A bit of history relative to the Sussex title
Part I: The Royal Marriage Act of 1772 and its genesis
Back at the beginning of September, a commentator whom I respect mentioned in passing that the Duke of Sussex title in the British peerage has a history of being created for royals who have entered into invalid marriages. That was all the prompting I needed to bolt down that rabbit hole. That in turn, fed into one of my pet peeves which is the a-historicity of shows like Bridgerton. So without further ado, the first Duke of Sussex and how his history undermines sloppy Georgian Regency stories.
To begin, a little bit of context: for irrelevant reasons, unlike their continental European counterparts, the British royal family didn’t have a law that mandated members obtain permission from the monarch until 1772. Although the Hanoverians generally followed European custom and worked off an assumption that permission was required, two of King George III’s younger brothers figured out that they didn’t need his permission and entered into unions that he and the rest of the family found unsuitable. George III proposed the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 as a direct response to his third younger brother, Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn (1745 - 1790), marrying Anne Horton, daughter of the 1st Earl of Carhampton and widow of country gentleman Christopher Horton.
George III disapproved of Anne Horton, not only because she was a commoner, but because her parents had poor reputations. Although her father, Simon Luttrell of an old Anglo-Irish family, eventually received the title Earl of Carhampton for his political service, he was disregarded socially as a second son who had made the fortune that funded his political ascent by marrying a slave owner’s daughter — slave owners had become a despised class of new money, by the 1770s, which is one of the underlying themes of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Horton’s father had the soubriquet ‘King Hell’ due to his visiting of brothels in Dublin, and there was even a popular ballad, The Dioboliad, describing a man who fits Carhampton’s description as ‘the worst man in England’ and imputing all sorts of scurrilous activities, such as human sacrifice and satanic masses, to him.1
Anne herself had none too good a reputation, with her contemporary Horace Walpole dismissing her as a mindless flirt who took after her family, ‘noted and long odious in Ireland for treachery, villany (sic), and arrogance.’2 Walpole even went so far as to imply that Henry Cumberland and Strathearn didn’t realise the wedding ceremony was valid, thinking the marriage was a farce he could end when he became bored.3 George III attempted to invalidate the union, but he discovered that due to a plea made by their great-uncle, the previous Duke of Cumberland, British princes were exempted from the Clandestine Marriage Act, so the family had to let the Cumberland and Strathearn marriage stand. But Parliament was sympathetic to (and scandalised enough by) the situation to push through a law to bring British royal marriages into alignment with the rules of continental Europe and the rest of British aristocratic society.
Only after the Royal Marriages Act passed did George III find out that his second younger brother, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, had clandestinely married Maria Walpole of the Walpole family around 1765.4 The marriage was witnessed by Horace Walpole, who was (later) extremely about clandestinity and imprudence of the Cumberland and Strathearn marriage. Evidently, Walpole’s willingness to adhere to rules varied based on whether or not he was related to one of the principals.
In both cases, the royal dukes and their wives experienced lifelong consequences from violating royal norms, even if they hadn’t broken the law. Although Gloucester and Edinburgh was a skilled soldier who had distinguished himself repeatedly, after his marriage became public, George III and Parliament refused to allow him a field command worthy of his abilities, at least with the British army. Cumberland and Strathearn and his wife ran into embarrassment early on — predicted by Horace Walpole since he claimed that they had a public fight on the boat to Calais leaving for their honeymoon — due to their separate gambling addictions. George III and the rest of the family refused to bail them out. Cumberland and Strathearn died childless and still in disgrace in 1790.
Although George III never allowed Maria Walpole to attend court, his attitude toward the Gloucester and Edinburgh children was positive. So much so that he and Queen Charlotte planned to marry the two who lived, Sophie and William, back into the main line of the family. George III and Charlotte intended Sophie (1773 - 1844) for their own son William, Duke of Clarance and St Andrews, and William, 2nd Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, for their granddaughter, Charlotte of Wales, daughter of their eldest son, the future George IV. In both cases, the princesses refused. Sophie couldn’t stand her cousin William (though by refusing she missed the chance to be queen since he became William IV), and her uncle didn’t insist — contrary to how these situations are shown in silly television dramas. She lived unmarried her entire life, pursuing her own interests in addition to royal duties.
