Gloucester. The marriage was solemnised on
the 22nd of July, 1816, at Buckingham House,
then the palace of Queen Charlotte. By a
singular coincidence the two dukedoms, which
furnished the pretext for the Royal Marriage
Act, have both become extinct, and no
descendants of George the Second can be traced
through either of their matrimonal alliances.

Chatham was in retirement when the measure
passed. In a letter to Lord Shelburne, he thus
denounced it: "The doctrine of the Royal
Marriage Bill is certainly new-fangled and
impudent; the extent of the powers it gives the
crown is wanton and tyrannical." Chatham,
had he been minister then, might have shown
the king that foreign princes do not always make
the best of husbands, and recalling memorable
examples in his majesty's own immediate family,
might have pointed to that remarkable episode
in Hanoverian history, the tragic fate of Dorothea
Sophia of Zell, through whom lie derived much
of his German patrimony and his birth.

There was a still nearer and dearer connexion
of the king, whose fate ought to have induced
him to pause. Caroline Matilda, the favourite
sister of George the Third, in one of those unions
of consanguinity, which the strongest predilections
of cousinship could not draw closer, had
married with royal approval the Crown Prince,
afterwards Christian the Seventh, son of Frederick
the Fifth of Denmark and Louisa, daughter
of George the Second. "She had been linked,"
in the language of Earl Stanhope, "with an
abject wretch, destitute alike of sense and virtue;"
but that wretch was first cousin of his bride.
The fatal night of the 16th of January, 1772,
little more than a month before the royal
message to parliament, witnessed an English
princess, the sister and wife of a king, the mother
of a future king, subjected to indignities
resembling those which eighty years before had
been endured by her great grandmother, the
injured Sophia of Zell. Queen Matilda,
suddenly aroused from sleep in her own palace,
was informed of her arrest. Neither her station
nor her sex received respect. Attempting, in
the frenzy of despair, to reach the chamber of
her husband, she was rudely repelled by the
bayonets of a brutal soldiery; and only half
attired, with an infant in her arms, was hurried
away to the castle of Croningsberg. There, in
a land of strangers, and surrounded by spies, she
endured a close captivity of four months,
terminated by the manly intrepidity of Colonel Murray
Keith, the British envoy at Copenhagen, and by
the menacing attitude of England. This victim
of a royal marriage with a foreign prince at last
found refuge in a British ship of war. Fact
might have been set against fact, and argument
thus held that marriages of consanguinity
with foreign princes were not necessary to secure
the happiness of the princesses of England.

As the malady which in after times clouded
the mind of the king cleared away, he saw some
melancholy consequences of the measure he had
forced upon this country. Scandals sullied the
fair fame of one at least of his daughters.
George Prince of Wales had been early
fascinated by the charms of Mary Anne Smythe,
better known as Mrs. FitzHerbert. His love
was known to the ballad-monger:

               I'd crowns resign,
               To call thee mine,
               Sweet lass of Richmond Hill!

In kneeling at her feet he affected to emulate
the most illustrious of his predecessors, Edward
the Black Prince, who had given his hand in
lawful wedlock to the celebrated Joan, the once
fair maid of Kent, when, like Mrs. FitzHerbert,
she too was in her second widowhood.

The Royal Marriage Act enabled the son of
the king who imposed it on us, having married
this lady, to violate his plighted faith, and
gratify the German predilections of his father
By his ill-assorted union with a foreign princess,
Caroline Sophia of Brunswick, the wife, not of
his choice, but of his aversion. In that union
the ties of German consanguinity were again
drawn as close as nature would endure. The
eldest son of George the Third was married to
the daughter of the eldest sister of the king.

Honest and binding marriage to the woman
of his choice might have made almost a man
even of George the Fourth. The Marriage Act
helped largely to make him what he was. It
would have saved the deliberations of the most
august judicial assembly in the empire from
odious disclosures; it would have saved the
confidential advisers of the crown from the ignominy
of discomfiture; and the nation from the sin and
shame and sorrow of an example, which
terminated in the degradation, and ultimately in the
death, of the erring but persecuted Caroline of
Brunswick.

Then we have had—all the immorality being
in the operation of the Royal Marriage Act—
the Sussex Peerage case. Augustus Frederick
Duke of Sussex, the sixth son of George the
Third, on the 21st of March, 1793, at Rome,
entered into the most solemn matrimonial
contract with the Lady Augusta Murray, second
daughter of the Earl and Countess of Dunmore.
That contract was still further consecrated by a
marriage solemnised on the 3rd of April, in the
Papal city, by a clergyman of the Church of
England, and the ceremony was again repeated
on the 5th of December following, in St.
George's church, Hanover-square. On the
event becoming known to the king, a suit was
instituted by him in the royal name to annul
the marriage. The prohibitory provision in the
Act was alone relied on to defeat its validity,
and in August, 1794, the king obtained a
decree declaratory of its nullity. On the death of
the royal duke his eldest son, Augustus Frederick
d'Este, as heir, in 1843 claimed, in right of
his mother's marriage, the honours and dignities
of his father, the dukedom of Sussex, the earldom
of Inverness, and the baronage of Arklow.
The petition having been referred to the House
of Lords, Cardinal Wiseman, then a Roman
Catholic bishop, appeared at the bar of that
assembly, as a witness to sustain the marriage
as valid according to Roman law. The late