by Horace Walpole that "his implacability
against those who opposed the Marriage Act
proves it is his own act." Forced upon an
obsequious minister, the measure was subsequently
wrung out of a servile parliament.

The arbitrary instincts of the king had been
excited and roused into action by the singular
domestic relations of his royal brothers.
Among other peculiarities, it is perhaps
remarkable that widows have been in general
preferred by princes of the house of Brunswick.
Edward Augustus Duke of York, the eldest
brother, died in 1767 at Monaco, then in Italy
but now in France. It was believed by many
that he had formed an attachment for, and was
bound either by a secret marriage or a solemn
pledge to, the Lady Mary Coke, one of the
Campbell sisters, a daughter and co-heiress of John,
the celebrated Duke of Argyll. The fair widow
of Edward Viscount Coke, eldest son of the then
Earl of Leicester, considered herself married to
the eldest of the royal dukes, subscribed her
name in the regal style, and on his death wore
widow's weeds.

The marriage of the king's second brother,
William Henry Duke of Gloucester, with Maria
Countess Dowager of Waldegrave, had been
secretly solemnised in 1766, and although
suspected or perhaps known, had not been publicly
avowed. In the position of the royal duke and
his duchess there were some remarkable features.
The title of Waldegrave was a creation of James
the Second in the person of Sir Henry
Waldegrave, Baronet, who, in 1686, became Baron
Waldegrave. He had married Henrietta
Fitz-James, a daughter of the king by Arabella
Churchill, sister of the great Duke of Marlborough,
and Henrietta was sister to the celebrated
James Fitz-James Duke of Berwick. The young
Lord Waldegrave, having embraced the religion
of the exiled king, followed his fortunes to
France, wheie he died in 1689, leaving his widow
with an only son, James, who succeeded to
his father's title. He attached himself to the
rising fortunes of the house of Churchill, and
abandoned the faith of the fallen Stuarts.
Reproached in after-life for this abandonment by
his uncle the Duke of Berwick—"Was it not
from worldly motives that you conformed? Come,
confess it?" The young lord replied, "It was to
avoid confession, your grace, that I became a
Protestant!" He was created Earl of Waldegrave
in 1729, and it was his son James, the
second earl, great-grandson of James the Second,
who became by the changes and revenges brought
about by time, the governor of George the Third
during his minority as Prince of Wales, and,
before that sovereign's accession to the throne,
prime minister of England. When rather
advanced in life, he married, in 1759, Maria
Walpole, the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward
Walpole, Baronet, second son of the great
minister Sir Robert. Maria Walpole was many
years younger than her husband, and Horace
Walpole, who invariably expresses for his niece the
affection of a father, thus describes her: "Maria
is beauty itself; her face, bloom, eyes, hair, teeth,
are all perfect. You may imagine how charming
she is, when her only fault, if one must find one,
is, that her face is rather too round, and she has
a great deal of wit and vivacity, with perfect
modesty." The earl died in 1763, leaving three
daughters by his widow; and although she
dedicated to his memory a laudatory epitaph, in
which she subscribed herself as "the once happy
wife, and now the remembrancer of his virtues,"
the title of Duchess of Gloucester very naturally
weaned her from her sorrows.

The third brother of the king, Henry Frederick
Duke of Cumberland, was only remarkable
for the profligacy of his career, and the libertinism
of his amours, without any of those qualities
which in some eyes render libertinism attractive.
In 1820 the British public were startled by an
announcement headed, "Discovery of a Royal
Princess." A person of the name of Olive or
Olivia Wilmot Serres pretended to be the
offspring of a private marriage alleged to have
taken place in 1767 between the Duke of
Cumberland and Olivia Wilmot, who was said to
have been the daughter of a clergyman of that
name. As the date fixed for this union, if there
were any foundation for the story, was prior to
the Royal Marriage Act, the issue, if any, would
have been legitimate. This impudent attempt
to imitate the Perkin Warbeck imposition, was
sought to be sustained by documents apparently
bearing the signatures of eminent public
characters, then dead. The entire deception and the
fabrication of the papers were triumphantly
exposed on the 18th of June, 1823, by the late
Sir Robert Peel, in parliament. The pretender
turned out to be the daughter of a house-painter
in Warwick, and to have been baptised in the
parish church of that borough on the 15th of
April, 1772, as the daughter of Robert and
Mary Ann Wilmot. This woman also put
forward pretensions to be a Polish princess,
alleging that her mother had been the legitimate
daughter of Stanislaus, who had been placed by
Charles the Twelfth on the throne of Poland,
and consequently sister of Marie Leskinski,
the queen of Louis the Fifteenth of France.
There was of course as little reality in
this claim as in the other. The Duke of
Cumberland's chief reputation was earned as
defendant in 1770 in an action for the seduction
of the young wife of Richard Lord Grosvenor,
in which the damages were assessed at ten
thousand pounds. The infidelities of the lord were
held to palliate the offence of the lady, and we
are assured by Horace Walpole, that so far from
the result being deemed a dishonour by either,
it seemed uncertain which was the more proud
of the distinction—the husband or the wife.
The heartless abandonment of this victim for the
wife of a rich city merchant, speedily followed.
She also was in turn deserted, and the
indignation of the king was aroused by public
announcement of this brother's marriage on the
2nd of October, 1771: a step which was said to
be the only virtuous act of his life. It was first
announced in the Public Advertiser by a note
from Junius, under the heading—"Intelligence