The Duke of Sussex of the First Creation
Or why the dukedom is associated with invalid marriages
This issue is a sequel to the one titled ‘A bit of history relative to the Sussex title.’
The first (and only) Duke of Sussex of the first creation was born Prince Augustus Frederick of the United Kingdom and Hanover in 1773. He was the sixth son and ninth child of George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. As covered in the previous Oxford Dawn, George III and Charlotte were martinets in the subject of marriage expectations, and George III had sought to disinherit two of his brothers over their marriage choices. That said, there were gradations of unacceptability, and while the king and queen wouldn’t receive their sister-in-law Maria Walpole, they were perfectly happy to accept her children into the family circle, to the extent of keeping her son William, 2nd Duke of Gloucester, in reserve as a groom for their granddaughter Charlotte of Wales.
In the the above family tree, one can see how far down the pecking order Augustus Frederick was. One can also see that three of his five older brothers all inherited a throne, which became a bit of a sore point later in his life. His three older sisters married monarchs, which, though not normally an issue, rather escalated the dynamic of political jockeying amongst the siblings.
There are two significant details marked on the above family tree with asterisks: first, the fifth son Ernest’s name has an asterisk, and second William IV has two lines of descent coming from him, with one marked in orange and with an asterisk. In the first case, the laws of Hanover didn’t allow female inheritance, so when William IV died, Britain went to the daughter of fourth son Edward, and Hanover went to fifth son Ernest, which sparked decades of political maneuvering within the family.
For the second asterisk and bright orange label, prior to becoming heir to the throne, back when he was simply the Duke of Clarence, William IV had a twenty-year relationship with an actress, Dorothea Jordan, who already had at least one child. The relationship with William IV produced ten children, five boys and five girls. The children were not legitimate, and their father never attempted to marry their mother. They received no recognition from their father’s family per se, but since their father acknowledged paternity, they used the name FitzClarence, i.e. illegitimate son of (the Duke of) Clarence.1 Although the FitzClarences weren’t in the line of succession, they had a negative effect on the marriage prospects of their father’s younger brothers, including Augustus, because they proved that William was capable of fathering a legitimate heir.
In other words, by virtue of being the sixth son and ninth child, Augustus wasn’t an ideal match. Throw in that the British throne didn’t (and doesn’t) have a system of appanage, meaning that Augustus didn’t have any independent wealth compared to princes from even very small continental European states, and he was a very unprepossessing match indeed.
Yet, Augustus was the lowest key and least scandalous of George III and Charlotte’s sons. Some of his restraint may have had something to do with poor health. He was raised in close conjunction with his brothers Ernest and Adolphus, but because of ‘asthma’, which might not be the same condition as what we mean today, he wasn’t destined for the military. Instead, he was sent to the University of Göttingen at age thirteen2 and more or less left to his own devices, which for him meant intellectual and artistic pursuits.
After leaving Göttingen, Augustus, without a career and without any assigned responsibilities, began travelling around Europe. In Rome in 1793, he met Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the 4th Earl of Dunmore and granddaughter of the 6th Earl of Galloway, who was on her own tour of the continent. She was twelve years older than he, but they fell genuinely in love and married in an Anglican ceremony there in Rome. As Augustus hadn’t obtained Royal Assent to the marriage, it was invalid. As soon as he found out about the ceremony, George III sent a minister to bring Augustus back to England.
Despite the forced separation, Augustus didn’t give up Augusta Murray, and, after she returned to London, too, they had a second ceremony at St George’s, Hanover Square, in December 1793. Once again, the marriage was invalid. This time not only had Augustus still not obtained permission, but the couple lied about their identities to the priest. At this point, nothing could make the marriage valid, and the Church of England’s ecclesiastical court, the Court of Arches, confirmed the marriage’s invalidity a year later in 1794.
Augustus refused to leave Lady Augusta, and they had two children, Augustus and Augusta Emma, who the family called ‘Emma’.3 However, just like his older brother William, Augustus was on his own for supporting his spouse and children since they were not members of the legitimate family. Unlike William who at least had his naval officer’s pay (this being before royals served their countries without pay) and a royal ducal grant from Parliament, Augustus had no career and no ducal grant. George III and Charlotte tethered giving their sons royal dukedoms to military service, which Augustus wasn’t expected to do, having been denied the officer training his brothers received. Eventually, his financial situation forced him into a rapprochement with his parents.
