on the subject, making an almost certainly definitive use of previously unconsulted sources, including hitherto suppressed correspondence) Dr Munson does not present us with a Maria Fitzherbert whom Catholics will need to subject to any tiresome reassessments.
In one sense, despite the thoroughness of Dr Munson's scrutiny, she emerges with her status as an Mused romantic heroine absolutely intact. But Dr Munson's heroine is no soupy Victorian caricature, but a real and always interesting woman who leaps from the page as vividly as from a well written historical novel (she would have done very nicely as a Patrick O'Brian character, perhaps as a friend of her fellow Catholic, Stephen Maturin). From the first page, here is a real woman
— "in the event", says Dr Munson, ... Maria was never a defenceless romantic heroine. She had survived the untimely deaths of two husbands before she met the prince and had learnt to be self-reliant. She was practical, strong-willed, highly emotional, and liked male company, although she remained a virtuous woman. She had a tremendous sense of the ridiculous and her humour was sometimes very earthy. She could be pompous but she could also be kind and considerate. She liked society and could more than hold her own in a world dominated by men.
This is an important book, as interesting for its historical analysis as for its insight into the characters of the dramatis personae of this strange but illuminating story; it is also a fascinating and entertaining read. Academic historians can be very hard going — or (a smaller number) they can be models of lucidity; Dr Munson falls into the second category.