Her brother William, 2nd Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, was a career soldier, good enough at his job that he earned promotions on his own merits, and one of the first royals to adopt abolitionism.5 William Gloucester and Edinburgh spent his youth encouraged to postpone marriage in order to be available as a groom for Charlotte of Wales (despite being twenty years older), and the two were spending time in a courtship-like situation before George III was declared incompetent. However, when George IV assumed power as regent during his father’s incapacity, he opposed the match, leading to an unseemly shouting match between father and daughter that was heard by servants, courtiers, and extended family.6
The source of the quarrel was that George IV, though he wasn’t king yet, had grandiose visions of acquiring the Netherlands for Britain through a marriage between Charlotte and the Hereditary Prince of Orange, the future William II of the Netherlands. Charlotte had been raised by her grandparents due to the absolutely spectacular collapse of her parents’ marriage. George III and Queen Charlotte drummed into her that while a future queen regnant must marry a prince, he should be one who could reside in her country, rather than becoming sovereign of his own. (Incidentally, this became a principle that was in play as recently as Elizabeth II’s marriage to Prince Philip.) Hence, George III and Queen Charlotte’s encouragement of a friendship between their nephew William Gloucester and Edinburgh, who checked both boxes, and their granddaughter, who was expected to succeed her own father to the throne. Although Charlotte only saw William Gloucester and Edinburgh as a friend, she understood that he was more acceptable to the British people than a foreign prince. George IV saw the Duke merely as an obstacle to his own geopolitical ambitions.
Charlotte had a better sense of national politics than her father and therefore found the Dutch William repugnant as a match — though it must be noted that they very much liked each other personally.7 Despite George IV’s thundering and pressure, including beginning marriage negotiations without her involvement, Charlotte refused to buckle, and in doing so received complete support from her grandmother and the rest of the family. Her choice was Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, a man who as the eighth child, youngest son of a not-very-wealthy sovereign duke had had to leave his father’s realm and make his own way as a cavalry officer in the Imperial Russian army. Since Prince Leopold’s expectations of inheritance were so slim, he could reasonably be expected to renounce his claim to the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg, resign his Russian army commission, and naturalise as a British subject in exchange for marrying the heir to the throne. After the Dutch diplomats included terms preventing a union of the British and Dutch thrones, George IV gave up his expansionist dreams and granted Charlotte permission to marry Leopold in 1816.
In the meantime, William Gloucester and Edinburgh dutifully remained available until ten weeks after Charlotte married Leopold. William then married his cousin, George III and Queen Charlotte’s daughter, Princess Mary. Despite his opposition to a match between his daughter and William, George IV supported one between his sister and William. On the wedding day, he used his powers as regent to grant William an HRH, thereby elevating him to the same status as a child or grandchild of a sovereign.8 The marriage was childless, as was to be expected considering that Princess Mary was in her forties. The pair had a happy marriage, though, and lived quietly well into their niece Queen Victoria’s reign, without becoming subjects of gossip or innuendo.
George III’s two younger brothers were the background to the events of the creation of the first Duke of Sussex title. The rather pathetic end of the Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn should have been a strong disincentive to his nephew to follow suit, but, of course, it wasn’t. However, knowing the situation of the Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh and his children is important for understanding why, after having contracted an invalid marriage which produced children, the first Duke of Sussex acted as he did.
Part II coming soon.
MLD
Curtis, Maurice. To Hell or Monto: The Story of Dublin’s Most Notorious Districts. The History Press, 2015.
Walpole, Horace. Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third. With University of California Libraries. London : R. Bentley, 1845. http://archive.org/details/memoirsreignkingg04walp.
There was a scandal in the 1600s with the 20th Earl of Oxford, Aubrey de Vere, faking a wedding ceremony in order to have his way with a young woman. When he became tired of the relationship, he revealed the marriage was invalid, rendering the son he’d had with her illegitimate. Oxford then married a woman of his own background and had children with her, but when the legitimate son predeceased his father, the title went dormant, i.e. there was (and still is) an heir who has yet to come forward. Litigation relating to the Oxford title continued well into the eighteenth century as the children and grandchildren of the illegitimate son argued that they should be allowed to inherit. Horace Walpole’s audience would have been familiar with the de Vere suit and would have understood perfectly what Walpole was hinting at regarding the Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn’s marriage to Anne Horton.
Maria’s father, Sir Edward Walpole, never married her mother, although there were no obstacles to the union. Generally, illegitimacy in the eighteenth century wasn’t the obstacle that it was in the nineteenth century. Maria and her siblings were openly raised by their father’s family and treated as legitimate by their grandfather, Robert Walpole, who secured good marriages for the girls, though possibly not for the boy since Edward Walpole junior — barred from the inheritance due to his illegitimacy — died unmarried at age 34.
His soubriquet, though, was ‘silly Billy’, which could have just been a spiteful tabloid name, or indicative of his mental capacity since his contemporaries record that he had a sense of grandiosity that was out of place for someone whose right to his titles was under some question.
Plowden, Alison. Caroline & Charlotte : The Regent’s Wife and Daughter, 1795-1821. With Internet Archive. London : Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989. http://archive.org/details/carolinecharlott0000plow.
William, Hereditary Prince of Orange, went into mourning for Charlotte when she died in 1817, despite having since married a princess acceptable to the Dutch people.
William, 2nd Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh’s style at birth was H(is) H(ighness), which was the correct style for a male-line great-grandchild of a sovereign at the time; later in the nineteenth century that style would come to be associated with progeny of morganatic marriages and George V abolished that form in English usage entirely in 1917, leading to the all-or-nothing approach that English-speakers know today.