In 1801, the year Emma was born, he agreed to leave Augusta in exchange for receiving a royal dukedom and the parliamentary grant attached. Augustus left the family home and moved to Grosvenor Square. After this, George III created Augustus Duke of Sussex, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Arklow. During the Napoleonic War, Augustus circumvented his ill health and joined the army, where he served creditably. Augustus remained discreetly responsible for Lady Augusta and their children, even though he technically was supposed to end the connection completely. He never returned to live with them, but he always insisted that he was married, and categorically refused to allow his family to open negotiations for him to make a suitable, valid marriage.4
Although the marriage was most definitely invalid and Augustus wasn’t allowed to take on royal duties or receive a royal income until he had renounced Lady Augusta and their children, there were a few mixed signals sent out by George III and Charlotte. For example, in 1806, George III granted Lady Augusta the use of the style de Ameland, effectively elevating her to the status of a married woman without specifying to whom she was married. She also received an official annual pension of £4,000 (about £400,000) plus child support, which was over and significantly above the £1,500 William IV granted Dorothea Jourdan out of his private funds when he separated from her. The mixed signals resulted in the Lady Augusta believing that there was a path to legitimacy for her children.
There wasn’t, and the Duke of Sussex knew that. One of the first signs that his children’s situation could never be regularised was when he had to block Lady Augusta from sending young Augustus to Eton, where the Murray family traditionally went, lest young Augustus meet his paternal grandparents who frequently visited the school.5 Young Augustus went to Harrow instead. However, the education of the children became a point of war between the parents, as the Duke believed it was better for them to be raised with a realistic understanding of their position in life (upper aristocracy certainly but not royalty), while their mother wanted to raise them as royals.6 Matters reached such a pitch that the Duke attempted to seize custody of them, but in this, unlike his brother William, he was unsuccessful.
When young Augustus was fifteen and his sister eight, their father changed their name from ‘Hanover’ to d’Este, explaining to Augustus,
Not being able to give you that which is most congenial to my wishes and feelings [I have chosen] one of the names of my family which is Este by this I shall in the future call you; it is one you need in no way regret & marks who you are, to whom you belong, & with whom you are connected.7
Both the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and the Murray family were, and are, descended from the Italian House of Este, so the Duke gave the name some real thought when he chose it. The father also moved Augustus to Winchester College, where he joined Jane Austen’s nephews, among others.
The Duke of Sussex was politically and socially liberal, supporting Catholic emancipation, abolition of slavery, and Jewish civil liberties. The last may have been related to that he was an accomplished Hebraist and religious scholar. As part of his academic interests, he built up a private library of over fifty thousand volume library, on mostly religious topics.8 He was also of a sober disposition, such that he saved up most of his parliamentary grant and invested it into a sizable independent fortune. He harboured hopes, at least when his children were young, that his wealth, political activism, and social capital would mean that he could bring them out into society as legitimate.
There’s some disagreement among historians on which parent first came up with the idea that Augustus d’Este might marry one of his princess cousins. There is some evidence that the Duke first thought of it9 — possibly inspired by seeing his parents keep his cousin William Gloucester on the hook for Charlotte of Wales — but he had certainly discarded the idea by the time d’Este was finished with school. The Duke purchased his son a lieutenant’s commission in the army but expected him to make his own way after that. The Duke didn’t broach the idea of a royal marriage with his son and didn’t interfere when d’Este’s regiment shipped overseas for active duty.
Lady Augusta, on the other hand, not only nourished hopes of royal marriages for her children, but she unwisely spoke to them about it. This was despite the fact that the Duke had had his lawyers officially write to her at the time he changed the children’s name and inform her that there was no possibility his family would recognise the children as royal.10 Augustus d’Este began pursuing his cousin Charlotte of Wales in the short interval between leaving Winchester and shipping out with his regiment. She didn’t like him, calling him ‘a spoilt child’ and complained about his ability to show up wherever she was.11
In 1825, Augustus strained his relationship with his father by pursuing the future Queen Victoria’s older half-sister Princess Feodora of Leiningin, and in the process committed the ultimate solecism of proposing without obtaining either his father’s permission or informing Feodora’s family of his intentions.12 Feodora wisely didn’t accept, but the whole episode caused embarrassment for the Duke. Although he remained an involved father, especially with his daughter Emma, the Duke closed ranks with his siblings and ceased his efforts to improve Augustus d’Este’s position.
Lady Augusta died in 1830, the relationship between the Duke and his son effectively ended when in 1831, d’Este, dissatisfied with William IV’s compromise of granting d’Este a knighthood and offering Emma the same status as a daughter of a marquess (the compromise William IV had given to his FitzClarence children), sued in Chancery to be recognised as legitimate. To his father’s fury and humiliation, d’Este took his parents letters from over the years and submitted them as evidence, thereby opening his parents’ private life to the public.13
That same year, 1831, the Duke married a second time to Lady Cecilia Buggin, the daughter of the 2nd Earl of Arran and widow of Sir George Buggin. As before, the Duke didn’t seek royal assent, meaning that this marriage, too, was invalid. However, as Lady Cecilia was accepted in a way that Lady Augusta had not been, e.g. Lady Cecilia was allowed to live in Kensington Palace with the Duke. Some of the tolerance may have had something to do with that the Duke deliberately didn’t seek royal assent in order to avoid displacing his younger brother Adolphus and his children in the line of succession, in the unlikely event that he and the forty-year-old Lady Cecilia had a child.14 In this case, an invalid marriage was a sign of familial loyalty. Queen Victoria later rewarded the couple by making Lady Cecilia Duchess of Inverness in her own right. The Duke died three years later in 1843. Lady Cecilia outlived him by over thirty years, dying in 1878. She was buried next to the Duke.
Augustus d’Este died in 1848 afflicted by what we now know to be multiple sclerosis.15 He never married. Before his death, he sued for recognition as the second duke of Sussex and to take his father’s place in the House of Lords. The House of Lords refused to grant his request, citing yet again that the marriage between the Duke and Lady Augusta was invalid. On her brother’s death, Emma d’Este inherited the Sussex private fortune, increased it through her own business acumen, and wound up using it to benefit the people of Ramsgate, Kent, where she settled later in life. She lived a quiet, unassuming life and got on well with her royal cousins. She died childless in 1866, ending the story of the Dukedom of Sussex in the first creation.
Because of the history of the first Duke of Sussex, the title was associated with awkwardness, specifically invalid marriages, which contributed to why it wasn’t revived for over a century. The Sussex relatives were a cloud over the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, even though Augustus was her favourite uncle and never caused her any personal embarrassment. He also had a very strong sense of family loyalty as evinced by his decision not to risk displacing his younger brother and nieces and nephews in the line of succession. By virtue of that much of the Duke’s private effects were broken up after Emma’s death, some of his papers, especially those relating to his interest in Hebrew studies, became separated from the royal collection and are now housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Happy Halloween!
MLD
William IV eventually left Dorothea Jourdan in 1811, after his financial situation worsened and Parliament and the royal family refused to bail him out due to his lifestyle. The couple initially split custody of the ten children, with him taking the boys and her taking the girls and receiving lifelong support from him. However, the custody and financial support were contingent upon her never returning to the stage, which she did within a year, citing that she had to support a daughter from a previous relationship and as well as that daughter’s family. William immediately took the girls away from her and ended Jourdan’s annuity. Later, when William married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, she took over raising those of his children still at home, and to her credit, they considered her a better maternal figure than Dorothea Jourdan. Munster, Wilhelmina Kennedy-Erskine FitzClarence countess of. My Memories and Miscellanies. E. Nash, 1904.
All the Georgian princes, excluding George IV, attended Göttingen for at least one term. But none of them took a degree, even Augustus and Adolphus who were students there the longest.
Smith, Julia Abel. Forbidden Wife: The Life and Trials of Lady Augusta Murray. The History Press, 2020.
A Bird. The Damnable Duke of Cumberland. With Internet Archive. Barrie & Rockliff, 1966. http://archive.org/details/damnabledukeofcu0000bird.
Smith, Julia Abel. Forbidden Wife: The Life and Trials of Lady Augusta Murray. The History Press, 2020.
Ibid.
Ibid.
‘WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions | Item #4358’. 19 June 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150619221258/http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/brisman/bookplate/item/4358.
Williams, Kate. Becoming Queen. Random House, 2013.
Smith, Julia Abel. Forbidden Wife: The Life and Trials of Lady Augusta Murray. The History Press, 2020.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Landtblom, Anne-Marie, Patrik Fazio, Sten Fredrikson, and Enrico Granieri. ‘The First Case History of Multiple Sclerosis: Augustus d’Esté (1794–1848)’. Neurological Sciences 31, no. 1 (2010): 29–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-009-0161-4.